3-Day Weekend

We took another trip out to Custer State Park this weekend. It's amazing how much more winter-y the park seems after just one week. Here are some pictures, I'll explain this more thoroughly when I have more time.

Bighorn sheep at the State Game Lodge campground. There were also some wild turkey running around, and, more excitingly, a couple buffalo lounging by the road a couple miles back. This time the girls were a little more calm about seeing a buffalo (when we saw one a month ago at night they all started screaming). Kate and Lea went into Custer to purchase some groceries and on the way back apparently saw a buffalo relieving an unfortunately located itch on a fire hydrant. Kate offered us a good re-enactment of what this looked like.

Our camp site. My tent is the close one; I inherited it from my folks, and it's a little bit old. It's got that nice smell of well-used camping gear, and I think we lost a bunch of poles along the way and replaced them with new ones that don't quite fit properly.

A nice creek that ran right behind our site. Note that that is pronounced "crick," mostly because I am ridiculous.

Winter is coming.

Shannon presides over the cook-out.

Anna presides over the fire. We determined that if we had Ryan with us on this expedition, we would have had the triumvirate of camping gurus to take care of us: food (Shannon), fire (Anna), and general camping knowlege (Ryan).

Luke finishes the Crazy Horse Marathon in 3:48.

Dave looks on amused as, leaving Rapid City, the girls attempt to squeeze some left-over Chinese food into an already overpacked car.

Harney Peak

Here are some photos from last weekend's climb of Harney Peak.

The beginning of the trail.

The intended purpose of the hike was "leaf-peeping" (Matt's phrase), but since most of the Black Hills are covered in Spruce trees, this is the best we got, still at the beginning of the climb.

Halfway up. In the second photo if you look really closely, you can see the tower on top of Harney Peak.

Some rocks on the way up.

En route.

The lookout tower at the top of Harney Peak. This is the highest point between the Rockies and the Pyrenees, apparently.

View down from the tower.

Various views from the peak. In the last one you can see Cathedral Spires. It's hard to believe this is only 2.5 miles from my little house on the prairie.

The lookout tower seems like it was once wired for electricity; I think that must have come from this pumphouse, somehow. You can see the tower at the very top left corner. That's Matt and Ryan lounging on the rocks.

Kim at the top.

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.")

Go West, Young Man

At home, the cardinal directions were just something I learned in school. They didn't mean much in suburbia, except maybe as a way to align the grid of streets. It's sad to admit, but for a long time I could never remember which direction the sun set in, east or west. What did it matter? Wherever the sun went, suburbia was its own world, closed off and directionless. I could never get lost enough to need to navigate my way back home.

On the prairie, the directions are still just concepts, but they are the concepts by which I can tether myself to some sort of order. When I'm running out on the trails, I will crest a hill and see Eagle Nest Butte in front of me, and know I am heading south, or I will see the sun start to dip and I will know I am heading west, and it's only these clues that differentiate my patch of grass from the endless rolls around me. Suffice to say I know now that the sun sets in the west.

The past few weekends I've found myself heading west just after sunset. At night the prairie closes in; headlights only pierce so far, and the darkness closes in over the road like a tunnel. But around 7:00 PM there is still a faint breath of light rising in the west, slipping over the contours of the hills. Even as the blackness closes in from the east, behind me, there is that hope of light still there, suggesting that the day holds out a little longer somewhere, even if I can't drive fast enough to get there. It's a peaceful sort of twilight that you couldn't get anywhere else.

Houston

I was poking around on the Teach For America website the other day, and I came across this video (scroll down to "A Day in the Life"), starring South Dakota's own Mr. Holth, which depicts a day at summer institute. When I watched it, I kept being like, "that's my hallway!" "that's my bathroom!" (you can see me very briefly as I stumble out of my room on my way to breakfast; a lot of the other SoDak corps members get some better face time). And I suddenly felt nosalgic for Houston. Probably some kind of Stockholm Syndrome--the stress warped my mind so much that now I remember Moody Towers fondly. But it was nice to have that kind of communal living, a certain camraderie as we all stumbled out into the bathroom half-awake and enjoyed the fine dining of RFOC.

Small Towns

Last weekend I made a last minute decision to head over to Mission on Saturday night. I didn't eat dinner before leaving, and then between the hour-long drive and the switch to central time, I found myself pulling into town around 9:30 with most available eateries already closed. I decided to head over to the gas station to get some lovely fried foods. When I hopped out of my car I paused for a second; something didn't feel right. Then I realized I didn't have my keys. I was hoping I hadn't locked my car, but when I turned around to check, I realized that not only had I locked it, but the engine was still running and the lights were on. Whoops.

