🗽 American Odyssey Tour ~ Leg #10, Pt. 2: Chicago to Black Hills, SD

[Leg #10 is long, so it’s being split up into parts. You’re welcome 😉 – kf]

Day 5 (7/19/15) continued. Chicago:
Robyn Scott and I reprised our roles as Clark & Lewis, established from our trip to Yellowstone & Back last year, and set off again to find the Pacific. I truly feel that I am now going west and the final month home is before me. This is new territory for me still, at least until I get to Montana, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of our beautiful country. Leaving the environs of Chicago we headed straight towards our overnight stop in Newton, Iowa. We crossed the rest of Illinois, and I was happy to have the Upper East Coast toll tag still function this far west. Only to the Iowa border though.
I must say I was distracted driving across Illinois. I was behind on this travelogue and feeling like I needed to catch up, so I wrote in the van when we switched drivers. However I found that I was missing everything going on around me, probably making Robyn bored as well, and this was the first quality time we had to catch up since Chicago was such a whirlwind. I was getting cumulatively tired from this long Odyssey and the hour or so at night when I would normally write up my notes from the day and post on Facebook was now needed for rest and sleep. So I decided to throw in the towel entering Iowa and just take brief notes during the three weeks we would have together and enjoy the ride.

Aha! There were the famous corn fields, but wait, there is a lot more diversity in the Iowan landscape than we are led to believe. We decided that Iowa gets a bad rap, and it’s probably Nebraska that is flat, endless corn fields. We saw proud signs for a “modern rest stop” which turned out to be a building you could enter and then split up into bathrooms of your choice. (With people gender-bending these days, who knows who’ll go in which? Oh wait, this is America’s conservative heartland. Never mind!) The “modern” moniker makes us wonder how primitive the highway bathroom were before. Seriously, I’d guess it was to cater to the bitter cold winters here and being able to go to the loo inside and warm up in a lobby instead of a more open, concrete version outside.

At dinner time we pulled off the endlessly unpopulated environs of the Interstate and up the road a bit to Grinell, IA. It still has an old-fashioned movie theater on the short Main Street, which speaks to the town’s remoteness from larger urban areas with multiplexes. A very farm-oriented, mid-west, tiny town on a long down swing but holding on. Perhaps due to the small college keeping it alive, along with any corporate ag business. Not like a vibrant college town, but the youth is there. We drove by a young, lesbian couple walking hand in hand. Or maybe they were QWIC–queer while in college, or what ever that acronym is that means that. Maybe it’s BWIC: Bisexual While in College. Maybe America’s heartland isn’t as conservative anymore.

They were trying to find an open restaurant like us and we all ended up with a few other townies at a weird little Chinese restaurant with tons of uncleared tables. A sweet but harried guy waited on us and it looked like the only other staff was a cook, so I guess he was prepping in the kitchen when he wasn’t waiting on the three tables of guests, instead of cleaning up. There doesn’t seem to be much interesting food options here in Iowa, and I had looked extensively on Yelp for something off Interstate 80. Diners mostly, with the occasional Chinese and/or Mexican to spice it up. However, I bought some knick knack somewhere wrapped in newspaper that I read a bit of, and it said that there is a town called “Oregon” that considers itself very foodie. Not sure what that would look like here. Am I giving Iowa a bad rap, too? Maybe it’s their curse. Des Moines probably has something. Maybe Chicago sucks all the foodie talent out of the surrounding states of Wisconsin, Iowa, etc. It certainly has some far out options like Grant Achtaz’ restaurants on the cutting edge of culinary imagination. Next Chicago visit!!

Day 6 (7/20/15) Iowa to Sioux City, SD via Omaha, NB:
Straight across Iowa to Omaha, Neb. Set the cruise control and lock the wheel kind of straight. I hear they’ve developed a car computer that can drive highways like this for you. The future to come. I’ve been imagining that scenario since I was a kid except for the computer part, as I was born in the 1960’s. As a kid I thought you’d hook your car to a conveyor belt link that would relieve you of driving but keep you from bumping other vehicles. It’s weird to have the end result of those imaginings materialize eventually, like Star Trek stuff becoming true. There really is now a type of medical Tri-corder like they used, and we’ve already gone beyond the the first flip open cell phone so like the communicator in the first series! Even they didn’t have the smart phone. Crazy fun!

