After the Buckhorn adventure and our visit to Mt. Rushmore, we spent a couple more nights at the horse camp as it was near a lot of other Black Hills attractions. One of these was Jewel Cave. We arrived late in the afternoon just before the last tour of the day. Should have gotten a bit of a clue about this place as we bought our tickets as the clerk mentioned about three times that there would be a lot of stairs. OK, I’m fat and grey and maybe I was walking with a bit of limp as I had been riding in an RV and not getting a lot of exercise over the last couple of weeks. My knee tends to take a while to warm up and work right under those conditions. But if I really had a problem with stairs, I would have figured out the first time he mentioned it. Beside I could still have taken that snot nosed kid in a fight any day cause Judy does the fighting for me and she fights dirty. But to be honest I didn’t even think about the insult at the moment because I was so excited to see the cave. I suddenly remembered my camera and bolted for our Ford Ranger. Almost to the rig I heard them announce that the tour would be leaving soon. In the minute it took me to return, there was Judy waiting with a scowl. They had left without us. She had told the guide I would be right there but as it was the last tour of day and as the guide was in a hurry to go, they just left. So, I missed going into Jewel Cave by, at most, 30 seconds. We thought about going back the next day, but I was still pissed, so, we went to Wind Cave and instead of having to walk up and down stairs we took an elevator.
Wind Cave is noted for its box works which looks like a square honeycomb made by giant bees in a creature feature. Seems like the geologists don’t really know how box works are formed, unlike the stalactites which make up most limestone caves like the aforementioned, may it rot in hell, Jewel Cave. After about an hour in Wind Cave and the museum we headed back to camp with a stop at our first prairie dog town. Cute little buggers. Judy spent about an hour trying to sneak up on them for a close up while I videoed her from the rear giggling and making quiet references in the audio to Marlin Perkins, Jim Fowler, and that crazy Australian who kisses crocodiles. Judy hates it when I show this video to all our friends. But it was really funny especially when we stopped later in the trip at two other tourist-oriented places where the illusive critters ate out of our hands.
The Black Hills with their caves and Mt. Rushmore are really worth the visit. But also, be advised that this area is a king-sized tourist trap. I don’t know how many places we passed that advertised giant caves, museums, dinosaur sculptures and the like. All of them stating that they were amazing, gigantic, and family friendly. By far the biggest of these traps is the Crazy Horse monument. They have been working on this rival to Rushmore for something like 70 years, refusing to accept government help. They make a virtue of that part implying that government is evil while private enterprise fosters self-reliance, hard work, and basic goodness. And why should they accept government money to hurry up the work? They know a cash cow when they see it. My mother had shown me pictures of it when she had visited the monument 30 years before, and to be honest, it had not progressed that much in a generation and a half. I think occasionally, someone must go up there to set off a bit of explosive to impress the tourists, but in the off season they probably spend a lot of time drinking coffee. Shit they might as well take government money if they are acting like public employees. But it was still a lot of fun going through the museum, watching the movie about the crazy guy who started the whole thing and his family that is carrying on the tradition. If you gazed at the monument and then looked at the sculpture of what the finished product with associated building and conferences centers all in support of Indians and their culture, you can almost imagine that at the close of the present millennium it might be nearing completion. It’s a big dream with the best of intentions. So, what if it takes a few centuries. There are lots of tourists to milk before that.
Judy bought a Lakota wedding urn in the gift shop which is really a pitcher with two pour spouts. Apparently, they drink from this at their weddings, sort of like our tradition of feeding each other wedding cake with much the same result only in liquid form. The cashier in the shop seemed knowledgeable about it, explaining the mystic carvings on the pitcher. And I thought they were just some silly looking squiggles. Shows my ignorance of Native American culture. A few years later when my sister married Hector, an Apache I came to fully understand my ignorance. Many Native Americans are true mystics, with spirit names, and rituals involving killing wild animals and eating raw flesh. Growing up in Southern Oregon I had heard a lot of racist shit about Indians. How in Klamath Falls the Klamath Indians would sell their timber rights and buy a Cadillac then get drunk and wreck it the next day then buy another repeating the cycle till the money was gone. As a kid I believed all this stuff. In truth many Indians have trouble with alcohol, but I do not doubt their native intelligence. Ever see an Indian losing his money at a slot machine in one of their casinos? I think not.
