Into the Hills

Five day weeks are long. Two day weekends are short. Too short, in fact, to be able to fit both work time--necessary for my physical health, so that I can get some sleep during the week--and play time--necessary for my mental health, so that I won't go absolutely crazy. Debating what I needed most, I made yet another last minute decision, and on Saturday morning I threw an unorganized assortment of clothing and gear into the trunk of the car and headed out towards the Black Hills to meet up with a couple of the Rosebud-ers. At this point the 3-hour solo drive does not faze me in the least; in fact, there is a certain satisfaction to cruising through the prairie, watching the landscape slide by. But I wrote my thesis on "automotive vision," so I could probably go on about that for too long.

During the drive I had my iPod on shuffle. As I pulled into Rapid City, it just so happened that Phantom Planet's "California" (i.e. The O.C. theme song) popped on. Hearing the song, and remembering my own brief cruise through L.A. last spring, and my ridiculously gorgeous afternoon in Pasadena, I felt a sudden hankering deep in my American blood not just for palm trees and L.A. glitz and glamor, but for commericialization and capitalism: a world laden with cell phones and fancy cars and all kinds of subliminal stimuli overriding my mental circuitry. The song conjured up the perfect sheen of a Californian dream, and here I was in downtown Rapid City, my car idling under the shadow of a grain silo.

(It's since occured to me that California--the song and the state--are sort of a hidden foil to everything I write here. Fueled by too much television and pop music, I have adopted California as my own private dreamland, filled with sunshine and beautiful meldrama and devoid of any kind of adult responsabilities. And South Dakota is what I've got instead of that dream. The name of site comes from Colin's reappropriation of the lyrics to "California"* upon my sudden decision to move to South Dakota, when, only days earlier, I had been hoping to move to Pasadena. Playing off that metrical similarity, then, the unwritten question of this weblog is what happens when a Calfornian dream is replaced by a South Dakotan reality.)

Those feelings were assuaged, though, as I continued my drive south into the Hills: the landscape was so spectacular, with sheer cliff faces and layers of pine trees, making this one of the most scenic drive I have ever done. As I drove through Hill City, I got my fill of commercialization, too, as all the tourists hustled about the carefully designed Western boutiques and back country gourmet restaurants. The Black Hills are just about the New England of South Dakota, filled with gorgeous scenery and yuppified small towns to set my homesick heart at ease. When I met up with the rest of the crew down in Custer, it was like a homecoming as we set down for lunch in a cafe/gallery complete with chalkboard menus and gourmet sandwiches. This weekend was Buffalo Round-Up weekend--all of the Buffalo were herded today into corrals to be sorted, vaccinated, and counted--and lots of different events were going on, so the tourists were out in force. Here, though,--unlike, say, Valentine--the cowboy boots were fringed and the cowboy hats were some kind of fashion statement. With just five weeks of Wanblee dust sticking to my red Pumas, I felt more legitimately cowboy than any of these Rapid City suburbanites. The reservation is a different world.

After lunch the five of us headed out to Custer State Park to tackle Harney Peak, the highest peak east of the Rockies and west of the Pyrenees, which makes it sound much higher and more difficult than it really was. It was a six-mile round-trip hike, and although it was marked as a "technical" trail, I stand by my claim that it, were it a little flatter, would be easy enough to run. The temperature climbed up into the 80s, and it quickly became clear that it was the perfect day for the hike; whatever work waited back at home, I was happy to be out and experiencing South Dakota, allowing its reality to be a little more dream-like. (Photos of the hike to come once I get my camera back.)

After finishing the hike and then enjoying an expensive but oh-so-worth it meal back in Custer (I think these , we headed out in search of a campsite. We didn't quite realize how popular Buffalo Round-Up Weekend is out in these parts, and for an hour we drove from campground to campground, hoping to find a vacant site; finally we gave up looking in the park and found a private campground that had a couple of tent sites still available. Ryan, the hardcore camper of the group, stated that he would be sleeping outside, under the stars, and when Matt followed suit, I felt like I couldn't back down. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite as well equipped for the experience: I don't even have a sleeping bag out here (let's see if I can hold out till Christmas), so as I was throwing everything in my car I just borrowed Luke's. This is a sleeping bag that cost $5 at Wal-Mart. Ryan laughed when he saw it. I stayed strong, though, and after throwing on a sweater and a sweat-shirt, wrapping myself in a wool blanket from my car, and then wrapping the sleeping bag in the rain fly from my tent, I was pretty well fortified against the 40-degree evening. Turns out that sleeping under the stars isn't quite so grand an experience when you are as blind as I am, because as soon as I took my glasses off I saw nothing but a gray blur; and then to top it off, the rain fly soaked up all of the dew in the grass so that I woke up with a face full of water.

After breakfast in Custer, I headed out for my solo drive home. Normally Sunday mornings weigh heavy with the pressure of work to come, but this weekend's escape recharged me well enough to make it home happy and destressed. As the hills disappared behind me and the prairies unfurled before me, I crossed over Rapid Creek, nestled under a blaze of autumn leaves, and it, as much as anything I had seen or done this weekend, was a perfect scene; even as I left behind a more dream-like South Dakota, trading in the polished facades of middle class tourism for the grit and dirt of the high plains, I managed to catch a glimpse of a dream, there, too, more real than California will ever be.


*Full lyrics, in Colin's best "on the microphone" voice: "Dee dee dee dee deee, dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee dee dee deeee, South Dakota here we come, not Chicago where Boyce started from...South Dakotaaaaaaa, here we cooo-ooooome" (Originally that would go: "California here we come, right back where we started from, California, here we come.")