My eldest daughter, Delda, graduated from Idaho State University and eventually moved to South Dakota where she worked part of the year for the Badlands National Park and the other part as a bartender at a rough and tumble cowboy bar. It was one of those bars where you walk in and everybody goes silent and stares. Then they all slowly turn their heads back to their beers and ignore you. Delda, said it made for some interesting evenings. The owner was smart in that he only hired female bartenders. Regardless of how rowdy and rough the place was, if a fight started all Delda had to say was “take it outside boys” and they would. Even drunk cowboys still have the chivalry you see in those old John Wayne westerns. The cowgirls on the other hand seemed to lack this trait. When a cat fight started, not only would they ignore the “take it outside”, they were very likely to take a swing at Delda as well.
Somehow during this time, she fell in love with Trent, a real boot-wearing, horse-riding cowboy. They had recently moved in together and Judy and I were a bit worried as my Green Peace liberal daughter who would not harm a mouse, was in love with a Rush Limbaugh conservative who was a card carrying member of the NRA and who supplemented his diet with wild game shot from the cab of a hay truck.
We turned off the freeway drove for a bit on a paved road to the town of Midland, a thriving community of less than 50. It had a gas station with a convenience store; a bar/restaurant which we found out had great steaks, a church, and the best damn self-service car wash I ever used. In retrospect that was because the owners filled up the soap and wax every few days as they had nothing better to do with their time, and nobody except for a few drive-by tourists ever stopped to use it. The locals never wash their cars. I learned this latter factoid while cleaning Trent’s bug encrusted windshield while he was paying at that local gas station. When he came out and saw me using the sponge/squeegee thingy he snorted,
“So that’s what that’s for”.
Why bother to clean your rig. Within 10 miles it will be covered with bugs and dirt anyway. Besides the grime serves as camouflage so you can sneak up on the deer and grouse to shoot them easily from your motorized blind. Come to think of it you don’t actually need the camouflage for grouse as they are not quite as bright as a West Yellowstone appliance repair man. In Oregon it is illegal to shoot game from your car. Probably the same holds true in South Dakota, but in small towns like Midland, everybody has known everybody since God was a boy including the local cops who probably supplement their diets in the same manner.
After Midland it is 11 more miles on a washboard dirt road to the ranch, which is an island of cottonwoods in a shimmering light gold sea of rolling prairie. We parked the RV on a flat spot, hooked up to electric, popped out the awning and enjoyed the rest of the evening as our dog, Hannah, got to know the ranch dogs and explored to her heart’s content. As the sun went down Delda introduced us to Trent and to the communal bathhouse fed by a hot spring that turned over the 4 foot-deep 20 X 20 pool every day. We had to knock before entering as this was the busy season on the ranch. They have over 4000 head of cattle on the ranch which requires the owner, Trent and two others, so the bath house can get busy if you take more than 3 or 4 hours at your libations. I am not saying that cowboys have it easy. Trent worked seven days a week and 12- hour days for a salary that worked out to be less than minimum wage. Sure, he gets to ride horses (he has two), but he also gets bucked off horses. At 6’5” that is a lot of cowboy hitting the ground. But on the plus side housing is free, including lights, water, and heat (providing you own a chain saw). Beef is provided and Trent for variety shoots the occasional grouse or pheasant that crosses his path, neither of which tastes like chicken.
When we were there Delda still worked half the year in the Bad lands National Park which was a 2-hour commute from the ranch. She later got a permanent Fed job in Pierre, which is pronounced “Peer” by the natives, and now drives only 55 miles to work but it is all on dirt roads. Pierre is the capital of the state and has 15,000 permanent residents and a Wal-Mart.
Delda and Trent are no longer married. God once told Adam some good and bad news. The good news was that he had given Adam both a brain and a penis. The bad news was that he had only given him enough blood to run one at a time. I am not convinced that God had given Trent a brain. Not that I am assigning blame here, but Trent turned out to be a pecker-headed shit-kicker.