Hector constantly surprises me. We were once having a long conversation about religion. Hector went off on a five-minute colloquy about Christianity, heaven, Jesus, and how most people just don’t understand it. I was enthralled and amazed at his apparent knowledge of the spirituality of Christ. But then I remembered,
“Hector, I thought you believed in the Great Spirit?”
“Sure, I do” he instantly retorted, “all this other stuff is just crap”!
We went up to Rushmore on the last night of our stay at the fallen Aspen leaf campground. Rushmore is, if anything, more stunning at night. We got to talking with a group of people next to us. Judy does not know a stranger and never will, but on our RV sojourns she becomes particularly amicable, sharing information about our life while a perfect stranger shares the same intimate details about theirs. Judy has this effect on people. Over the years there is the occasional business trip that I have taken without her. As soon as I kiss her goodbye, I become invisible. Other than the meetings where there might be a familiar face, I am pretty much alone and on my own, eating dinner by myself, trying to sleep in a strange bed, wandering city streets in my off-time. A stranger in a city of strangers, avoiding eye contact.
When Judy can go with me the trip becomes an adventure. Even though she is alone when I am doing my mandatory things, she always manages to meet some people who become her life-long friends, even if it is only for a few days. Such it was that night at Rushmore. We ended up taking pictures of our new life-long friends with Rushmore ablaze in the background. They had left their camera back at the hotel in Rapid City and were leaving for home the next morning. We were more than happy to take a few extra pics and promised to send them via EMAIL as soon as we got back to Oregon. Unfortunately, the stereotype of Oregonians is true. We are all flakes. Even though we have the best of intentions, our sincerest promises somehow never come to fruition. The Rushmore incident was one of these. We had forgotten the whole thing and would have remained in blissful ignorance were it not for the lost camera card turning up at the bottom of the case a couple of months after the trip was over. We eagerly opened the file to find our lost Rushmore at night photos and three blurry faces with Washington and the three other guys in background. It all came rushing back in a wave of embarrassment. Although the pictures had not turned out we had lost the EMAIL addresses, and all of that information that they had shared with us like their names, the company they worked for in some east of the Rockies city. We had no chance of redeeming our honor. We felt bad in having reinforced another unfair stereotype. Thus, the Oregon flake has joined the shiftless black, drunken Indian, wandering Jew and dirty Belgian bastards in the long list of racial, religious, and unfair ethnic stereotypes. We felt bad for having contributed to this. We remained in this state of funk for about five minutes but then after a pumpkin spice and a double shot mocha with Mexican chocolate it was all better. I am kidding about the spiced lattés but Waldport, a one stoplight burg of less than two thousand souls and a few reformed hippies, has three drive-through espresso huts.
We left our aspen leaf camp and headed to Rapid City, SD where we hooked up with I 90 again for the last leg of the trip to Delda and Trent’s. I once heard a conservative Oregonian talk radio host bemoaning that the state of Oregon should raise the speed limit on I-5 from 65 mph to 75 mph as that is what everybody does until they see a state cop. So why not raise the speed limit to what people actually drive? I-90 in South Dakota shows the fallacy of that logic. The speed limit there is 75 and everybody drives 85. And why shouldn’t they? There are more cows than people in South Dakota. They have off ramps for dirt roads. My point is that there are no people in South Dakota. You probably could have set the speed limit for 95 and not seriously hampered safety. I believe that South Dakota Department of Traffic Safety, which consists of Earl and Daryl, would have upped the limit years ago except for the headwinds which tends to slow the easterly flow of traffic down to a safe and sane 85. That was the speed at which everybody except us was moving. RV’s don’t do headwinds. Try as I might I could not do more than 65. If I were moving 20 mph under the speed of the traffic in any other state I would have been rear ended, cursed at, and give the middle finger California freeway salute. But not in South Dakota. As there are no people in South Dakota, there is no traffic in South Dakota. They could see my snail’s pace from five miles away, make their leisurely move to the hammer lane and blow past me without incident or middle finger erection. Might even give me a pleasant wave as they sped past as if to say, come by my house for dinner sometime as we would really like to visit with somebody other than Earl and Darryl who we have known since before Pampers.
