Buttes, Rattlesnakes and Canyons: They’re Called The Badlands for a Reason

 After I crossed the Missouri River, there were no more neat grids of fields, but a far less civilized arrangement of sagebrush and hills.

The land in western South Dakota pitches and rolls like a confused sea and seems just as endless. When I came through, cattle drifted about the emptiness like wayward vessels, their backs shimmering in the heat of the sun. Occasionally, a ledge of crumbling stone would jut out like a bone through a butte of dried-up grass. In other places, erosion had carved deep arroyos into the dusty ground. For all I could tell, they might have been cut by a downpour last week or they could have been marked in the land for a thousand years or more.

The word that comes to mind when I think of this landscape is “unfinished.” Some master-architect had gone off some half-written blueprints and never got around to putting in trees or water features. The guy had left broken rock lying around, maybe planning to make them into ornamental walls later on. When it came time for the paint job, he’d cheaped out and made everything beige.

Beige was the rage, the color for rocks, for dirt and all the grassland flora. The whole thing looked slap-dash and unstable, built from crumbling low-grade materials that could fall apart at any minute.

I had a difficult time accepting that for hundreds of miles, this unruly chaos was actually the law of the land. No one had come to level off the buttes or neaten up the shrubs. There was only the road, closed off on either side by barbed wire fencing.

Inside the Badlands National Park

Cresting a rise, I estimated that I could see about five miles of highway to the front of me and about the same distance in the rearview mirror. I was alone. But I had my Led Zeppelin going strong — the BBC sessions in case you were curious — and was loving every minute of the crazy journey. The road could go forever. After thousands of miles, I had finally discovered bliss behind the wheel.

I laughed, I honked at cattle, drove a hundred miles an hour. I could do whatever the hell I wanted.

For every car I saw, there were at least two billboards. The signs for Wall-Drug were spread out over maybe two hundred miles “An American Experience!” they shrieked to the passing cars. Then there was 1880 Town. “Come Ride With McNasty!” the signs exhorted, an attempt to lure little kids behind the gates.

To the south, I could see a place where the land dropped away. Miles distant, there was a tawny mesa jutting out above the plains.

I pulled off at a highway exit. It was $15 to get inside the park. My fee got me a map of the trails, brochures about local wildlife along with warnings not  to travel far without water.

It was indeed burning hot and dry. The land showed it. There was an overlook where you could look out over a cliff, over the prehistoric land. The cliff itself was made of something in between stone and crumbly mud. It dropped away, perhaps 300 feet, revealing alternating stripes of beige and rose colored sediment that lined up perfectly with the stripes on the opposing walls a half-mile away.

The land looked so water-starved that I imagined I could have pissed out a whole other canyon if I’d wanted to.

The soil was cracked up like alligator skin, parched out of its mind by the sun and wind. It was hard to tell where the rocks ended and the rock-hard soil began.

Powerlines at sundown

After staring at the godforsaken land for the appropriate amount of time, I got back on the road, following it in between the buttes. The landscape would have worked just fine in any of the Road Runner cartoons. I stayed vigilant for falling anvils and all suspicious packages labeled “ACME.”

The road descended the cliffs over a series of steep switchbacks to a park information center.

Beyond the parking lot there were countless tall buttes, shimmering in the bright sun. The headwall I had just driven down stretched for dozens of miles either way and rose 500 feet. Back in the day, pioneers had come to grief trying to drive their wagon trains over the forbidding escarpment. The cliff itself was cut up into a labyrinth of deep canyons, mind-bogglingly complex. Within a half-mile of careless walking, I thought, it would be a cinch to become hopelessly lost.

The author  exploring a canyon

Beyond the handful of tourists snapping pictures at the visitor’s center, the wide empty land impressed me, and I knew that I needed to explore.

To do this, I put on my running clothes and a small backpack that I loaded up with the maps, my camera and plenty of water. I brought a compass so I wouldn’t have to rely on the difficult-to-distinguish features of the landscape as guidance.