My impression of South Dakota is that it is isolated, rural, uninhabited and backward. You can’t come to any other conclusion. When South Dakotan’s talk about going out for some fast food they are referring to shooting an antelope. The nearest town to Delda and Trent’s, according to the official road map of the State of South Dakota and the Rand McNally atlas was Capa. It had one resident. Had two, but grandma died. The lone resident had no running water but I think the town was starting to turn around a bit as he recently put in a satellite dish, so he can now watch Lawrence Whelk in Spanish.
Delda took us on a guided tour of the Badlands. What a marvelous place full of canyons and fossils. This must be the world’s greatest “age of mammals” fossil bed in the entire world. Delda, who had previously worked at Oregon’s John Day Fossil bed said that the John Day beds are a postage stamp compared to the Badlands. And it is not just the paleontology that makes this place of interesting. God, using his wind and rain chisels, had crafted the soft rock into wondrous sculptures that puts man’s humble work to shame. We even found one that looked like the Crazy Horse monument although it was a bit farther along. And this landscape of forms is constantly changing. The Badland’s Crazy Horse in a few years will lose his out stretched arm; his steed will dissolve into humped mounds surrounding a middle spire like finger sticking out of a closed fist, symbolic of what Crazy Horse would say to the white eyes for what they have done to his sacred Black Hills.
We did not have a lot of time to look for fossils in the Badlands. Delda, being a purist on that sort of thing, would not have let me keep any as they belong to SCIENCE. My daughter is a prick. She is right, but she’s a prick. Even after I helped her move the rest of her stuff from the place she had been renting near Interior, SD, and transported it to her new digs with Trent, she still gave me the look when I asked her about a good place to collect fossils.
On our way back to the ranch we stopped at the local bistro in Interior and had lunch. Food was okay but the coffee could best be described as warm brown water. Now there is this image of cowboys liking coffee that a horseshoe would stand up in. Not true. You must live in the Pacific Northwest if you want strong coffee at a restaurant. Also, a salad in South Dakota consists of chunks of iceberg lettuce with saltine crackers for croutons. That’s it. No red cabbage, bell peppers, mushrooms, carrot, stinky sock cheese, artichoke hearts, baby corn cobs, or any other salad addition that would take away from the iceberg/saltine experience. But they do have great dead cow. I guess you should expect that from a state where there are more cows than people, and my cow count does not include the “ladies” who show up for the Sturgis motorcycle rally.
My nephew, Alan, has been trying to get me to buy a Harley for several years now so that we can do the Sturgis thing. After watching him sink a sizable chunk of change into a Big Dog and then listening to him go through the litany of repairs he has had to make just to keep it running locally around his hometown, I am a bit nervous about riding all the way to South Dakota on an over-powered crotch rocket without a wad of hundreds in my pocket. Besides, I am not going to add my flabby body to the hordes of motorcycle senior citizens trying to recapture the wild youth they never had. Am I the only one who has noticed that over the past few years that the average Harley rider is getting a lot older? A few months ago, I even saw a Harley with an oxygen bottle attached to the sissy bar. Fifty years ago, when a biker gang road into town, stores closed early, mothers grabbed their teenage daughters by the arm and pulled them frantically inside their houses. Bikers were mean, dirty, soon to be drunk, and looking for trouble. If you accidentally hit a parked chopper with your car, you threw the car in reverse and drove away as fast as you could as your life was worth about as much as a duct taped Mr. Coffee in a garage sale. However, if the same thing happened today, you are perfectly safe; stay, say you are sorry and help the old geezer pick his bike up as he will be physically unable to do it on his own.