Iowa is less flat than I thought, and less populated. Some rivers and wooded dells. Rolling fields of corn corn corn. A few farms and silos, both working and abandoned. The infrequent gas stations on the Interstate were filled with pamphlets promoting money to be made becoming a trucker, so it seems like there’s not much going on. I figure the Iowa Caucus every four years when Iowans participate in the first steps to determine a party nomination for president is the most exciting thing to happen here, unless Neil Young comes through doing a Farm Aid tour.

We rolled into Omaha to meet up with my buddy Sean. He was supposed to drive the Odyssey with me all the way to my home but commitments at his dad’s farm superseded that. Luckily by the time he had to back out, Robyn had by then signed on to go from Chicago to Vancouver so I was partially ok. Jean-Marie Carson, the amazing woman that she is, answered my Facebook plea and volunteered to fill the gap to drive me home from Vancouver.
Sean drove in from somewhere on the Kansas/Nebraska border (America’s true center he informed me) and we met at his Mom’s house in Omaha. I wanted to meet the woman who raised such a nice guy. We had a nice chat in her living room, drinking Shandies. That’s a British drink made from part lager beer and semi-sweet, lemon bubbly water. I’ve never seen it in a can until now, having had the real deal in English pubs. Very refreshing in the summer. Sean informed me that the craft beer and food movement hasn’t reached here yet, but I later read that Omaha has a few stirrings. He’s out in the sticks so there is nothing for young people to do in the region, and he is bored out of his skull. He was my garden helper in California, making extra cash while he attended the junior college. Sweet young man I started feeding occasionally, and we became good friends. Now he’s moved back home and I miss him. He’s a crack up, too. When we described our drive he said he thought the farmers deliberately planted corn along the highway to foster the Corn Belt image. Ha! His reasoning is that farther back there’s less iconic crops like potato, sorghum, soy, and wheat that don’t get roadside billing.

Scary bridge on the way to Omaha

His mom gave me her “Omaha Magazine” because I was drawn to it’s provocative cover illustrating a story by Doug Meigs. A woman holds up a black snake coiled around her oil-streaked arm and she is half submerged in a pool of the black gold with an American flag behind her. She is Jane Kleeb, the founder of Bold Nebraska which seeks to prevent TransCanada from constructing their Keystone XL pipeline and crossing the fragile Nebraska Sandhills ecosystem and the Ogallala Aquifer. A break in the line is way worse than a train wreck spilling out oil, and could destroy the sand hills ecosysytem, but perhaps more importantly, pollute the aquifer, which yields about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States and supplies drinking water to 82 percent of the 2.3 million people (1990 census) living near it. The aquifer is huge, covering parts of 8 mid-west states, and we need it–clean.

Ms. Kleeb is also pissed off that a foreign country seems to think it can have access to our government’s right to enforce “eminent domain” upon Americans and bury their pipeline on people’s property. Private land has already been seized in South Dakota and Texas. These three concerns have created an odd resorting of traditional political partners. Environmentalists who seek to turn us to sustainable power as well as protect our ecosystem and the human reliance upon it, are pairing with Libertarians and other right-wing players angered by our courts ruling in favor of foreign corporations over taxpaying landowners. On the opposite side are Corporate interests and Labor Unions seeking work. Fat cats and temporary jobs at best. There’s tons more to the issue, like the destruction of the Canadian lands where oil is painstakingly separated from sand with toxic chemicals. It is the most polluting method of obtaining oil. That cover picture of the snake Kleeb holds aloft? The Lakota call KXL the Black Snake Pipeline. The article’s author quotes Greg Grey Cloud: “For over a thousand years, our spiritual leaders have prophesied that a great black snake will one day wind through the land, bringing doom by robbing us of our natural resources as Grandmother Earth remakes herself and introduces a new coming.” In other words, wipe us out and create anew. Perhaps She sees us as a poisonous pest to swat, a species run amok and needing curbing. I frankly don’t think we’ll progress to sustain our species unless we stop being so greedy for money. It’s really making us short sighted.