It was good to be running again, exciting even from the road. The map showed some trails nearby, but before I got to them, I saw some power lines that lead into a canyon.

“I wonder how many people have been down there.”

I ended up walking more than running, simply staring into the grandeur. Eventually, I lost the lines and wandered through the crisscrossing nexus of secondary canyons. I paid close attention every time I came to an intersection. After all, the steep, eroding walls made it almost impossible to climb out of the maze, and I forgot the turns, it might not be so easy to find my way back. A creek had run through the place during the wetter seasons, and there were still sections of puddles and sticky mud.

A frog, resting in the muck, was seemingly unperturbed by my sticking a camera in his face.

High above, birds nests made from mud clung to canyon walls. Several dozen of them were clumped together. With their gourd-like shape and the dark openings at the top, they made me think of featureless, terracotta dolls, jawas to the Star Wars fans amongst us.

There were a lot more of these suckers up high on the canyon walls.

Eventually, the canyon started to narrow and I decided to turn around and see what the marked trails had to offer.

The first thing I noticed at the beginning of the path was a sign that read “Beware of Rattlesnakes.”

The word “beware” has so much more poignancy than “caution” or even “danger.” When I think of caution, I think of wet floors in malls—“don’t fall on your dumb ass!” “Beware” is a word that should strike fear into your very soul. 

As I started up the steep embankment, the sun, low in the sky, cast a blush over the land. Among the buttes, there were those highlights and deep shadows that landscape photographers prize. As I climbed higher, I could look upon the endless Dakota grassland stretching east.

Near, the top I went off trail so that I could reach the top of a local butte.

I guided myself up a nimble pitch of rock, balancing on a ridge of scree that was treacherous as marbles on a tile floor.

Suddenly, there came a sharp rattle.

“Oh shit!”

I leaped back and nearly fell bass-ackwards the way I’d came.

Yup. It was a rattlesnake, maybe four feet long, coiled like a spring with its head bobbing ominously from side to side. The little forked tongue flicked the air, and the bead eyes locked into mine, communicating indifferent regard.

I had read that the snakes around here attacked rarely, but would give a warning. After that, it would behoove the interloper to step away and I was all too happy to do so. The snake kept watching me, but made no move.

Feeling a little braver than before, I reached for my camera and took a few shots. Disdaining paparazzi, he began to slither off.

I started back down to the trail, chastened by the encounter.

Yeah — you better run! 

The top of the pass leveled out into pancake-flat prairie land. I started running again, but slowly and with my eye out for assassins in the dust.

At the top of a small hill of dirt, I surprised an entire herd of mule deer. They burst into flight, bounding off in strange, lock-kneed leaps.

Suspicious mule deer

It was still light enough that I felt comfortable going back off trail, and ascended another butte. From the top, I saw dark clouds climb above the broken landscape. The sunken light lit them with a hellish glow from within.

I shivered in my t-shirt. Before, it had been baking hot. Summoning  what nimbleness I could muster, I negotiated the slippery scree on the way back down and ran the remaining two miles back to my car.

That night, I pulled into a campsite, but stayed inside the Mazda.  A honking wind out of hell ripped across the flatland, buffeting the sides of my metal and glass shelter. My makeshift tarp shelter would have been futile with no trees to tie up to, and because wooden barriers prevented me from moving my car to a place where I could park on the tarp. As in Wisconsin, the car sleeping really sucked. At least I slept for free. I woke up early enough to head out before the fee-collector came around.  

Canyonlands

I Parked On My Tent. I Did It On Purpose.

 After the my rendezvous with the Mississippi River, the highway climbed out of the valley and onto the flat spread of land that Minnesotans call home. I was only going to skirt the very bottom of the state, just north of Iowa until I reached South Dakota.

One convenient thing about the big flat emptiness of the state was that I could do a pretty good job of scoping a town before I exited. No need to guess about how far I’d have to drive to get to a gas station or a McDonalds where I could buy a soda and spend the next two hours using the wireless internet.

