Day Eight: Murdo, South Dakota, to Livingston, Montana

Monday 30 September -- Up more or less with the sun and out into the fresh, bracing air of Murdo, South Dakota, for a walk and look around the place.  In shorts and a t-shirt, I walk away from the cluster of motels and toward the rolling fields and dozen or two houses, and quickly catch up with a middle-aged man wearing jeans, boots and a heavy jacket.  He greets me with a comment on the morning’s chilliness.  This strikes me funny for the central plains – it’s at least 50 degrees, and shouldn’t these people (he looks like a cowboy) be hardier frontier-types?

A small herd of friendly goats have no complaints about the weather, but they’re leaping about a good bit.  I wander toward a big, black, horned bovine in a field, and it leaps, spins, and rushes away from me crying.  Across the street there’s another pasture with a smaller, black, un-horned bovine; when I approach it to say good morning, it lowers its head, hunches its shoulders, snorts a few times, and starts ambling toward me with predatory deliberation.  I am hopelessly confused about who is the bull and who is the cow –and no, I don’t care to go peering at livestock genitalia.

Much friendlier is a beautiful buckskin horse who happily munches some grass I offer.  The horse is in a field with two others and a pony; the others are content with the grass on their side of the fence; the pony looks at me speculatively but I just look back suspiciously.  The smaller they are, the meaner they are in my experience, and this one is pretty tiny.

My friend on the left.

The day is warming up beautifully as I head back, but an old woman wearing slacks and a quilted jacket to take her trash to the curb comments to me on the chill.  I just smile and say, “Well, it’ll be hot enough later.”  Seriously, how did these peoples’ ancestors survive?

Back in the car the radio is still tuned to the best radio station of the trip to date:  KOYA, broadcasting from the town of Rosebud.  Last night they played an African chant in the midst of the classic and alternative rock; this morning I get mid-career Eric Clapton, a lot of Rolling Stones, an 86-year old from Pine Ridge Reservation singing, a capella, his grandfather’s song, something psychedelic I’ve never heard before, and a song that I think is called “Sunflowers and You,” which I’ve also never heard and quite like.  (Researching it for this posting, I suspect it was Everclear’s “Sunflowers,” whose refrain is actually, “Sunflowers in your room.”)  Then there’s a chat show discussing how sequestration and shutdown affect Native Americans, and then there’s static.

And outside the car there are cultivated fields and grassy plains and lots of smaller-than-usual, rather homemade-looking billboards advertising nearby attractions:  Wonderland Cave, Reptile Gardens, 1880 Town, Ranch Store, Petrified Garden...  1880 Town, a recreation of a pioneer village, is right by the highway, and it has three horses and a camel in a pasture next to it.

The prairie landscape of my imagination is real.

The wind is blowing my face funny!

Perspective shift:  I am easily bowled over by dramatic landscapes.  Mountains, river rapids, red rocks, cliffs plunging to surging oceans, fields of dark green grass blanketed with deep purple violets – I react.  I gasp, I marvel, I open my arms wide, I climb and explore and write postcards extolling them.  I would not have guessed how deeply the prairie grasslands would move me.  They are wide, flat, grassy.  On this day, the grasses were in constant motion due to a dramatic (deranged was the word I picked at the time, but let’s call it dramatic) wind.  The grasses are actually a diverse variety of plant life, mostly of the knee-high-or-shorter, tan, yellowish or dull green variety.  At a scenic overlook, I am pole-axed; just stand there gazing, camera in one hand.  I don’t know why this place inhabits me as it does, and maybe I don’t want to analyze my reaction to it, but I’m tempted to start walking, maybe roll around a bit, and just settle into this gigantic meadow for a spell.

Then I start thinking about prairies in winter – and if this relentless, power-mad wind continues into cold weather, my heart is with the smaller mammals – take a few photos that can’t begin to explain how I feel, and get back in the car.