Well, good luck Nebraska. Ms.Kleeb says you have grit, creativity, and the resolve to get things done. As a strange parallel as I rewrite this after the fact, I recently heard how Saudi Arabia has foolishly used up all its ground water to make wheat and hay in the desert and now has bought up huge chunks of Arizona that don’t have water restrictions to repeat the process here. Another example of a foreign country detrimentally influencing the lives of our citizens without our say; in this case, future water availability. They’ll use our water to irrigate their crops in a desert region and ship it home or to China until the water runs out. Sounds so wrong. Karmic kickback for American oil, gas, timber and mining conglomerates exploiting 3rd world countries? Maybe. What goes around comes around.

Back to Sean et maman. We went to an old-style steakhouse that claimed the worlds finest steak. Well, we WERE in Omaha, and we had neglected to scarf down on a steak in Chicago, the pinnacle of the beef and pork industries. Gorat’s steaks were indeed tasty and we had nice conversations surrounded by vivid oil paintings of various beasts staring us down. Mostly loosely rendered bovine portraits, although there was a llama that ogled Sean all through dinner. We felt suitably guilty as they watched us slather on Bearnaise or blue cheese sauce. Nom nom.

Once again, it’s sad to say goodbye to my friends after a short visit. It’s almost worse seeing them so briefly! Oh well. Cherish the moment and hope to do things differently next time round. Glorious sunset and dusk, the crescent moon low in the sky as we put by another few miles going north into South Dakota. The very flat plains of hay and corn are now quite beautiful.

Day 7 (7/21/15) Sioux City to Oacoma, SD:
From our Sioux City, South Dakota hotel it was only up a short way to Sioux Falls. We were to rendezvous for lunch with my best pal Dina from my L.A. days in the late 1980’s, and her son Marshall and his kids. I’d stayed with Dina in Baltimore so it was a treat to see her again at a different point of the American Odyssey. I hadn’t seen Marshall (“Krunchy”) since he was a teenager so it was extra special.

We met and pigged out at a Cracker Barrel. When Dina texted me our meeting point I had to tease her because she’s African-American and I’m European-American. So I asked “Ha! Is that a racial slur?! You calling me a cracker?? Her answer was yes! Ha. When you know someone well you can tell their tone or joking in a text. I had a grand time catching up with her and Marshall and meeting his two young boys and new baby. There was a table of two older white couples sitting nearby, and one of the gentlemen could not stop staring at us with a huge grin on his face. We must have made quite a company with an Australian woman, a handicapped chick (me), Dina and her descendants all laughing and obviously very fond of each other. I guess in this mostly white-skinned area it was a treat to see such a loving mingling. At least it was to that table across the way.

A couple hours passed so quickly. We hugged and promised future get togethers. Again, I felt the oddity of coming such a long way for so long but only briefly seeing my friends, although it wasn’t a planned visit when I was plotting the course before I left. Still, it was a privilege to have the opportunity to see them at all. So off Robyn and I headed west to an overnight stop half way towards the Mt. Rushmore area. On our route was the somewhat famous Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, so of course we wanted to see that to break up the dullness of rolling plains and sparse habitation. The far horizons, big sky and treeless grasslands become surreal after awhile, so any diversion is welcome, especially if it prides itself in being decorated by the crops grown here.

Still adding bits to the most recent Corn Palace manifestation. It’ll look even better with those finials on the ground up on the roof.

South Dakota has a more interesting history than it seems to have going on now. Thirteen years after being established as a Territory in 1861, an expedition led by the ill-fated General Custer found gold in the Black Hills. The Sioux Nation, whom had been “granted” their sacred Black Hills in 1868, refused to grant mining rights and of course things got ugly as gold fever spread. Miners weren’t the only people entering the area. The great migrations of people looking to farm and ranch the land came up the Great Lakes and waterways to the upper mid-west and spreading out around the same time.

The Great Dakota Boom of easterners and Europeans came in 1878, and it was a year later that Charles Ingalls moved his family to DeSmet, where his daughter Laura grew up to write her famous books about their little house on the prairie. Sioux City became the third-largest meat-packing city in America, mostly from pork raised by settlers. There was unusually abundant rainfall for ten years and crops thrived. To celebrate their prosperity they decided to showcase the abundance by building a corn palace. Most every year except in extreme drought or war efforts, a palace was built and decorated by the crops in their myriad colors, yellow corn, brown millet, etc., using the dry husks and seeds and flowers, cattails and grasses. I learned all this history inside as the structure is permanent now, and the walls around are lined with snippets of information and pictures of previous palaces.