And I actually found the landscape to be pretty cool. I liked the vast scale of the fields and sky. From the highway I could see hundreds of them like sentinels in the fields. There was a tension, I thought, about how they were all together, and yet all stayed as far apart from one another as possible, avoiding each other, doing their own thing. They were like awkward coworkers at the company cocktail party.

The turbines reminded me of a joke I’d heard from a Minnesotan friend:

Q. Why is Minnesota windy?

A. Because Iowa sucks and Wisconsin blows.

The most important landmark of Minnesota, if not America, is of course the Jolly Green Giant. This formidable acrylic icon lies in the town of Blue Earth, which would be an excellent name for dreadlocked, new-age commune. And what could be more hippy than a dude who wears leaves for clothing and promotes a vegetarian diet?

I made it just after sundown—barely enough time to snap the iconic portrait of myself with the nutritious mutant.

Just think, I had started the day with Beefaroo Lady, essentially Green Giant’s opposite. Even though they were at diametrically opposed ends of the dietary spectrum, I wondered if they might have had a chance with each other. Could they have gone frolicking together through some magical world of oversized food advertisements?

No. There is no such place and the two of them are nothing more than dumb conglomerations of plastic.

Fortunately, I had already called ahead at a KOA campgrounds in Jackson about 50 miles east of South Dakota. After a long day of driving, I’d have shower, WiFi (yes, the campground offered WiFi ) and a place to sleep that was not my passenger seat.

Over the last hour of driving, the sky turned a deep crimson and the windmills started blinking red, spread out over the miles of fields like sinister fireflies. More creepily, the hundreds of them blinked in unison, as though driven by a singular will.

The campground in Jackson was right off the highway, giving me a good view of the slow pulse over the fields. There were perhaps two other people on the site, snug in their trailers with the football game on satellite.

The wind gusted over the plains in hard gusts. The tarp that I was using as a tent was going to need some reinforcement. Unfortunately, there was only one tree that I could rope it off to.

Ever resourceful, I tied one end off to a water pump and then moved a picnic table over one side of the tarp in order to hold it down. Since there were no windbreaks available, I made one by moving my car to the opposite side, deliberately driving over the plastic in order to secure the end. After some adjustment, I had a fairly workable tent. The fact that the thing was completely ghetto and jury-rigged only appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities.

Compare to what I used in Ohio:

As fun as it was setting up the tarp, I’m afraid that right now I’m not in a position to give it my full endorsement as a viable tent alternative.

The structure that I used did stop most of the wind, which was the most important thing that night. I’d read that when it comes down to it, a good sleeping bag is more important than a good tent when it comes to keeping warm. True, if your tent leaks in a downpour, a warm down sleeping bag will become useless fast. A waterproof bivvy sack would stand up to these elements nicely though.

I got the idea to use the tarp from an account of some photographer who used it while exploring Yellowstone in winter. Chances are that he had a warmer bag than me and had better idea of how to improvise a shelter.

While my setup worked reasonably well for that night and in Ohio, the concept is probably more applicable in wooded areas where the winds are not so fierce and it is easier to incorporate structures like tree branches to lend stability. Having tent stakes and poles is also probably useful if you don’t want to have to park your car over your tent to prevent it from blowing away. 

When I awoke that morning, the wind was still gusting and it was numbingly cold. I had brought a small stove to cook oatmeal, but found that either my lighter was out of gas or my hands were to stiff to work it. I decided to pack up and find a good restaurant along the highway. I found Chit Chats.

When I sat down, I had an appetite as big as the land. I ordered up a delicious, all-American heart attack consisting of six slabs of French toast and a spiraling galaxy of hash browns. The waitress brought a tray of syrups that were as big as milk jugs. I washed the breakfast down with towering mug of hot chocolate—topped with whipped cream of course.