Heading toward Mt. Rushmore, I seem to be officially in the Badlands.  They smell great.  Supposedly the natives of Corsica can recognize their homeland, approached by sea, by the smell of the maquis before anyone catches sight of the island.  For their sakes I hope it smell as good as the Badlands, which are perfumed like a tremendous bundle of savory herbs, just starting to dry, drizzled with a very thin stream of pale honey.

Rapid City does not smell like anything much.  It does offer gas, though, and directions to Mount Rushmore.  The Honda likes the gas but not so much the Black Hills, and strains going both up and down, which we take in second in an attempt to keep to the 35mph speed limit.  I like Mount Rushmore – it seems like an extraordinary engineering and logistical achievement, among other things – but I think it’s perfectly patriotic to say I prefer my mountains un-sculpted by the hand of humans.  Also, if you think the best thing Thomas Jefferson did for this nation was to effect the Louisiana Purchase, as the roadside sign suggests, I am afraid I believe you have a rather mercantile turn of mind.  Under usual circumstances, I’d also be a bit put-off by the elevation of the executive branch to special-celebrity status, but given our current legislative branch – oh, never mind.

Spot the sculpture...

Hint.

Although since I’ve trodden down this political path, I guess I’ll be brave and mention that one of the principal thoughts I’ve had all morning is, “They get two senators?!?”  This is mostly because South Dakota offers signage noting its senators’ hometowns, and I’ve driven past both of them.  I might not have thought it otherwise – though South Dakota seems unusually empty.  TJeff and GWash have something to answer for there.

They do have awfully beautiful hills, though.  Lunch is a piece of pizza, left over from Iowa City, that warms up quite nicely indeed in its foil wrapping, sitting on the dashboard of the closed car on an 80-degree day for as long as it takes me to scramble up and down some hills and boulders for photos.  Too late I recall the chocolate bars in the car, too, but with luck being down on the floor will have protected them from melt.  I eat sitting on the roadside fence, gazing at acres and acres and acres of evergreens, plunging down and rising back up again.

Driving back to Rapid City, I run over a tumbleweed, and I’m so excited I squeak.  I think this means South Dakota is officially the west, not the midwest, but of course I’m not the arbiter of those designations.

I’m very confident Wyoming is the west, and that’s where I’m headed, at about 68mph, when a grasshopper leaps in through the sunroof.  More squeaking.  I have no idea whether it left again (I opened a window) or whether its corpse is someplace amongst my effects, possibly with a nest of grasshopper eggs or whatever they use to reproduce.  I probably ought to check more thoroughly before I start importing invasive pests into Washington’s orchards or Oregon’s vineyards or California’s everything.

Mule deer?  That is not a rhetorical question; someone tell me.

Fourteen miles later, I cross into Wyoming and spot a small herd of what I believe are mule deer in a pasture.  The scenery’s great but the radio choices are dreadful, and the ad for a CD-based program for parents of 11-to-17 year old boys who “exhibit oppositional or defiant behavior” is horrifying.  How many 11-to-17 year old boys are meek and obedient, and how do those boys become healthy, independent men?

Leaving Wyoming I get a brief rain shower, but just head for the sunny spot right over there in Montana. Even after I reach it, briefly the world smells like rain, though it doesn’t look like rain, as the band Morphine once sang.  Does rain smell the same everywhere, I wonder?  At least to our limited human olfactory sense?

I am wondering about rain in the deserts of Arabia, rain in the slums of Calcutta, rain on the steppes of Russia, when I glance in the rear view mirror and get another sudden perspective shift.  I’ve been checking the rear view often, of course, but usually I just look for cars and trucks and motorcycles on the road behind me.  This time I happened to notice the landscape.  It looks so different from here.  What’s brown and green in front of me looks yellow and white in back, and the narrowness of the mirror concentrates my vision, so the sky seems smaller and the plains broader.  It’s very cool – fun and interesting – and I resolve to observe the landscape from this angle more often.