I have a few of these type photos now from my trip around the country

As was normal for me on this trip, while at the Corn Palace souvenir shop I shared with the checkout person that I was on a four and a half month trip around the states. The young lady looked wistful and said how she wished she could do something like that. I gave her my practiced speech on the importance of words and what we tell ourselves, and how the phrasing can change our lives. So instead of saying I wish I could do (something) one day, you say, when I do this (something). Then the magic takes over in our brain and our subconscious efforts begin to lean in that direction to make it true. I wonder if any of these little encouragements I’ve given will take root? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look into a crystal ball and see any repercussions?

Residents need some inspiration here. Many little towns seemed boarded up and barely functioning. I suppose they never really recovered from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl Years in the 1930’s. Gone are the multitudes of family sod busters, their lands aggregated into large farming corporations, their heirs gone to bigger cities chasing work. The recent Depression started in Bush the 2nd’s presidency knocked those remaining pretty far back, too. But this is still salt of the earth folk. John Wayne was from here! But I guess he left, too. Robyn called the cemeteries we passed the dead center of town. Funny, but sadly true.

We passed a sign for DeSmet and as Robyn loved the Little House on the Prairie books we toyed with the idea of detouring, but the 55 miles off the highway and back deterred us. Maybe if we had known sooner we would be passing the spot we could have built it in, but we had aways to go. So on and on through the endless grasslands. Have I mentioned how the drop in gasoline prices have helped greatly on this trip? It’s creeping back up slowly but the majority of the Odyssey has been at the deflated prices, a helpful aspect as I’ve been in lots of hot areas where the air-conditioning was essential, and that burns fuel.

The mighty Missouri at Oacoma, SD

Finally the horizon seemed to dip a bit and we came upon the great Missouri River. We’ve been shadowing her since Omaha, Nebraska and now got to cross her wide waters at Oacoma, a small town on her bluffs. This is also the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Headquarters, as a sign on the highway informed us. Our hotel was inexpensive so we had booked two rooms. I headed to the hot tub which could have been hotter, but the picture windows to the west that filled with pink and purpling clouds at sunset made up for that. My tub mates were very friendly, as I’ve found from many upper mid-westerners. They were polite and curious about everyone’s travel plans and how we all ended up in tiny Oacoma for the night. The openness was to continue the next day at breakfast. Friendly folk. I like that.

Day 8 (7/22/15) Oacoma to Mt. Rushmore are:
Oacoma, SD hotel breakkie a sparse affair. All carbs. White bread, bagel, English muffin, donut, waffles and accompanying slathers. Oh and hard boiled eggs and cereal. I opted for the egg to make a sandwich because I ALWAYS travel with Hellman’s mayonnaise. It makes anything better! Lol. Southern gal.

We had an easy drive which doesn’t mean we’re not traveling for 9 or 10 hours, it just means we can pull over where ever our fancy takes us and not try to eat up miles. So quick pic of the giant bison statue overlooking the Missouri River, some gas, and a bit of map contemplation and we were off. Flllllllllaaaaaatttttt plains. Yet green and grassy. I’m used to Texas or California where the spring green is gone by June usually so this is nice. It’s a bit dulling to one’s senses, though and a couple enterprising ranchers have added amusing eye candy to jolt you awake. A slyly funny moment occurred when we saw flat, metal cutouts in a field showing a life-size wagon and horses in full gallop, then in another field farther down were cut-out cowboys on horseback in hot pursuit, looking like they were bandits after the wagoneers. Very clever, and a nice way to spice up the monotonous grasslands. Another visual wake up was the sculpture of a dinosaur skeleton. The camel we saw later was real though, and the ever perky Wall Drug billboards crop up every once in a while. Seems we are getting closer!

Heh heh. Funny.

Passed the time playing Robyn’s iPod through the van radio and conversation. We started speculating on something, I can’t remember what, but it led to Robyn telling me about Nominative Determinism. That’s when your name can bring about the outcome of your life. Say your last name is Stamp. That might lead you to be curious about stamps, becoming a collector or engraver of stamps. Apparently there was a man who named his boys Winner and Loser. These bizarre monikers so influenced the boys that it affected their lives in the long run, but not how you’d expect. Winner actually ended up in prison and Loser became a cop. A lesson in letting too much expectation ground you down and fighting to overcome an unfair designation. Endless prairie can stir up these musings.

