A Runner’s Meditation on Heaven and Earth

There is a heaven,

I write with my knee slashed

And blood dribbling down my leg, dirty

From stumbling, stumbling

—running raving through the woods.

And I did emerge upon a gravel road,

Which went east and west and deep into wilderness.

I let hour run into hour.

I ran beneath the canopy of green and gold

The leafy banners bold against the autumn sun.

I’ve felt those cold draughts of air

Come charging down to my desperate lungs,

Explode within my chest.

And drive the rhythm of my footsteps

Through Chaos, masterful in purpose.

And it’s just as roots dug deep in soil

Reach the apotheosis of their expression

In burning leaves above.

That which makes live, is perfect

And I cannot live without this.

I actually wrote the first verses right after I’d finished a run.

I was in fact seated in my driver’s seat with a pretty nasty gash on my knee. Months later, I still wear the faint purple scar.

It was back in the fall, shortly before I had left for Wyoming. I had gone for a run in the Maine woods, and fallen through a booby trap of rotten branches, whacking my knee against a rock.

I had started that outing with a not-so brilliant plan to try running down a streambed. When the plan led to painful injury, I almost turned back.

Instead, I beat my way ahead through some nasty brush and discovered a gravel path, which went on forever through some of the most striking nature I have ever seen. Chances are I could have followed the network of logging roads and ATV trails all the way to Canada if I’d had the mind.

The day was uncommonly beautiful and the air was crisp. The still-warm October sun lit up the birch trees as they transitioned from green to gold, illuminating the leaves as though they were pieces of Tiffany glass.

I ran on, charging up hills as fast as I could, letting the exaltation of the day take me many miles further than I’d planned on going.

The simple, biological fact that I was breathing heavily and my heart was beating fast only intensified my feeling of elation. That relationship between emotion and cardiology is one reason why I hold that it may be nice to drive through scenery in a vehicle, but it can never be as exalting as experiencing the scenery while getting exercise.

As I ran I started thinking about:

How it is that the tree’s dying colors (okay, its shedding colors) are prettiest to look at.

All those leaves together form a simple shape, a single splotch of color in our line of sight.

That zone of color seems like an ideal to me, a perfection that transcends its reality. It exists like an equilateral triangle or a solitary note, plucked from a guitar string. When I look at a tree, I don’t think of the decomposing chlorophyll any more than I think of the nylon stitching on a flag or the ink molecules on the pages of a book.

The tree appears as more than the sum of its biological processes, but also much, much less.

After all, the beauty of that final, leafy display begins in that dirty mess of roots, plunging through the detritus of dead and rotting life. Why is it that we are more likely to rhapsodize over the final, brief display of color than we are to worship the roots, the weird grubs and bacteria below that make the display possible?

It must be our human instinct to focus not on the bits and pieces of things, but focus on the complete idea. Psychologists will talk about the symbols and other shortcuts that we use to understand our world. We can divide these symbols into smaller pieces — try to understand the roots, the bark, each strange leaf, but of course it would be impossible to hold all of this in our minds. We have no choice but to misunderstand everything we see, to stab blindly at the truth with simulation.

The idea of “perfection” can only be a byproduct of this sloppy mental arithmetic. I never cared for Plato’s model of the universe, where everything has a single perfect version of itself floating out in the ether somewhere. There might be a couple billion horses roaming the earth, but they are all based on the idea of a single, perfect horse floating out there. somewhere. All other horses suck compared to this one Plato would say.

I believe there are too many forms of beauty out there to assume there is one perfection of anything, not horses, not birch trees, certainly not human beings.

I’d rather think that everything that creates existence must be a part of the larger perfection, not just the tree’s brilliant leaves, but also the roots that feed them and all that plant sex needed to create baby trees.

Running through that imperfect world, I wondered why heaven had to be some separate kingdom, divorced from the breathing, farting life-processes down on earth. I was running, breathing and farting in that world now. The thinkers who spent their time obsessing on perfect angels, writing down the details of the One Truth and other iterations of inflexible dogma probably took breaks now and then to scratch their asses or eat some tubers.

The so-called imperfections of the world are what give it its authenticity. Otherwise, the reality we live in might as well be projected on a screen, incomplete as any other flawed idea that humans can conceive of.

The real world can cut you or kill you. We learn to respect the forces of nature that do this. We nourish our bodies with air, food and water from this earth. We make our minds come alive by embracing the world that we have, taking it in through our eyes and ears, breathing it in through our lungs. It leaves its mark on minds and flesh alike.

Take What You Need

The graves of some old cowboys with Big Horns in the background

Now, let us praise the utility of the simple kitchen spoon. Whether it be silver, aluminum or steel, the spoon is unmatched in its ability to plumb deep into a jar or peanut butter and deliver its precious sustenance to hungry mouths.

At 3 a.m, I awakened with a rumbling stomach, a jar of peanut butter and nothing to eat it with. I was in the driver’s seat of my ancient car, having parked for the night at a 7,000 foot parking lot in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. It was cold. I really, really wanted a spoon.