1615 Miles

Welcome to South Dakota. Every other mile, there was a billboard up advertising some great American icon. There were at least 50 miles of advertisements for the Corn Palace in the city of Mitchell and maybe 150 miles of billboards for Wall Drug out in Rapid City.

At first the land was pretty much like Minnesota, but then the road took a steep decline, descending to the level of the Missouri River. Cottonwoods grew up along the shore. On the other side, the highway climbed into desiccated hills, brown and alien. Like the land in Minnesota, the far side of the river was open, but at the same time it seemed much older and definitely more western. 

Big Boats on A Big River

The Midwest Passage, Cont'd

If you are plotting a cross-country journey of epic proportions, the kind where you find yourself, the meaning of life and/or America, please make note that in October you run the risk of fundraising season for Public Radio.

“For the same price that you pay for a cup of coffee, YOU can bring quality programs to Wisconsin.”

 “Minnesota needs your support. Have you considered sending us $50? Some of you could probably give $100—or if you have $200 lying around somewhere…”

It never stops with those damn broadcasters: the classical music, the thoroughly investigated feature pieces, the whorish demand for listeners’ money. The unfairness.

I had my own music too, though I’d rationed it. I’ve found that a few boring hours of driving in silence makes me appreciate playing the tunes that much more. In a masochistic exercise of self-discipline, I had kept the music off all the way through Pennsylvania. By Indiana, I entertained myself by trying to sing with Robert Plant’s highs; driving Illinois, I aimed for Johnny Cash’s lows.

When I came back to the radio, I decided that if those lefties were going to spend the whole day bitching about how poor they were, I’d get back at them by listening to the right wing. I ended up spending about 45-minutes learning how to choose the right Catholic College for my kids. Any school that puts on the Vagina Monologues or teaches literature by gay people is right out. The kid might as well major in bible burning and witchcraft.

As I absorbed these words of wisdom, I noticed a dark object resting in the middle of my lane. It was a waist-high package of fertilizer. By the time I realized this I was already in a 70-mile an hour swerve over the rumble strip and into the breakdown lane.

It was good to have avoided the collision, but there was still plenty of reason to be vigilant. The roadside was a tour-de-gore, the graveyard for a hundred Bambi’s, their corpses interspersed with the odd skunk or woodchuck mashed into the asphalt. The de-animated animals were as regular as mile-markers. The radio people explained that mating season was making the deer more reckless. Consequently, they were getting massacred like horny teenagers in a horror flick.

2,350 Miles: The Mississippi River.

I got out at the visitor center at the Minnesota side. There was a cold wind blowing, stirring up waves on the river. I walked down the bank so that I could dip my hand in. The rocks were coated with mussels. It’s tempting to say that they were zebra mussels, but I didn’t see stripes, so they were likely another species.

Back inside the center, I found this rather amusing graffito in the bathroom:

The river looked to be at least two miles wide, impressive when you consider that it was still about a thousand miles from its terminus in New Orleans. And it’s impressive, if sobering, to consider that even this natural force has been fundamentally altered by human engineering and made to serve the purposes of commerce. I’d say the river has been tamed, but when you consider its habit of rising up and killing people on the flood plain, that could be an overstatement.

Nearby, there was an enormous lock for regulating the river’s flow, for raising and lowering the enormous barges that travel between the ports. I spent about fifteen minutes watching boatmen guide a barge through.

It was an incredibly delicate operation, like threading a needle if your thread were the size of a football field. There were in fact, two of these football-field sized barges for the one tugboat to push. They had to go through one at a time. The vessels were conglomerations of enormous plastic crates, lashed together by rope. They had all the elegance of a herd of dumpsters.

From behind the fence, I got to ask the boatmen a couple of questions as they worked. There were maybe a dozen of them, in charge of the whole operation from St. Paul to St. Louis. At that point, another tug would deliver the goods to New Orleans. The boatmen would head back north for another trip. Soon however, the river would freeze up and commerce would halt.

The containers were filled with grain and coke: your Wheaties on the move, along with raw material to make the spoon you eat it with.

