Ruminations and Rambles In The Empty Places

“C’mon, light damn you!”

I was crouched up next to the Mazda, trying to find a spot that was sheltered from the icy wind. With numb fingers, I struggled to flick the lighter. The flame would perk up suddenly — and disappear when a sneaky gust wrapped around my car and snuffed it. In my other hand I held the can of knock-off Sterno, the flammable glop with which I hoped to heat my oatmeal. I held the can upside down and close to the lighter so that I would have the best possible odds of lighting it.

The sun still hadn’t risen, but the Badlands were already shifting from gray to  salmon hues in the dawn light. I was in my hat my sweater and my parka, shivering.

Just when I was ready to forsake everything and eat the oats dry out of the tube, I saw the faint, ghostly blue flame emerge from the can.

Success! I plopped my doll-house stove down on the gravel and seized the pot of water. I held it as close as possible to the top of the can as I could without putting the fire out. After about five minutes, the wind snuffed it anyway. I dipped my finger in the water. Lukewarm was good enough at this point. I poured it into my mug and stirred the moistened flakes of oatmeal around with some honey.

As I savored each cold spoonful, I pondered what I should do that day. I planned to be in Wyoming by nightfall but I still wanted to see more of the Badlands, and find the bison and prairie dogs in the western part of the park. Yesterday someone had told me that he had driven all the way from Ohio so that they could photograph from Sheep Mountain. I put it on the list. At the same time, I was not far from the Black Hills where stands Mount Rushmore. Having never seen the monument, I decided that now would be as good a time as any to see the landmark. But it was the thought of exploring more of the Badlands which really excited me.

With that in mind, I swirled more water in my mug, drank the sludgy remainders of my oatmeal and hit the road. I stopped five minutes later and walked along an educational path, which pointed out the ancient sites of dinosaur fossils and nesting areas.

There was a path on the other side of the road leading back out among the buttes and empty canyons. Tiny etchings in the soil that might have been traced out by a child’s finger, grew into shallow trenches, then fell away again into mighty canyons that would swallow you alive.

 Erosion had carved the land into a mosaic of Byzantine complexity. The earth at my feet looked like pieces of broken china, glued back together. Walls of canyons and buttes heaved up at every opportunity. Every step I took reveled some new aspect of the glorious mess: a different canyon, a new side of a butte.

Strangely, this made me think about the wrinkles in our brains, and how they allow a huge surface area to fit within a comparatively tiny space. I saw that the deranged Badlands topography meant that even a square mile of land could take days to explore. There would be thousands of secret niches hidden out of sight until you stumbled (hopefully not literally) upon them.

I spent about half an hour lying on the lip of a canyon, hurting my brain trying to find patterns in the chaos. Little drainage paths going through the dirt and freestanding knobs looked much the same as the much bigger canyons and buttes. 

Always looking for the path of least resistance, the water carved out some predictable turns. The buttes themselves shared similar pitches to their neighbors. The simple principles governing erosion had conspired into sculpting a landscape as boggling and abstract as anything I had ever seen.

Even if a deciduous forest, with more life forms was more complicated than what I was looking at, the Badlands excited me because so much of the machinery was laid bare.

I removed myself from my contemplations reluctantly and hiked back to the car. The road began gaining altitude. At every turn there was a new view that would blow your mind and maybe break your heart.

See how many of those diagonal slopes are parallel?
Also there had been a UFO in the frame. Damn shutter delay.

Doesn't that look just delicious?

Just kidding, I'm too vegetarian for that. I'd pass on the
bison burger too— but man was I hungry!

I followed my route on the map onto 20-mile a dirt road that followed a ridgeline. On the other side were fields where buffalo did roam.  I only saw a couple of the beasts, but I did see their pies everywhere. 

Under the sun, they became rock hard, and became the “buffalo chips” that the settlers used to use to make their fires. Come to think of it, I probably would have had more luck cooking breakfast with them than I’d had with my little fire in a can earlier.

That meal had not been large, and by midday, I was starving. But salvation was at hand. Before I got to Sheep Mountain, I would pass through the town of Scenic, where I expected I’d at least find a pack of Twinkies to hold me over. On my approach, a highway sign announced that I was entering the “Scenic Business District.”