I had packed everything else it seemed — cross country skis and boots, extra hiking boots in case I didn’t want to ski, layer upon layer of breathable fabric tops, an impermeable raincoat. Somewhere in the dregs of my backpack, I had squirreled away my new Patagonia parka, which is rated to 30 below and shimmers like a radioactive orange ghost in the moonlight. Oh yeah; I ‘d also brought my crampons, an ice axe, sleeping bag, gaiters and a tent.

I was planning on climbing Ant Hill. Don’t let the modest name fool you. This particular hill stands at 10,980 feet at the edge of the Big Horns, where it towers over a hundred miles of brown Wyoming rangeland. I had been there in December, but after hours of climbing in waist-deep powder, I’d bagged the mission at 10,000 feet.

 Now at the end of March, I was hoping that the warm weather had melted enough snow, or at least made it solid enough to trod on without the need for snowshoes (didn’t bring ‘em. Draw your own conclusions).

An early start was a key part of my plans, which was why I had parked at the turnoff. I planned to split the journey into two days, with the second day reserved for an early morning summit push. With any luck, the snow would still be frozen from the night chill by the time I started hiking.

The plan seemed pretty solid to me as I sat in the driver’s seat, shivering under my blanket. I unscrewed the peanut butter and plunged my fingers in, plucking up big gobs of the stuff to eat.

Beast of Burden           

Even without the weight of a spoon compressing my spine, I still had a heavy mother of a pack to haul  into the mountains.

Over-packing is a persistent concern of mine just as it is a persistent source of mirth to friends who see me heading out the door with what looks like another hiker grafted onto my back.

I’ve tried to get better. I’ve read Ultralight Backpackin’ Tips which is a fine book by outdoor instructor Mike Clelland. The read (with cartoon illustrations!) includes everything from tips on how to make pillows out of ziplock bags to sewing your headlamp to your hat to cut the weight of the strap.

While I admire the Zen of only trying to bring what is absolutely necessary to the outdoors.

I’ve also read plenty of stories of poor bastards, dead of hypothermia for lack of that three-ounce layer of polypropylene insulation.

Taking less stuff could be a Zen way to enlightenment, but bringing more stuff is a fun, American way of defying common sense. I recently discovered how awesome it is to have ice axes and crampons, and using them to scramble up steep pitches of ice, even slippery mud slopes, with no problem. Look at Lewis and Clark bringing that damn collapsible boat with them up through the Louisiana Purchase. Then there’s David Breashears, who hauled oversize IMAX equipment up the ice so that he and his crew could film atop Mt. Everest. Nuts? Sure. Awesome? Definitely.

Cold Toes           

The two things I obsess about on any trip are managing cold and managing moisture.  I’ve been to the Bighorns several times now, and I have stayed warm and dry zero times. This is despite my responsible layering; my careful attempts to seal off the inside of my boots from snow with knee-length nylon gaiters. A thigh-deep plunge through a thick crust wriggles away the protection so the snow rushes in. Then it melts into frigid puddles of water that tortured my feet.

On this trip, I wrapped Gorilla tape around my pant cuffs and around the top of my gaiters. Even then, it was no match for the deep, nasty stuff that I encountered up the trail.

It started with almost no snow and I soon ditched my skis. I was hiking with what felt like an oversize child on my back.

I didn’t hit the deep stuff until Soldier Park, a massive field in the midst of the pines and in view of several snowy peaks.  It was about an hour and a half into the hike.

I could see that the wind had blown a lot of snow off of Ant Hill, giving me hope that I might be able to finish the job in one day. Before I got there however, there were still miles of pines, still filled with deep snow.

Eyeballing the mountain, I thought that I had maybe a half-mile of the really deep stuff until I could reach some bare rock. I took my compass out and set a bearing for the nearest stone outcropping and plunged on ahead. 

The crust was a nightmare. It would tease me into thinking it would hold my weight, then plunge me into the icy powder.  I would struggle to lift myself out, but the snow around me wouldn’t hold my weight. Soon my feet and legs were soaked and freezing. My heart was pounding and my morale was sunk. I had gone off course and couldn’t even see where the damn mountain was.  I had been out there for about two hours. Disgusted, I turned around and followed my footsteps back to Soldier Park.

The sun was high in the sky, warming the air to the mid-60s. It was a beautiful day to lie in the grass with the splendid mountains all around, shimmering in the bright light. I set out my boots and let them fill with warmth. As they dried, I crawled into my sleeping bag and stared up into the blue for a while then napped.

I would go back and get my skis. I would try in vain to push myself through the deep snow and set up tent that alongside the trail that night. I kept my wet boots inside the sleeping bag so that they wouldn’t freeze. When I woke up that morning shivering with icy feet, I realized I didn’t want to try anymore. Ant Hill had won again.

My stuff resting in Soldier Park

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.

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.