The barges were 105 feet wide, while the lock itself was 110 feet wide. A five-foot margin of error. The tug couldn’t fit inside the lock at the same time, requiring the boatmen to use the flow of water to move the freight.

I asked one of the guys if the barge ever hit collided with the rails. “It doesn’t hit often, but when it does, it’ll tear hell out of the sides,” he said.

After the lock was closed, it relied on gravity to go down, routing water through pipes to the other side. The water outside the lock boiled furiously as it emptied. After water inside the lock was equal with the south side, the doors swung open and the barge made its slow progress out. When it was finally out of the gate, the workers tied the thing off to pier, and started working the second segment through.

Given the fences and no-trespassing signs, I was surprised that nobody objected to my picture-taking. I asked if one of the workers would mind being in a photo.

“Go ahead, he was on the Discovery Channel last week.”

A fine experience, to be sure, even if it will never live up to his appearance in Tom’s On The Move.

Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin Welcome You

The Midwest Passage Cont'd...

I saw no purple mountains, but the amber waves of grain were everywhere as I plunged onward into the heart of the Midwest. Eager to make up for time I had spent at Cuyahoga, I sped indifferently past the landmarks of Ohio and Indiana. Apologies to the birthplaces of Thomas Edison, and Rutherford Hayes. Another highway billboard warned me that Jesus was coming in May 2011. Apparently, I’d missed the boat on that one.

The miracle of the Eisenhower Interstate System is that now you can go anywhere in the nation, but still inhabit leave the sameness of highway signs and rest stops. (Wow! They’re using a different kind of asphalt in Indiana!) 

Most truckers have probably discovered that driving though thousands of miles of America can get kind of boring, even with The Best of Kenny Chesney in the tape deck. In Travels With Charlie, John Steinbeck was turned off by the interstate’s flat boredom, and did most of his driving on back roads.

While the great author may have had time to look for America and whatnot, I’d need to take a more efficient route in order to get to Wyoming on time for work. I told myself that it was worth it to economize the sightseeing in the first half of the journey in order to spend quality time in the Dakota Badlands.

Still, I decided I would like to stop east of Gary to see the Indiana Sand Dunes National Lakeshore. There was camping there and I was thinking it would be cool to wake up and run along Lake Michigan.

I think I would have stopped if it had been a sunny, beautiful day. Instead, there was a persistent downpour as I left the interstate and navigated a post-industrial hell of fast-food chains and big box stores. Welcome to Michigan City.

Some poorly marked roads took me outside the city limits to where I thought the park was. Just when I was getting ready to think that the dunes were just a sick joke to sucker tourists, I came upon the shores of the great lake. There was a parking lot nearby, which had flooded from the storm. The harsh wind flung the rain into my eyes. Everything was gray and unpleasant.

I ran down to the beach to the water’s edge where I skipped a rock across the waves. I couldn’t see much further than the last splash. Behind me, expensive beach mansions towered over the lake—likely havens for wealthy Chicagoans. It seemed strange that what was marked as a huge national park on the maps, could actually have so many houses and roads.

I got back in the car and began scrutinizing the map. Hours of driving had made a small dent out of the miles that remained. As I shivered wet in the driver’s seat, I decided that I didn’t really give a damn about this place and would much rather keep driving, get past Chicago, go closer to the goal.

Fine, I thought. Let’s rumble. And I left.

I didn’t get back on 90 right away, but took a parallel road in the direction of Gary. The rain picked up again and cut the visibility to where it was all I could do to drive between the lines. After about fifteen miles, the downpour subsided to where I felt comfortable going 40. Through the fading light, I could make out the Gary exurbs, a disturbing land of gargantuan power-lines and smokestacks. The sun setting from behind the clouds gave the sky the rich color of coagulating blood.

Just as I had left the Sand Dunes for other explorers, I decided that The Windy City could wait for next time. I got on 90 again briefly, and then dumped it for 80, aiming to swing west of the city and cut up towards for Wisconsin along 294. Outside the gates of O’Hare airport, 90 and I would reunite, and stay together for the rest of the way west.