After lunch we stopped at one of the tourist traps, but one I would recommend. It was a well-preserved sod shanty. This was an example of the original pioneer dwellings that use to dot the land in these areas. I know that parts of the world are so poor that it is common to have dirt floors, but dirt walls. The shanty we visited had been partially dug into a hill side, then using a little wood they extended their cave, then roofed and sided the exposed portions with sod cut from the surrounding prairie. This provided a cool in summer, warm in winter hovel from which they could mind their cows, chickens, and children. The tourist trap also had a colony of albino prairie dogs which according to the lady in the gift shop made great pets. Although the albino prairie dog colony was not tame, Judy was finally able to get her close-ups without having to stalk. We also stopped at another tourist trap on the way back to Delda and Trent’s which advertised that you could hand feed the prairie dogs. It was after hours so the place was closed but “dogs” were accessible from the parking lot and we gleaned a few stray peanuts off the asphalt to hand feed the adorable roly-poly critters. Trent hates the things as cows and horses step in their holes and get hurt and they eat all the grass around their towns, making life hard for those whose livelihood depends on cows. Judy and I took delight in teasing him about this. She even gave him some framed prairie dog pictures for Christmas that year but also provided a dart gun to practice indoors during the off season. Apparently there was a guy in the area you could call who used an industrial vacuum to suck them out of their holes alive for which he would charge a nominal fee, then export them to Japan for pets or maybe food, I was never sure which. This worked out well for both the cowboys and hopefully for the prairie dog as long as it was used for a pet instead of sushi. It all ended when it was discovered that prairie dogs carry diseases like tularemia, plague, and monkey pox. Anyway that was the lame excuse the Nips used to shut down the thriving US prairie dog exports in order to protect their pet and sushi industries. Sneaky bastards. But as my mother so often said, after Pearl Harbor she never trusted a Jap, although she never actually knew one. There is no knowledge quite like ignorance.
No trip to this area of South Dakota is complete without a trip to Wall Drug, located in the town of Wall. I think the town was named first. In the thirties the founders of Wall Drug, Ted and Dorothy Hustead, bought a drugstore and probably would not have made it work in this isolated site in the middle of nowhere. Then Dorothy had a vision to draw in people driving through on the highway. Free ice water. Go figure. This must have been a novelty during the depression because the day they put out their first signs they had more business come in than they could handle and it has snow-balled over the years, helped in large part by an aggressive billboard campaign that eventually extended world- wide. There was even a sign telling how far it is to Wall Drug at the South Pole. The billboard campaign took a hit when Lady Bird Johnson used her influence to beautify the nation’s highways by outlawing much of the signage. It also didn’t help that Dooby Hansen, the principal sign painter for the store was killed when a Wall Drug sign he was working on fell off his truck killing him. But even without the nationwide signage Wall Drug seems to be thriving. Today it is a maze of novelty shops, clothing boutiques, a restaurant, toy and leather goods stores. I bought a book on the White River vertebrate fossils, a new rock hammer, two coffee cups; ones with Judy and Bruce embossed above a pictorial of Wall Drug, and a giant fry pan for camping. There were also old time dioramas where life sized animatronic cowboys singing songs, a ratty gorilla playing a piano and singing Ali Oop (doop doop), and full-sized head of a T-Rex that looks over the top of an electrified barrier to roar and scare the crap out of the little kids. After about an hour of wandering around I did find a spot in an interior courtyard where there were some conical paper cups and an ice water dispenser, but it was not working that day. I guess the demand for ice water is down a bit these days.
I did finally get to go fossil hunting. Delda relented a bit and told me that she thought there were fossils right on the ranch and pointed me toward an outcrop of rock not more than a couple of miles away. So I grabbed my new rock hammer , yelled at Hannah to get in the truck and drove my trusty 4×4 Ford Ranger to the end of the cow path road she had pointed out, then popped it into four wheel drive on the fly and took it off road for its first and only time. No, I didn’t wreck it! What kind of idiot do you think I am? It’s just I never had the opportunity to take it off road again before I traded it in two years later for a bigger truck, which has never been off-road. So why have I owned two 4×4’s, each of which had “off road” written on the side, if I never took either off road? That is a good question. The answer of course is pussy.
When a boy turns of age as his testosterone increased, he discovers that the thing hanging below his crotch is a multi-use tool. The more willing women you have the higher the hormone level becomes. You don’t even have to have women to get this feedback loop. Fantasizing about women especially while taking a shower works almost as well. Women with their bodies contorted into pretzel like positions wanting it, needing it, craving it.
