The demolition derby in Casper, Wyoming smells like dirt and
exhaust and fried food. Tressa is wearing an absurd red cowboy hat she got from
a thrift store for four dollars and an old man calls her cowgirl, so we know
we’re not blending in. It’s hot and loud and thrilling for a while. We see
mothers bouncing three-month-old babies at intermission, while the announcer
says not to go nowhere, corrects his own grammar, and then does it again. The
little boy behind us is cheering for his mom, driving a red white and blue
striped beater that gets shoved out of arena.
Hot Springs, South Dakota is like traveling back in time,
all faded red brick facades in one little strip. We drive to the Cascade Falls
natural pool and swim for a while, hoping the chilly water will wash some of
the sticky Midwestern heat off our skin. We are officially in the Midwest. We
see bumper stickers like, “Don’t blame me, I voted for the American” and big
billboards proclaiming, “Life is a gift, not a choice.” We park in what we
think will be a quiet neighborhood to sleep, and are perplexed by the voices
carrying up and down the street, footsteps at 1am on a Sunday in a town less
than four square miles in total. We wake up between roadblocks in a
construction zone and while Kelsey jogs Tressa discovers that the two coffee
shops in town have both been shut down.
The Wind Cave National Park is obviously renowned for it’s
cave, but tours are expensive so we opt out and amuse ourselves photographing
bison, meandering through the hot, windy hills and trying to get close to
prairie dogs. We have a couchsurfing host in Rapid City that warns us that
parking for Mt. Rushmore is absurdly expensive, so we cruise past the monument,
which is strange and small in the face of the awe-inspiring black hills, all
that immense rock, jutting out in round, bulbous formations. We pull to the
side of the road and take a few photos.
Every now and then you meet a person and you wish they were
a character you had invented, that their life was a story you’d written. Our
host in Rapid City is like that, this tattooed twenty something with a beer in
hand, two kids, and a quiet tow-headed friend that lives in a tent when he’s
not sleeping on the couch. He shows us the wine he’s making, the kombucha he’s
brewing, the greenhouse he’s building and the aquaponics system he envisions
for it. He shows us the squirrel he is training squirrel to eat from his hand,
and takes us to Cabela’s in his beat up hotwired Ford with a chair nailed to
the floor as a backseat, a much more legit rape van than even our bulky Chevy.
At Capela’s we lay on cots, try on absurd camo outfits, photograph the stuffed
bears and buffalo, and Skyler shops for his new home — a hefty 16x14 tent
with a chimney. All he needs now, he says, is somewhere to put his
couchsurfers.
We don’t know what to expect when we head to The Badlands
National Park, and it blows our minds. It’s insanely gorgeous, chalky red
striped rock formations where big horned sheep take leisurely naps and then
rolling prairie hillsides full of more bison and more prairie dogs and
unfortunately, biting flies and mosquitoes for days. But their primitive
campground is free. We camp there for
two days, hike around, enjoy an incredible sunset over the rocks and some
beautiful clear starry skies. On the second night, we nearly run into an
ENORMOUS bison that’s lurking in the ditch, contemplating crossing the dirt
road we’re driving down in the pitch black. Later, we read that the bison is
actually considered more dangerous than a grizzly bear. Terrifying.
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