First there was the matter of getting past America’s third largest city alive. I steered my poor, rumbly car through the eight-lane monster highway, taking care to avoid veering semis. Though I wanted to double check my map to make sure I was going the right way, the traffic made it impossible to look down without getting killed. I guided myself through about five different interchanges interpreting a morass of confusing signs and a dim memory of what things looked like on the map. Amazingly, I didn’t screw it up.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the big city fell behind and I was back to driving across the endless fields.

The next relevant of course was where the hell I was going to sleep that night. I decided that if I just kept driving, a campsite would show up eventually. Thinking I would be spending that night in Indiana I hadn’t little research concerning accommodations on the road past Chicago. (Notice how I didn’t even think about getting a hotel?)

There were a couple parks in northern Illinois where I thought there might be tent sites. I swung off the highway to check one out and found it gated up with “no camping signs.” Deciding I’d rather not get a cop rapping on my window looking for conversation, I got back on the road. As I hit the Wisconsin border, I saw a sign for Pearl Lake Campsite. It was after 10:00pm, too late for most desks to stay open. I’d park somewhere and pay in the morning I thought.

The “campsite” turned out to be some kind of RV retail center. Well screw them. The Road Ranger truck stop was right next door. I wasn’t exactly sure how sleeping there was, but I knew I was through with driving and looking. If this was good enough for truckers, it was good enough for me.

I would have to eschew the comforts of my tent for the passenger seat. I yanked some blankets out from under my hiking gear and tried to sleep. The situation was pretty damn uncomfortable for someone who usually sleeps belly down. Meanwhile, sodium vapor lights cast a harsh orange light through the windshield, requiring me to pull a hat down over my eyes. The cold was enough to put frost on the inside of my windows.

Still, I managed to get perhaps five hours of sleep. When I awoke, there was a bathroom and food conveniently close by. Even better, no one had smashed through the glass and slit my throat while I slept.

Perhaps I owed such good fortune to the benevolent presence of the Beefaroo Lady, guardian angel of the Road Ranger station. She even watched out for vegetarians it seems. The miraculously proportioned roadside icon beamed in the early morning sunlight, savior to all men who travel the lonely highways.  

Golden Cuyahoga

A dull gray dawn washed over the soggy campsite. Slowly, reluctantly, I extricated myself from the sleeping bag and embraced the shivery Ohio morning. It’s always a hell of a time waking up when you’re camping, but it makes you stronger. I’ve found that a cold draught of dewy air is a better stimulant than coffee.

I took my shelter down quickly, so that I wouldn’t be tempted to go back to sleep. Soon I would leave this place forever, but before my departure, I decided that I might as well take breakfast on the lake nearby.

There were no paths going down to the water, but there was a slippery bank of mud with a handy network of roots to grab onto. It was a drop of about 20 feet. I eased myself down slowly, taking care not to skid my jeans.

The silence by the lake was perfect; a mist hovered over the water, softening the trees on the far shore. Gnarls of driftwood lay half-submerged above their reflected twins. Behind me, the stands of maples threw off a deep golden light, suffused with what green autumn had not yet stolen.

I poured my cereal in meditative reverie, and slurped each spoonful with thoughtfulness. Much as I enjoyed the solitude, I found evidence of an earlier customer who sought solace with nature here. The other guy had brought a roach clip however, and probably experienced things rather differently than I did.

After I’d finished my meal, I checked out at the ranger station, got in the Mazda and got back on 80. There would be miles to go until I crossed into the far-famed fields of Indiana, but I was not quite done with Ohio yet.

Within about twenty miles, I pulled over for a morning run at Cuyahoga National Park. The tourism brochures I’d picked up at the state line had assured me that this was a place well worth visiting. It piqued my interest to hear that the place was actually laid out with hundreds of miles of trails for bikes and hikes. Needless to say, this was a far cry from my snobby East-Coast perception of Ohio as an unwonderland of suburbs and strip-malls.