Then you get married. While some guys never stop playing the field after marriage, it is not the best of plans. Just ask Wayne Bobbit or the dude in the emergency room trying to get his dick un-superglued from his thigh. Yes you can still fanaticize about every comely babe that you meet, but there are drawbacks to that one as well, especially when you are caught fantasizing about someone other than your wife in her presence. Don’t kid yourself guys, they know. And the longer you are married the quicker they figure out what that glazed, deer in the head lights look means. As a guy, you will try to stop before hitting a deer caught in your headlights, but your wife will bore in at full speed. What you need is a viable substitute. Something that will keep the circulating testosterone titer up without the danger of getting killed. Sort of like substituting methadone for heroin.
The answer is toys or tools. Some guys go for metal lathes, or fancy golf clubs. In my case it is a 4×4 truck. The bigger, badder, and higher off the ground the better. I now own a Ford F250, 7.3 liter Diesel. The fact that every time I drive it my testosterone level goes up a bit is well known to the Ford truck division as they have “power stroke” written just below the 7.3 liter on the fender. I took special pride in driving it to work and parking it next to the minivans and economy cars that the other married guys had to drive. Then the price of diesel hit $3.50. After a “we need to save money” discussion with my accounted (Judy), I agreed to drive our Honda Civic the 15 miles to work, while Judy drove my truck around Waldport. The doctor said the antidepressants would help a bit, but how do I tell Judy that she needs to shave more often. So now you know why I have an “off road” 4×4. It’s not the truth. The truth is silly and I am saving it for another chapter. After about 200 yards of off-roading I was stopped by a barbed wire fence. I grabbed my rock hammer, put on my back pack of emergency supplies, dropped the tailgate to let Pickup-dog out (that’s what I call Hannah when I go camping and off-roading), and strode off in the direction of the fossil bearing outcrops. I felt like Lewis and Clarke, or Stanley in search of Livingstone. I was wearing my Indiana Jones hat which I had bought at Disney Land a few years back just for expeditions like this. After crossing the fence I spent the next few minutes coaxing Hannah through the opening, Hannah is an extremely careful canine, and she knows that fences are not meant to be crossed, especially ones with metal barbs on them. Hannah also does not like to get dirty and there was lots of dirt around. But at the same time Pickup-dog loves to chase squirrels and run ahead on hiking trails. If this seems contradictory, it is, as I am sure the Hannah/Pickup-dog are two manifestations of a bipolar personality, and I am never sure which one I am going to get. But eventually Pickup-dog emerged and we resumed our fossil quest. But first we had to ford the notoriously dangerous Bad River which has taken the lives many nameless souls who were naïve to her treacherous ways. On this day I was lucky. It was early October and there was no water in it. Climbing out of the Bad River “canyon” was also not easy as I had to stop frequently and pick the cockle burrs out of my socks. Should have worn my hiking boots instead of my Nikes. Pickup-dog on the other hand was in fine form, running ahead out of sight then running back as if to say, “move it gramps, there be dragon bones in these rocks”. For the next three hours I walked and dug in the loose shale with my rock hammer, with frequent stops to pick the cockle burrs out of my socks but found nothing. Too soon it was time to go back. I had told Judy I would be gone for only a couple of hours, it was nearing dusk, and the emergency backpack was out of beer. I managed to make it back through the fence without having to coax very much as Hannah knew we were going home. I drove back across the field, and reluctantly put my off-road truck back into two-wheel drive when I made it back to the main road. The adventure was over, or so I thought, for once I was back at Delda’s, Hannah began to whine and I discovered her coat had about 50 cockle burrs entangled in it, some of them even gouging into the tender parts under her tail. It took more than an hour and an entire bottle of crème rinse for me to dig them out of her. She took this abuse without complaint and disdainfully refused the bullet I offered her to bite down on. Pickup-dog is tough. But the look in her eyes was pure Hannah.