Since cell reception was spotty, we stopped at rest stop we obtained a handy analog map. Who knew we’d have to preface the word ‘map’ now with that adjective? It showed this area and attractions, but not in a commercial flashy way. This was a comprehensive list probably put out by some government body. From this we determined that there really were lots of things to do here. Some very daggy, as Australians say when they mean smaltzy or dorky, although it can be said in affection, like to someone being sentimental or in obvious thrift shop wear. A daggy thing here as we near the Badlands/Black Hills/Mt. Rushmore area would be the wax museum with all the Presidents. Think I’ll give that a skip!

We decided to stop along the highway at the Petrified Forest. The building looked like it was stuck in the 1930’s. The zombie proprietor let us in and we hit the gift shop first, of course. I purchased a couple magnets and an interesting print of the biblical timeline. It reckons we’re 9000 years into the world since its beginning. This is really funny next to the million year old fossils. Now just watch, we’ll die and all will be revealed that everything was created just 9,000 years ago! OR…maybe it is a deep genetic memory and we actually are an alien-seeded race arriving 9000 years ago and we’ve forgotten. LOL!

The Biblical print has a lot of other bizarre factoids that some among us still hold as truth. It mystifies me that we still hang on to the oddities of the Hebrew Old Testament with it’s severe dogmatic laws. These nomadic tribes in the desert lived 5000 years ago! They had to be nuts in the first place to live in a desert, right? Do we really want to consider stoning someone to death for not keeping the Sabbath, and other restrictions we consider outlandish today? There is a lot of wisdom that is valuable to hold dear. I’d rather cherry pick those wise social skills than the bizarre and violent edicts. As I understand it, Jesus came to change the Covenant and old ways, and turn our intentional cheeks to loving one another, no matter what. By hanging onto all those old, Hebrew laws, doesn’t that make Christianity just a breakaway Jewish sect? Funny thought isn’t it, especially how Christianity historically has gone to great lengths to distance itself from Judaism, pin-pointing them as killing Jesus, and keeping them out of the Golf Clubs for so long. It’s true though. Jesus was a Jew who sought to evolve Judaism and instead, His followers broke away.

Perhaps we should review and update the Old Testament like Emperor Constantine did in 325 A.D. when he called all the Christian leaders to Nicaea to work out a uniform canon of their beliefs and agree on things like when Easter is observed. They also declared heretical the teachings of some of the groups, as the new religion was scattered over the Empire and evolving different doctrines. Today Christians could keep the valuable teachings, trim the carbuncles and stop dragging archaic Law behind like a prehensile tail. No offense meant to the faithful. My favorite bumper sticker is “Speak the Truth and Run Away”.

After stirring up such ecumenical speculation, the rest of the petrified wood place was pretty daggy, although there were highlights like the rocks that glowed lurid radio-active colors under black lights, the shards of rock mined from the interior of George Washington’s nose at Mt. Rushmore, and petrified dinosaur poop. There were an old postcards of the business with Packards out front, so maybe I was actually in a time-warp!

The South Dakota plains. The pioneers took forever to get across them and we are too. We veered off Interstate 90 to head to the famed Badlands of South Dakota. Right off the bat we saw a preserved pioneer cabin, it’s root cellar buried in the slight hill, a barn and a large pen with a roaming goat to make it look like the homesteaders were just out of sight. Why settle here? Perhaps they just got tired of crossing the endless prairie and plunked down, refusing to go further. They would have been greeted by ubiquitous prairie dogs, as we were. I wonder if they saw them as a ready source of protein? But I guess there were still some buffalo, deer and elk back then, and good luck trying to catch a prairie dog. I love trying to throw myself back into the past and wonder what life was like. I mused in the car park, watching the quite close prairie dogs scamper between their mounds and warrens that protect them from swooping raptors and prowling coyotes. So cute! Destructive to human endeavor, like when cattle break their legs by stepping into one of the holes, but…not my problem! We thought they were adorable. Robyn was rapt in her instant love of the furry critters, so different from Australian fauna.