Somewhere between Rapid City and where we turned off the freeway for Delda and Trent’s I saw one of the numerous billboards advertising yet another South Dakota tourist trap. This one caught my attention right away as it said, “Reptile Gardens”. Could it be my quest was over? Judy pretended that she hadn’t seen it. But as the next billboard loomed in front of us and she tried to distract me in the opposite direction with a “look antelope”, I knew she had seen it and knew what it meant. She was doomed. I was grinning from ear to ear as I turned into the parking lot finding a shady spot so that our dog Hannah would not cook as we were going to be inside for a long-long time. It was not exactly a snake pit as it looked more like a zoo but maybe it had been a snake pit once and had over the decades thrived while the others of its ilk withered. We paid our entry fee and the old guy who took our money said that if we hurried, we could just make the snake show. Judy tried to dawdle but I pulled and pushed, and we just made it in time.
The snake show room was not big. There was a two-foot-high Plexiglas screen behind which the show would happen. So, it looked like we were going to be separated from our scaly friends. I suppose this is a safety precaution forced on the owners by the State of South Dakota so that the tourists don’t scare the snakes. On the other side of the safety barricade was a three-tiered set of metal bleacher seats, the first tier a full three feet back from the snake stage. A little disappointed that I could not sit closer, I sat down front row center, causing Judy to give me the “look”.
The longer a couple stays married the more non- verbal communications become. This was the “no fucking way are you sitting there” look. I could have tried and played dumb, but there was no fucking way I was going to be able to sit there. I sighed and moved to the middle of the back row. Judy reluctantly joined me with her back against the wall and her hand squeezing my bicep and her other hand in mine. The snake guy came out, a young blonde-haired kid in his twenties wearing a t-shirt, Levi’s, and sneakers. He brought out a cute little coral snake telling us his little snaky facts about how poisonous each variety was. He went on to note that most snake bites are on the hand and alcohol is almost always involved. He then opened a large box in the back and extracted about an 8-foot python, wrapped it around his neck and torso. Judy gasped and tried to put her head in my armpit. He then proceeded to let the snake crawl all over him, with its forked tongue lapping at the air. I didn’t think Judy was watching the show but she must have been as she shuddered and her hand squeezed tighter on mine. I had seen this act before, but in that case the snake handler had been the focus of my attention as she had been naked. This time I was paying more attention to the snake and it was all wrong. When the python touched the guys face with its tongue, my stomach tried to empty itself, but I managed to keep most of the contents out of my mouth. Then just when I thought it could not get worse, the handler now all wrapped up by the snake ask if anyone in the audience wanted to touch it. A little black girl in the front row immediately stood up and started to pet it. Judy turned to me and in a whisper said,
“Go ahead. I will be all right”.
I just sat there frozen. Her eyes recognized the signs instantly and she bore in like a school of sharks sensing blood in the water.
“Go ahead dear, pet the snake.”
“It’s OK”, I barely whispered.
“Isn’t this why you came here?”
“Sure, but we’re in the back row and….”
“Nobody is beside us. Go ahead!”
The bile was rising in my throat again as I came back with a mewling squeak, “too many people are ahead of me in line and….”
“It’s just one 10-year old in pig tails”.
Just then the little brat sat down, and the blonde snake kid said, “anybody else”? With that I got an elbow in the side and a glimpse of an evil, revengeful grin. The next 30 minutes of the show was a living hell as he pulled out one poisonous snake after another, teasing them with his feet till they struck at him. The worst was the cotton mouth which he goaded into striking at his shoe. Then he brought out a rattler which paid no attention to him but kept trying to get over the barrier and at the crowd. We were sitting as far away from the exit as possible. No way were we getting out alive. The final “act” was a king cobra. It was “contained” in a glass box and the handler acted like he was afraid of it. I figured that this snake had figured out how to get over the barrier and probably killed a tourist. Having lived in a tourist area for the past 25 years, I could relate to the snakes animosity, but in this case I was the tourist and the extra layer of glass between me and the fanged menace was not enough. Mercifully the show ended, and I managed to walk out even though my own legs were made of water. As we were heading to the exit, a loudspeaker announced that the gator show would start in 15 minutes. Judy poked me in the ribs and said that it would be okay to stay but I told her I would like to make Delda’s before dark.
I have often heard it said that sometimes the successful end of a long-term quest is anticlimactic. That the quest is where all the fun is and the end is just that, an end. I have also heard that you should be careful what you wish for just in case it comes true. I now know what they meant. It was pure luck that my parents did not stop at those snake pits in my youth as I might have been traumatized for most of my life, rather than just the last quarter.