Sunday:
Bear Lodge, I tell you.
* Devil's Tower. I can't remember if it's Devil's Tower or Devils' Tower, but the most important part is, it's the tiny remainder of some gigantic volcano that has long since vanished, and it is now slowly eroding, the columns that make up its sides falling to form the field of rocks surrounding it. Of course, it has nothing to do with devils or the Devil. Indians always called it some variation of "Bear" and "Lodge", because they believe it sprouted out of the ground to protect these girls that went to it in the hopes of escaping a gigantic bear, prayed to it, and got rushed by the growing rock to the sky, where they became the Pleiades. The columns thus are the claws of the bear dragging down the huge boulder.
* Spearfish Canyon. A pretty road that winds through a very, very twisty canyon. There are waterfalls supposedly, but we could only see one from the road.
They're named after a bridal veil. How original.* Deadwood. This is a casino town. It used to be a Gold Rush town (as in the Black Hills Gold Rush, yet another incident of white people shoving off the Indians when it's profitable for them... see your local American History text book for more information), but now the gold is only found in the bright and flashy slot machines frequented by old folks in hordes. All that remains of the mines used to explode out the gold is a delapidated building on the edge of town that runs over a dirty little creek, abandoned, the glass shot out, last opened in the 1970s. It reminds me of the kind of destroyed New England post-industrial village that Stephen King writes about. We stayed in a very nice hotel, the Celebrity Hotel, that prided itself on its "ye oldtime casino" decor - dramatic, stylish in an absurd, gold-plated, hair piled up on top, Indian kitsch way. You know. Except the Celebrity Hotel had acquired random crap from blockbuster movies, like Harry Potter's wand, a mummy from The Mummy, an outfit of a park worker in Jurassic Park, etc. We had dinner in a pretend Chinatown restaurant with a dragon theme (except their big display was a lion costume... oh well), since of course the Chinese get to be exploited in the mines, those lucky ducks, before they get shipped back to China posthumously.
Monday:
Wild Bill Hickock's Last "Stand".
* Deadwood. We got strong coffee from this local little coffee shop (no Starbucks anywhere on our trip, I'm proud to say) then went to the cemetery. This is why historians come to Deadwood - Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane are buried here. She claimed they were lovers, but most people doubt this - regardless, the people of Deadwood honored her request to be buried next to him. The cemetery came with a guide featuring the stories of the famous dead people - and there are a lot of famous corpses in the Deadwood cemetery. It's a good expression of Deadwood's heyday, back in the 1800s, reading those stories. Preacher Smith, killed by Indians. Hundreds of children died of a now curable epidemic. "Wild Bill" himself in a gunfight. There are reenactments of his killer's capture on summer evenings at one of the hotels on Main Street.
* Hill City. We visited their Museum of Natural History. They own Stan, the most complete male T-Rex skeleton. Their Black Hills scientists also discovered Sue, but apparently the farmer whose land they found her on decided to auction her off on eBay, and the highest bidder was not the South Dakota Museum of Natural History - it was Chicago's. Thus Chicago has Sue, who's even more complete than Stan. Needless to say this little museum in the middle of the Black Hills in a quiet town has an enormous grudge against the big-name museums like Chicago's. Yes, we were guilted into paying the optional donation.
Me and Stan - we're bffs.* Cosmos "Mystery Area". Discovered by (probably drunk) college boys in the 1950s, this place in backwoods Black Hills claims to have three vortexes where gravity is "all messed up". Balls and water roll up hill, people defy gravity, leaning the wrong ways and shit. It might all be an illusion based on slanted houses on slanted hills, but it's worth the creepy feeling you get while traipsing around that screwed up house where you lean forward and don't fall. My mom thinks it's the minerals in the hills, an excess of iron. I think it's ley lines. New Age people think ley lines are lines of cosmic or Earth-based energy, and when they converge, they form a vortex, where the energy mixture skews gravity. We also saw a guy whose shirt said "The Storm is Coming". I'm convinced he's part of a racist organization. See StormFront. It wouldn't surprise me if this part of the country was rife with their supporters.
My way or the highway.* Custer State Park. Huge wildlife preserve. We stayed in a rustic cabin-like house surrounded by the forest, in the dead silence of nature. Before that, however, we went on the Wildlife Pass road (by car), and after moaning about how there were no wildlife, ran into a buffalo herd. Let me tell you that buffalo do not respect the idea of "roads". They stand anywhere they want, for hours on end. And if they get mad, they charge, so it's really not in your best interest to go "buffalo-tipping". A calf will go onto the road to follow a bull. Then its mother will follow. And so on. There were about three herds, and these are pretty large herds, so by the end I had had my fill of buffaloes. I also had pheasant for dinner for the first time. It was lovely.
Tuesday:
* A lot of driving. I would like to pause here to make the following point: South Dakota's roads are horribly, horribly mislabeled. It's impossible to find turn-offs, the names of roads change, the maps are inaccurate. Etcetera, etcetera. It was clearer once we got out of the Black Hills and back onto steady highways. But we had to try a couple times to get into the Badlands National Park because the roads were so goddamn bad.
Badlands from afar* The Badlands. It's a jagged territory. There's very little grass or vegetation of any sort - it's just these tan spikes sticking out of the ground. It looks kind of like the moon, except much, much more craggy. The wind is also unbelievably strong. Apparently Yue and her family thought they were in some massive, constant tornado when they came here, and that is sort of what it feels like. It was hard to trust myself walking up the rickety staircase to our second-floor room of the shoddy but passable Badlands Inn. It howls. Tumbleweeds fly across the roads. Birds try not to crash into buildings. The food is horrid, too, and there's no cable television anywhere. People do not live here. At least here they respected the Indians' view - it was the Indians' idea to name the place Bad.
Badlands up-close.Wednesday:
* The Badlands. I should mention the huge amount of dead prairie dogs in this area now. Some of the rodents are just damn suicidal, seemingly daring each other to run across the highway where they get smashed. Dead prairie dogs litter the highway. It's sad. There's also a buffalo jump around here. Good place to kill anything, I say. The wind was so strong I had to hold on to the precious new dreamcatcher earrings I bought to keep them from flying off my ears. And some of these places might kill tourists when they get blown off rocky ridges.
* More driving through northern Nebraska. We drove through an Indian reservation. I thought it might be, you know, different from the rest of the landscape, but really it was more of the same - green(ish) farmlands, cows, hills. Except here they're owned by Indians. We stopped at O’Neill and here I had access to the internet for the first time since Chadron, NE – I sat in the lobby and listened to the loud desk attendant and Limp Bizkit-like guest who wanted to know where to find a bar and replied to my emails.
Rhino mother and child.* Ashfall State Park. We had to try twice to get in here too, because the first time we got there it was still closed, so we randomly drove back up the scenic country drive, then back down, and just waited for the gates to open. Ashfall is probably the most famous fossil site in Nebraska, more so than Agate National Monument, although I kind of liked Agate better for whatever reason – more mystique, more out there I guess. But the animals at Ashfall are sizeable – a rhino herd (bull and harem and calves), random slender horses, and birds crushed under their hooves. There’s widespread assumption that predators were also roaming around, dying after the large herbivores were thoroughly scavenged, but none of their fossils have been found. These animals died because of the eruption of a huge volcano in Idaho, ten times more frightening than Mt. St. Helen’s. It’s near Yellowstone, but it’s not the Yellowstone volcano. And anyway it came and asphyxiated all the animals – gave them lung disease and killed them over the course of a week, a lung disease that caused abnormal bone growth and probably massive discomfort. The fossils are unearthed and lying out for visitors to see in a barn.
Wildflowers.