Much vaster than it looks here with no scale. People in this shot would be teeny tiny, if you could see them at all

Our destination revealed a radically different landscape after the vast sea of grass. We took Hwy. 280 that eventually loops you back to I-90. 100 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous Period, this part of the country was the Western Interior Seaway that divided Mexico from the Gulf and came up through Canada to the Arctic sea, splitting the North American continent into Appalachia to the east and Laramidia to the west. (Who knew?) If you find yourself there now you are surrounded by the wind and rain-eroded former sediments of the ancient sea bed, pushed up by plate tectonics. The rising land drained most of the sea away and lush wetlands remained. Prehistoric animals moved in. Think dinosaurs et al. Eventually it turned to savannah and the animals that thrived there changed. The climate became drier and more severe, the oxygen levels lowered and bigger animals faded from the scene, their size heavily dependent on the richer oxygen levels.

Erosion carved the old seabeds further into strange forms, the colors of the different sediments attesting to the eons. Not much grows today in the arid soil, but the land also dips away and down to large valleys below where the rains charge off the spiky, multi-hued pinnacles and gather, offering some life. The contrast is startling after endless grasslands. I keep thinking of what the first non-indigenous settlers must have thought to come to the edge of the valley and see the abrupt contrast of it after weeks of plodding across the prairie. Or the first Paleo humans who peopled this continent. It is forbidding and still a dangerous place. The Native Americans called it bad lands in their language, and more modern settlers have chosen not to change that name.

The loop road put us back to the interstate at Wall, SD, infamous for the gimmicky old store Wall Drug. We had started to see it’s bill board signs advertising ‘Free Ice and Water!’ 100 miles away outside Oacoma, SD. Perhaps you have seen bumper sticker on cars that say ‘Where the Heck is Wall Drug?’. As the billboards say, a pharmacist back in the 1930’s was tired of watching the slowly building car traffic go by his tiny town with out stopping. As pharmacies tended to have soda fountains too, his wife suggested offering free ice water to travelers, hot and tired after a long haul across the plains in cars that had yet to boast air-conditioning. It worked and the travelers ended up buying ice cream and sundries too.

Today it is still a relief from the monotony of the road and something to do on your way to and from Mt. Rushmore. You’ll see every state license plate in the parking areas and tons of smaltzy attractions scattered around the sprawling complex, from a papier-mâché cowboy band to a giant rabbit with a saddle to sit on and have your picture taken, as well as a cornucopia of souvenir shops set up like an indoor town and a busy but lack luster restaurant. But the ice water is still free, they make delicious doughnuts and the coffee is only 5 cents!

How. On earth can they still have this dated stuff? Middle, white America is in a vacuum perhaps. Cozy in there? Well okay, this could be deemed historical. Many tribes were very kind to the immigrants.

All our dilly dallying was lengthening our day so we called ahead to Roosevelt Hotel in Keystone to alert them of our late check in. Robyn booked this place for us while still in Australia as a base to explore the Black Hills as I was already on the road when this part of the journey was being formed and therefore quite busy. She had read on Yelp or Travelocity some of the comments other travelers had left, and it surfaced that the proprietors locked up without apology or back up plan if you arrived after ten or eleven PM. Uh oh. And their phone number has 666 as prefix! What were we getting ourselves into? Most hotels will leave the key for you somewhere but some get all Nazi on you. We were a tad stressed with the uncertainty and moseyed a bit faster.

Upon arriving tired, but before “curfew”, we learned that “handicap friendly” only meant they’d talk to you in a friendly way, as there were four steps up to the entrance. Hmm. No scooter action then or trolley to the van for our luggage. They actually had a tiny trolley but you had to heft your gear up the steps first then do multiple trips because it was so small.. Traveling with my machines and our bags and a cooler made it aggravating. Then we learned that they turn off the elevator at 10:30pm. What?? Who does that? Never heard that one before. And what exactly are handicapped people supposed to do? I realize now why they only advertise handicap “friendly”. They obviously aren’t compliant with ADA. But we had arrived by 10pm and the place was clean, quiet, and the price was right for our family suite with living room so….whatever. We were still high from Wall Drug, weird rocks and prairie dogs, and looking forward to seeing the Black Hills in daylight. Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse over the next few days!