Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood
And these badlands start treating us good– Bruce Springsteen
It’s a little hard to believe that I have gotten this far into this account of my journeys without quoting Springsteen. Rest assured, dear friend, that his presence was, is, and always will be with me. Maybe I just had to prove that there is more to me than Bruce. Then again, why does there need to be? Especially when I need someone to accompany me, compel me, and reassure me that this drive will not last forever, that there is a destination out there somewhere.
And I was starting to think I just might not make it. There is a thing that I had forgotten from my last trip across the country: wind sucks. All the way across the Great Plains, there is nothing but wind. Going west, I did not notice it as much. Maybe that was the excitement of being outward bound, but I kinda think it is worse when you’re heading east. It is definitely worse when you are driving a two door Jeep Wrangler, something so boxy and top-heavy that it seems custom made for getting blown into oncoming traffic, as opposed to a 1992 Nissan Stanza, as I was the last time around.
One of the characters in Sun House, Grady Haynes, goes on a search for the mystical tribe of the Lumi, wandering ever farther into the fictional Elkmoon Wilderness to learn what they have learned. There comes a point at which, if he really wants to get into the heart of things, he has to make a treacherous passage across a chalky ridge that bridges two landscapes. The fact that he could easily plummet over either side, dropping thousands of feet, is terrifying, but if he wants to get to his spiritual center, there is nothing to do but go across. The same with me. If I wanted to get home, I had to cross this windswept place. I could drive to Calgary or to Tucson. It would still be there.
I had planned to drive from Jackson, Wyoming, to South Dakota in one sitting. Somewhere around Casper, I thought I might go insane. I pulled off the road and into the first campground I could find. They warned me about raccoons (I did not tell them I had been camping with bears). The warm wind dried out all of my wet gear in a short amount of time, and I wondered how much electricity these people saved by not using their clothes dryers all that much. Depleted from a morning of revelation and a day of terror, I fell asleep not too long after the sun went down.
Which meant I woke up somewhere around 4:00 in the morning, only to find that there was almost no wind! It’s a little known fact that the pioneers on the Oregon Trail became faux Trappists because they would wake up in the middle of the night, pray, and get moving. I decided to do the same, and set out for South Dakota’s Black Hills. This area is sacred to many Indian tribes as the mythical place from which their people emerged.
Maybe that’s why a group of dumb Anglos decided to carve up one of their treasures. Everything about Mt. Rushmore just seems weird and wrong. Out there in the relative middle of nowhere is a parking structure that would be more at home in Newark. Walking up to the monument itself, you pass through a set of granite buildings and an arcade of flags that, along with the preponderance of shirts saying “We the People have had enough!”,1 gave MAGA-Disney vibes. At least my vehicle would blend in with the crowd.
Just down the road is the Crazy Horse Memorial. Not unlike our nation’s process of owning up to its past behavior toward the indigenous people of this land, the Crazy Horse Memorial is a work in progress. I am not altogether clear on why carving up this mountain is an ok thing to do, but it seems to be working for the folks who are running the place. I had the distinct feeling of being in a tourist trap, but one in which I was perfectly willing to be caught.
The last stop on my itinerary was the Badlands National Park, a place of otherworldly beauty that I may well explore one day. This was not to be that day. I had arrived, windblown, in the latter part of the afternoon. More driving did not appeal to me. What I wanted to do was make camp and get to sleep as soon as the sun went down.
Now, to be a faux Trappist, you not only have to get up early, you have to be considerate of the people sleeping near you. As quietly as I could, I packed up my clothes, cot, and tent, and pulled out of the campground sometime around 3:30. “Lord open our lips, and our mouths will proclaim your praise!” Praise at least that there is almost no wind, not yet. I was in northwest Nebraska by the time it showed up.
When the wind did pick up, I had to accept that I was going to piss some people off by driving too slow. Admittedly, I was rattled, but I also was not on a timetable that required me to get somewhere quickly. Faux Trappists, like Sun House‘s Jarvis, navigate the ocean that is life without regard for pace or efficiency. “Peace to the wind. Peace to the other drivers. Peace to the winds of my shattered relationship that want to blow me into oblivion. Peace to Abigail. Peace to my resentment. Peace.”
Lincoln, Nebraska, is not the first place I would have imagined going to meditate on peace. The primary way I know it is through the title track to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”. This song tells the story of mass murderer Charles Starkweather, in first person. I’m pretty sure it was inspired by the Terrance Malik film “Badlands”. Lincoln itself is cool though. Serving as both the state capital and the location of the state’s flagship university, it has semi-Austin vibes. I got a Runza for dinner.
Heading into the shelter of the hills of Iowa, I did not feel compelled to rise quite so early the next morning. This would be my 48th state, and you may recall that one of the points of this trip was to advance my quest to visit all 50. I also had an inexplicable desire to visit Ottumwa, the hometown of Radar O’Reilly of the movie and TV show M*A*S*H. Something about Radar’s frustrated earnestness touched me as a kid. Maybe it was sympathy for the experience of the actor, Gary Burghoff, who felt he was often discounted in the same way as his character (although I had no way of knowing that at the time, any more than I could have known that we share a birthday.) At the end of the day, I found myself on the banks of the Mississippi, all but home.
- Neither which people, nor what they had had enough of, was clearly indicated ↩︎