There’s a brief stretch of Powder River County in Montana where the fields sporadically sprout odd, freestanding, rocky hills that look like mountain tops without the mountains under them.  I wish I knew more about geology.  About 150 miles south of Billings, the landscape gets – I’ll call it ‘scrubbier.’  Darker grass, low, tough-looking bushes, fewer trees, with occasional exposed – or protruding, sometimes quite dramatically – white and near-black rocky patches.  It looks like something that, in the movies, would mean we’re on another planet, and probably not a very friendly or prosperous one.  Then I’m sloping down toward the Powder River itself, where trees, horses and sheep cluster along each side of the water.

For a while the view alternates between these pasture-y patches and the more forbidding scrub, and then a steeper hill leads to evergreen forest.  There’s one quietly lovely, rocky hill that offers a patchwork of colors: white grasses, deep rose rock, green, purple and yellow bushes, with a single bright red one in the middle.  I doubt a photo would do it justice, and I gots to keep on rolling, so roll I do, until blam:  traffic jam on route 212, Montana.

View from a traffic stop; sky preparing for dramatic sunset.

It’s not a traffic jam really, of course.  It’s road work.  The woman holding up the STOP sign strolls by to explain that the wait should only be about five minutes, and it’s about double or triple that before we crawl past the workers and arrive at another woman with another stop sign.  This one strolls over to explain that it should only be about five minutes, and explains further that they’re putting in a new bridge, and I shall be one of the first to drive across it.  Upon questioning, she informs me that there will not be reporters present, I shall not receive a commemorative bouquet, and there is no need to practice my gracious waving.  She then questioned me as to what I thought the odds were that there’d be another rain squall like they’d had an hour earlier, which I’d missed completely 50 miles away.  We agreed there was no trusting this break in the clouds, and she’d do better to leave on her slicks.  And then she strolled away to tell more people that it would only be about five minutes, and ten minutes later we paraded slowly across the new bridge.

An hour or so after that, I got the best sunset of the trip so far.  There were little, low clouds turning to red-gold fire, like molten metal, and three smaller clouds above them turning shining coral pink against the morning-glory-blue sky.  As the sun sank, but with the sky still light, somewhere around mile marker 479 I suddenly understood what they mean by ‘big sky.’  While the horizon doesn’t seem unduly distant, nor the sky unduly high, it somehow stretches a remarkably long way in each direction, south and north.  Weird, and a bit cathartic.

It’s starting to get dark as I pass Billings, and maybe just as well.  The city, from the interstate, looks like it’s 80% a giant refinery complex, deliberately hodge-podge and ungainly.  So I’m pitying the citizens of Billings when I glance to the left and notice the whole southern landscape is comprised of a dramatically rugged cliff (a butte, maybe) crowned with graceful evergreens.  A useful reminder to look both ways, coming atop my earlier reminder to look back occasionally.

Then another hour or two of driving in the dark, chortling on each of the frequent occasions that this sign pops into view:

I’m pretty sure it means that at any moment, a prima-don’ish antlered creature might heave out of the tree cover and perform an athletic dance or gymnastic routine for my entertainment.

I brushed over the Beartooth Mountains, and looped through the Crazy Mountains, but I didn’t quite make it to my Bozeman goal.  I was only about 20 miles short when Livingston, Montana, which seems to cater to Yellowstone visitors, tempted me in.  The Best Western here also wanted $95, with little to offer for it, so I rolled a tenth of mile along and booked into the $75 Rodeway Inn.  Sure, my skin felt tickly when I first shoved into the sheets, but that actually passed pretty quickly.  And I did have the good sense to request a non-smoking room, reminded that not all motel chains are non-smoking all the time by the ferocious stench of cigarettes in the front office.

Incidentally, I never did see a sign for Cactus Flat, South Dakota, where I’d hoped to spend last night.

Murdo, SD driveway:  BMW, Harley Davidson, John Deere, maker unknown.