I went inside the gas station and asked the cashier if she had anything that I could use to jimmy my way into the car. She came up with a coat hanger, so I went back outside and worked at that for a while. I'm pretty inexperienced with stealing cars, so I didn't make much progress. It was also 45 degrees out and the wind was ripping right through my 3 layers of winter clothing. One guy stopped by and suggested that I have the gas station call the Mission police, since they should have a "Sneaky Pete." So I went in, but the cashier said that the police would just make me call Junior or Slim or someone with a name like that, who would charge me a lot. So I went back out for a while to work with my coat hanger without much progress. The cold eventually drove me back inside, and I had the cashier call the police.

The first surprise was when the cashier identified herself by first name. She talked for a couple minutes and then reported back to me that both of the police station's Sneaky Petes had been stolen (seems problematic), but that Kenny over in Rosebud would be able to open my car for me. Then she handed me the phone and gave me the phone number to dial. The phone rang a couple times, I asked to talk to Kenny, and then I explained that I had locked myself out of my car at the Gus Stop. He said he would need forty bucks to open it for me, and I said fine.

I had to wait about 25 minutes for Kenny to make the drive over from Rosebud. In the meantime, one of the gas station attendant's husbands came by, and very helpfully tried to wedge a piece of wod he found into my window so he could get the door unlocked. I probably should've been stressed out, it kind of put me in a good mood to laugh at myself, and everyone was being really nice; four or five people walked by, offering various helpful comments or spots in the warmth of their cars. I was only nervous about one thing: after getting off the phone, I counted up the cash in my wallet and discovered I only had $37, and the ATM was out. When Kenny arrived I offered to buy him something from inside, but he was happy with just the $37. It took a couple tries, but he got me into my car pretty quickly, and then I was on my way.

I felt like I learned something, though--and not only not to be an idiot next time I am driving. It struck me in a new way how small this community is. I'm aware of how empty the land is, how far apart these towns are. But everyone I meet is a stanger, nameless to me, and it's easy to assume that I am just as anonymous, another passing face who won't be remembered. But this is a place where they can call the police and identify themselves by first name, or be known across the res as the late-arriving entrepreneur who profits off of fools like me. Anonymity may be hard to come by.

Let's Get a Little Mud on the Tires

Most of you don't know this, so I will point out that the title of this post is a reference to a Brad Paisley song. My attempts to appreciate country music have for the most part stalled--we don't really get any radio stations out here in Wanblee, so it's hard to get the necessary exposure--but "Mud on the Tires" is one of three or four songs that comes with my seal of approval.

Usually I drive out to Rapid City taking the "scenic route," on 44, rather than taking the interstate. Yesterday, though, I decided to get a little mud on the tires and take the extra-scenic route, and get a chance to explore the dirt road I've been running on, which, according to maps, runs through to just south of Interior.

The beginning of the road: about a half-mile from home. This is the way I run out almost everyday.

A view of the school water tower through a tree.

This pink house serves as a decent three mile marker. At this point, as you can see, I am still driving through open plains.

It's a decently hilly route.

A little over three miles out, you pass the Wanblee dump, clearly the least pleasant portion of the route. But somewhere between three and four miles is also where I really start to appreciate the road: the road narrows down to one lane and the fences end, so all of a sudden the landscape opens up around you with no barriers between you and the openness.

A glimpse of the badlands on the horizon.

Badlands getting closer. Out this way, these powerlines are some of the only things tethering this road to civilization.

A little over five miles out, the roads starts to dip and you first start to get into the badlands.

These kinds of gratings allow cars to pass through the fences, but cattle can't cross them. You see them a lot out on this road. This one is just about six miles out.

A sign for Crazy Horse School at that six-mile grating. I'm not sure who it is there to help.

A car overturned in the ditch beside the road. You see this kind of thing a lot.

I took this slightly rougher turn-off in order to get a little closer to the badlands and get the next couple pictures. I thought this was a good indication of what the road was like, though.

Rock formations. The movie Thunderheart, starring Val Kilmer, was filmed out here; I haven't seen it, though.


You head down this hill, and the road starts to get a little rougher, but you also end up right in the middle of the badlands.

Another abandoned car. This one looks pretty old.


Eventually the road gets really bad. Here is a pretty massive pothole. This is pretty much a new piece of the badlands being formed as the ground erodes away.

As you can see in the second photo, these are right next to the road.

"Open Range."

As you get closer to Interior and return to the prairie, the condition of the road improves a lot.

Another junked-out car.

Cool dead trees outside of Interior.