And yet, when I’d asked one of the rangers at the campsite what she thought of Cuyahoga Falls, she told me not to bother visiting.

“Did you ever here about the river that was so polluted that it caught fire in the seventies?”

I had missed the connection. The falls, she said were an unimpressive drop and the river itself was an ugly mud color.

What I’d messed up was that Cuyahoga Falls is the name of a town nearby, and it has nothing to do with the national park. It was the falls on the Brandywine River that I wanted.

Of course the nerd in me couldn’t help but notice that the river shares its name with the river in Lord of The Rings. Right at the start of the hobbits’ journey no less.

Should we then choose to stay within the Tolkien trope, I’ll say that the park reminded me the most of Rivendell. Just like what I’d seen on the lakeshore, the leaves on the trees here were green-gold. As the morning sun climbed higher, it burned away the fog and shone in through the leaves. The canopy filtered the light like a vast stained-glass window, one that suffused the forest with a warm radiance.

The fine scent of the living earth rose up from where it had been locked away the night before. I breathed it deeply as I ran

There were indeed paths to explore. I followed the banks of the Brandywine for a while, and then wandered up into some hills. I found a gravel road that led into an empty field where I realized that I was trespassing in someone’s backyard.

After I had satisfied my craving to explore, I wound back to the river and up to Brandywine Falls. There is a slick wooden walkway for the spectators, with stairs leading down to a viewing platform in front of the drop. I took time out to walk out and admire the scene. The falls are about 60 feet tall and are pretty, if not quite at the level of Niagara Falls’ grandeur. It was nice, but I realized that it was getting close to noon and I had already spent far too much of my time enjoying Ohio.

A Spooked Out Night Run in Ohio

The Midwest Passage Part I: 610 miles logged.

I pulled into the West Branch Campground under a pasty autumn sky that was dimming fast. I had spent the whole day driving I-80 from the city, through Jersey and Pennsylvania and finally, across the border into Ohio. The campground was in the town of Ravenna, just east of Akron. There are perhaps 200 sites in the park, set up alongside a good-sized lake. To get there, I had to drive about five miles off the intestate to turn onto an entrance road that led down to the main camping area.

With Halloween approaching in about three weeks, the park rangers seemed to have enjoyed themselves decorating the roadside. Here was a tree filled with mangled scarecrows. Spider webs had been hung out of the tree branches, orange inflatable pumpkins glowed along the roadside. The Styrofoam tombstones served to remind we travelers that sometimes death is riding next to us in the left-hand lane, veering in our direction as he types out a text message and eats a sloppy sandwich with the other hand.

The road went down for about a mile and a half or so before it arrived at the check in station.

“Are you the one who called in a while ago?” the ranger asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“I didn’t think it would take you that long to get here from Penn.”

“I, uh, overshot the exit—ended up getting a little lost.”

She gave me a map of the grounds so that I could go find a tent site that I liked.

“Say,” I asked, vaguely curious, “What are you guys doing with all the Halloween stuff up? Is there a haunted hayride here or something?”

“Yes,” she said, “But we don’t start those until Friday.”

I went and found a good enough looking spot to tent and then wandered back to the station to pay the $22.00 tenting fee. 

Some trail maps on the wall caught my eye. Though it was getting dark fast, I thought that I might be inclined to try a run. The ranger recommended that I try the horseback trails, which are flat and smooth going. This sounded good because it meant I wouldn’t be as likely to trip and break myself if I couldn’t see where the hell I was going.

After I had set up camp, I decided that I should probably stick to the entrance road because the light had almost entirely left. I grabbed a headlamp out of my car and headed off. The moonlight shone down through the clouds, casting its witchy illumination upon the landscape. Fall looked like it had just got started here. Most of the trees still had their leaves, while the crickets chirped in the woods. The warm, humid air reminded me of the end of summer around late August. 

