Tales of a vagrant ant

I’m back with another installment of my Oregon Trail adventures!!
Excitement abounds, with ridiculous monuments, gusts of gravity, a couple close calls, and late night pizza.
So read on as we continue down the road across the plains, into the mountains, and into the badlands of South Dakota

July 18 Gusts of gravity , impatience and funny leaves

The morning found us in a decent part of town, although our car Ezra greeted us with a flat tire. The most concerning thing about that was not knowing when it had happened, the night before, or because of some rascals, overnight. Luckily it was fixed with little trouble for $10, after which we paid a visit to the “world famous” Wall Drug (I hadn’t heard of the place either), where weary pioneers travelers once received free ice water on their long journey to the Wild West. Nowadays, it had been reduced to a lukewarm water fountain, no match for the myriad of tacky souvenirs and the smells of breakfast. To give you an idea of how exciting this place was, I entirely forgot to take a picture of it! It also happened to be the land of immigrant workers, a fact that seemed more pronounced the closer whenever we arrived near any tourist destination, and which was something that seemed to trail us our whole way across America. It was as if they had come to pursue the Great American Dream, and ended up in Wall, South Dakota serving breakfast in a tourist trap.

After finishing a hearty breakfast, we quickly hit the road, to head onwards to Mount Rushmore, the “Monument of America”. How could one pass up this ridiculous opportunity to see humanity’s desire for immortality? Along the way, we kept seeing signs for Cosmos Mystery Area. “See it. Feel it. SURVIVE IT!”
How could we resist? Even with the knowledge that it was some ridiculous tourist trap, it hooked us in, line and sinker. When we got there, there was this little shack, where people waited their turn to experience the mystery. In other words, be parted magically from their money. The gimmick there was that apparently gravity apparently did not function normally here, instead exerting itself at an angle.

What I couldn’t figure out was whether it was a function of the irregularly built house, or the landsscape. It was such a whacked out house that it definitely could have influenced my perception. But regardless, it shouldn’t have been able to tamper with a carpenter’s level like it did, or cause balls to roll upward, or make the trees grow in such a strange way.

Then afterwards, we had entered the Black Hills, a remarkably distinct landscape from the surrounding plains. From far away, the dark green trees definitely gave the Black Hills their namesake, an apt name for this forested mountain (below) in comparison to the desert prairie grasslands nearby (1st pic of this post)

Mount Rushmore itself was an interesting spectacle. So huge and ridiculously, and excessively patriotic. What else could one really expect though, for THE “monument of america”? We went for the guided interpretive walk, where our guide explained to us why the sculptor chose the Presidents he did for the monument. We also met some fellow Canadians, and Katie got a bit of heatstroke and a headache to boot, as it was pretty scorching, and we hadn’t hydrated properly before the hike. We went to the heavily AC-ed cafeteria where many were taking refuge, but we couldn’t stay there for too long, as Elly was waiting more than patiently back in the car, and we were really worried that he might run into trouble from the heat. This was a recurring theme throughout the trip, and we ended up concocting some innovative ways to cool the lil guy down, even when we were parked outside with the sun baking the ground below.

After Mt. Rushmore, we backtracked a bit to Rapid City and then broke south-eastwards towards the Badlands. (see map above for a better description). We knew we were probably not in the best of shape, entering Badlands National Park in the late afternoon, if we wanted to get to our destination for the day, the town of Interior. However, we were able to see some rad animals.

Bighorn Sheep, prairie dogs, but alas, no buffalo.
I wish I could have spent so much more time here. This place was utterly fascinating. From the banded layers of rock to the dried up gullies of ephemeral streams, it was like taking a direct look into the distant past.

The sun set as we were deep in the Badlands, and we watched, as the sun was swallowed by some errant clouds on the horizon, as it tried to return to the earth. The onset of dusk that proceeded afterwards seemed as if we had entered another world though. It had illuminated the landscape with its ethereal light, and set a deep blanket of silence. It was disquieting, how such a vast place seemed to swallow sounds whole, making me feel like I was in a closet even with the sky wide open above me.. There was a magical quality to the silence though; it laid bare your thoughts to the open skies, like you were beside yourself. I got a sense of adventure and freedom from this landscape, but it’s interesting, because the same place lent a sense of fear and death to Katie, from being lost and dying of thirst.


Now the adventure of the evening began when I saw some strange aromatic leaves growing near the cliffs, which resembled the sage that I had seen growing in Strathcona Community Gardens, and smelt similarly when I rubbed the leaves together between by fingers, releasing their smell as I crushed them. After we had finished taking in the landscape, we set out again, and I was driving between the eroded features of the badland, when I decided to rub my eyes as I had been getting a little tired.


AHhhhhhh!! The burn!! My eyes started to water profusely, even as I tried to keep my eyes on the road. It probably looked something like this.

We were lucky that we had been on a deserted desert road at night, and not an interstate freeway. This kept up for almost a minute, as I tried to find a place to stop on the side of the road, so that I could rinse out my eyes with water, especially important, as I was the driver of the car. So yeah, that was quite the adventure and a half.. but it wasn’t half over! At this point, it was about 11:30, and we were getting hungry, and worried about getting a hotel for the night, given how desoltate this place was… We hadn’t seen a light for about 1/2 an hour or so, and we had no cell phone reception to make reservations over the phone. And it was there, in the town/village/2 houses, volunteer fire department and a church/nowhere of Interior, that Katie and I first experienced what could be eponymous described as the “Tam Syndrome”(after Simon Tam of Firefly fame), at Wagon Wheels, a local pub. We had almost finished driving through this town (all 15 seconds of it) despairing at the lack of food, when we suddenly saw the flicker of an orange fluorescent sign. Yay!!

It felt a bit like a movie; when we walked in, I felt as if everyone sort of shifted subtly to watch us. There was the guys nursing their beers, the pool table, and the jukebox. The only thing out of place was that instead of a bartender carefully scrubbing his glasses, it was a super friendly bartender. You could tell that his friendliness was one primarily reserved for outsiders. Now delving into the depths of nerdom, I’m going to explain what the “Tam “Syndrome” is. In Firefly, a sort of cult classic sci-fi series, Simon Tam was a head surgeon from the core planets who had become a fugitive from the authorities and had suddenly being thrust into small towns on backwater planets throughout the galaxy. There he stuck out sorer than a sore thumb. In short, just feeling entirely out of place. I guess that really, it’s hard not to be, in a town where advertisements were on the sides of conastoga wagons.

After some late night pizza, we were onto our next mission, to find a place to stay for the night. We were THIS close to being shit out of luck in with this hotel business. Our first choice closed up while we were waiting for our pizza, and the second hotel was starting to close up right as we rolled up into the dusty parking lot. The room we got actually came with a complimentary fly swatter in each room. But damn, we actuallly did make quite a bit of use out of it. Then Katie and I took a well-deserved shower before calling it quits for the night.