I drove through a couple of derelict buildings on the side of the road, and then I was looking back over the empty plains.

“Huh?”

I drove for another mile, waiting for the town to appear. Then it dawned on me: that WAS  the town. I u-turned and then took another look.

It was a real ghost town, complete with genuine tumbleweeds rolling down the street.

Here was a gas station with broken windows and black garbage bags taped over the pumps. Here was the hostel bunkhouse with boards over the window and a collection of bleached cattle skulls mounted over the front. The Longorn Saloon had at least 20 different skulls mounted up above their sign.

“Indians Allowed,” the sign announced. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the ghost of the  word “No” preceding the gesture of welcome. 

Someone had scraped it off at some point, maybe as a last ditch effort to boost flagging business. The sign stood out even more because about 30 miles to the south, lay the famous Pine Ridge Reservation, home to descendants of the Sioux who had demolished Custer’s troops at Little Big Horn.

I wondered if the lots of trailers nearby belonged to Sioux, but I didn’t see anyone out and about.

Occasionally, another tourist would blow through town on the highway, then turn back like I had, to make sure this was really the place they had seen on the map. Some walked up to buildings and took pictures.

My chances of getting something to eat were looking bleaker by the second. The only business that appeared to be open was the Tatonka Trading Post, located a couple hundred feet off the main drag. I tried the door, but it was Sunday and they were closed. My stomach growled. I was at least 50 miles from Rapid City, and I’d wanted to see Sheep Mountain first.

Resignedly, I tried to see if there was anything I could scrounge out of my car. There was the oatmeal and there was some falafel mix. I was out of stove fuel, so I dumped the falafel in cold water. After it got vaguely soggy, I chugged the incredishitty brew in retching gulps. The second, course — more cold oatmeal — was a little better. For the next couple hours, I had weird, grassy belches, but at least I had cut the hunger.

Later, I looked up some news-clips about the town. In July that summer, the entire town was put up for sale at a price of $799,000, only to be bought out by the Filipino Church Inglesia Ni Christo a month or so before I arrived. Didn’t look like they’d done much with the place yet. The website,  http://buyscenicsd.com/ is still active, and I include it for your viewing pleasure.

I had been wondering where I should end the story of my exodus to Wyoming and decided that Sheep Mountain is that place. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t climb it on foot, but simply drove up the windy dirt road to the summit.

Later in the day, I checked out Mount Rushmore and drove through the kitschy trappings of the nearby towns of Keystone and Custer.

Now that I’ve been back to the Black Hills, I can say that climbing Harney Peak (the highest mountain in S.D. at 7,244 feet) is a far more rewarding experience than driving up to the Mount Rushmore Parking Garage for a snapshot. 

Neither was my arrival to Gillette particularly momentous. It was too dark and rainy to see much of the town and I was too exhausted anyway. Suffice to say, I was quickly amongst friends.

Now that I’ve finally, finished my tale of driving out here, I hope to relate some accounts of my new adventures around Wyoming.

But I was talking about Sheep Mountain.

It was empty on the road out, and it reminded me a bit of “No Country For Old Men.” If a gunman out of the Cormac McCarthy story had come after me in a four-wheel drive vehicle, I’d have been seriously screwed, even if I'd seen him coming two miles away.

There were weird formations with boulders perched atop narrow columns of dirt. Wind and rain must have worn it away, while the cap of rock protected what was underneath. I had seen a similar principle at work on a glacier in Peru where the sun had melted the all the ice around a boulder except the very ice it sat on.

Nowhere to hide

After making my car climb the switchbacks up to the top, I emerged on a tableland where I drove for another half a mile until the road stopped at the edge of a tall cliff that stretched out in both directions.

Beyond the eroded cliffs, the sprawling wastes stretched out to where the dark mass of the black hills rose up in the west. The scope of my vision took up at least a hundred miles, and yet I saw no sign of anybody, no mark of human habitation.

Well then nobody will hear me if I whoop at the top of my lungs.

A second later, my shout came back to me as an echo.

Yes, I even took my mandolin out from the trunk and played some chords out into the void.

Once again I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay atop the peak for very long. By the time I went to sleep I wanted to be in the new apartment in Gillette. But I took my time looking out there, figuring out just where I was going.