But there was a creepy undercurrent as well. A steady mist fell from the sky, clung to my skin. It drifted in ghastly whirls across my headlamp beam. Then there were the scarecrows, hanging out, being dead in the branches up above.

It was pleased at the creepiness of it, glad to be experiencing something different from the earlier monotony of drifting from rest stop to rest stop. Never mind that tomorrow I would be back to doing exactly that.

In comparison to driving, running makes a place seem far more real to me. It covers more ground than walking, but unlike travel in a vehicle, it connects the perception of distance with real effort. Outside the car I can be aware of many things that I would have overlooked otherwise—sensations like the suspicion that there might be something somewhere out in the darkness. Watching.

But I did not turn back to the well-lit campsite. Instead, I went turned off down the horse trail, where they would be holding the haunted hayride. I didn’t even need the headlamp, with the bright sky illuminating the path. The surface was gravel and free of stones or roots that I might trip over. I did however splash my way into the odd puddle.

  

Beside the sounds of nature, I could hear some cars going down the highway nearby, as well as somebody blowing stuff up across the lake with perhaps the world’s biggest cache of illegal fireworks. A dull red glow lit the sky from the direction of Akron. As I ran out, the highway noise faded, but the glow endured. A cluster of swamp snags looked properly menacing against the hellish atmosphere.

Suddenly, I became aware of a white light filtering through the woods—headed in my direction. A dull rumble was on the air, growing louder as it approached. It was a freight engine, moving westward down the tracks. The shadowy bulk of the train ran alongside me on the other side of some trees, pushing toward Chicago in the night. For about five minutes, the thunder of the engine and the wheels drowned out my footfalls and all else. The railcars screeched and groaned as they went along, making their way like some procession of the damned.

After the train, I kept going for  perhaps ten more minutes until I arrived at a cul de sac in an open field. It seemed like as good a place as any to turn around. Approaching the road again, I saw an owl swoop down off its branch. The shadow whirled away into the night to look for whatever helpless animals it could devour.

I had thought that when I got back to the road I would simply head back to the campsite where I would jimmy open a can of beans open for my dinner. When I returned to the pavement though, I was far too wired. It was the adrenaline of running at night, the adventure of starting west. Instead of going back, I turned right, determined to explore the park roads until I was satisfied. It took me quite some time.

23-Year Old Runs Away From Home

 Child Services put out a missing-persons advisory Saturday for 23-year old Tom Fagin of Ledyard CT, last seen behind the wheel of a teal-green 1993 Mazda Protégé on the interstate, heading in a westerly direction. The runaway stands six-foot, is identifiable by the poorly groomed beard and hair that go with his disheveled, generally disordered appearance.

Over the last year, friends had noticed that Fagin would talk increasingly about leaving the East coast for work.

“He never shut up about going west,” said one friend who preferred to remain unnamed. “If you said you wanted to do something next week, he usually said that he couldn’t make it because he planned to be out climbing Mt. Rainier or something. Personally, I’d always figured he was full of if, but I guess he finally got his ass in the car and decided to do something.”

While it has notoriously been difficult to pin-down details about Fagin’s plans for the future, there is speculation that he may in fact be headed for Gillette, Wyoming (pop. 30,000) to work as a news reporter. The isolated city, wedged between the Black Hills in South Dakota and Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains, is known for its brutal winters, which will shrink the odds of survival if Fagin does not find shelter. 

In his departure, Fagin has left a loving family and a wonderful set of friends who he’s going to miss a lot. Many of these people are already scattered out around the country pursuing their dreams and ambitions. It wasn’t even possible to say goodbye to everyone, before leaving, which sucks.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if one of them decided to land in Gillette Wyoming some sunny day perhaps to climb some mountains? Chances are, he’s going to be out there for a couple years. In that time, hopefully he’ll get to cross off a couple peaks in the Bighorns. Oh yeah, and go see Devil’s Tower—just like the crazy guy in Close Encounters.