Impressions of Beauty and Darkness

Welcome to my moon.


The Bad Lands in all its glory.




Bob enjoys the view from our camp site. The roof over the picnic table is a wind break.



The bluebird of happiness?


I have no idea who this guy is but man!!! could he sing!!



Volcanic ash turned to rock.


Moonscape right here on earth.


Mommy turkeys and their broods hanging out in the park.



treacherous footing for climbers.


a local stops by to say hi.


The back door view to go with our morning coffee.



The sun sets on another day, a full moon to light our evening.


Grasses and hills at dusk.


7/24/10 6 am local

As I sit here writing this I am looking out at a pink and white moonscape, listening to birds whose names I do not know singing in the trees and while flying through the air. Ronda and Julie: this place reminds me of you. I know you would both love to be here watching the birds yourself and listening to their music. Jagged peaks of rock that were formed millions of years ago by volcanoes, the ash turning to clay and finally to the flint-like substance I see before me. The dew is heavy on the grass and I imagine how thirst-quenching it must be for the rabbits and small game to gnaw on the sweet, refreshing dew while having their morning breakfast of oat and buffalo grass. The children in the next camp site are still in bed, it is too early for them to be awake and making noise. The peacefulness of this morning is incomparable to anything I have experienced thus far.
I sit here and imagine what it must have been like for those long ago people to begin their daily routine; taking sustenance from food that they worked so hard to hunt and gather while I have the luxury of turning on the propane gas and frying up our bacon and eggs. I have real coffee, toast with chokecherry jam, and a sense of thankfulness that I can enjoy both the ancientness of the landscape with the modernity of a fairly quick breakfast. It is a dichotomy of thought and feeling that has never quite hit me so forcefully in all the days we have been in Indian country.
“Back country” camping is allowed here. You must go no further than a half mile off the trail and you are not allowed to have fires due to the danger of setting the whole place ablaze. If you need to “eliminate” you are asked to do it in a hole you dig; six inches deep at least and please take the toilet paper with you when you go. I admire people who can camp so primitively, I admit I am a creature of comfort who would balk at carrying my own fecal matter in a bag until I can properly dispose of it. I get the concept; leave no trace. But I am horribly spoiled and happy that I have running water on board with which to take care of my daily ablutions. As the back-country campers do I have abandoned my flip flops in exchange for good solid shoes that cover my entire feet in order not to tempt fate. One bite of the rattle snake’s fangs and the vacation is over.
The air is chilly after so many days of heat. The temperature is about 65 degrees; I am wearing sweats and a long sleeved t-shirt. I am sure if I moved to the sunnier part of the campground I would warm quickly but I am enjoying the anonymity of sitting in the shade of the camper too much to move; for now I accept the compromise of being cold in order to keep this wonderful peaceful feeling.
As we came into the park yesterday we could see the huge plains of grass in between the breaks in the rock; it is not hard to imagine the thundering herds of buffalo and the many thousands of tipis that must have once inhabited this area. I read that the buffalo and Indians were so closely tied together that when the soldiers needed to find the Indians they just looked for the buffalo instead. How sad that now a glimpse of a buffalo is such a treat when once they were as plentiful as the stars in the sky. I will be sorry to leave this place and I hope that my friends can find a way to come here and experience what I am feeling at this moment. It is precious to me.

Bob saw a sign that showed where some scenes from “Thunder Heart were filmed.

We’re on our way to Wounded Knee. It’s hard leaving the Badlands when it’s so pretty but I can’t stay here forever. Like anything else it would become so routine I wouldn’t even see it any more I’m sure. After Wounded Knee we’ll be going to the SAC (Strategic Air Command) museum in Nebraska. Bob and his family lived on several SAC bases when he was young due to his father’s stint in the Air Force. Bob wants to see what all the fuss was about now that he’s an adult. We haven’t made any plans for anything after that. The trip is winding down, I can feel it. It seems like we’ve been gone for a lifetime and yet it seems like we’ve been gone for just a few days.

We just entered the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Lakota people. You can still see the rock formations of the Badlands to the north but to the south it’s prairie/grasslands. The road is not as well kept as the county and state roads but passable nonetheless. The main farms here seem to be hay and beef. One family has the cows running around in their front yard. I thought dodging dog shit was a pain in the ass, I hate to think what cow chips would do to a good pair of shoes. More to come when I can tell you about Wounded Knee.

2:00 pm

I will be the first to admit that I have never been one to obsess over the plight of the Indian. Yes, their story is as much a part of American history as the pioneers or the fur traders or even the Revolutionary War that began this country. When we drove through our first reservation; the Crow, I looked around and thought a little about the culture and history of the Indian nations but looking back I can’t honestly say I was totally moved, probably merely curious, much as I would be about any culture different from my own. When we went through the Cheyenne Reservation I thought about the stories I had heard of their strength and the fights they fought bravely but it still didn’t register completely with me the impact on our history all that happened out here in the West. Going through the battlefield at little big Horn I began to feel heartbroken at the waste of it all. As a woman who was raised in a minority culture, if you will, I understand the anger and the puzzlement regarding the more dominant culture. I still to this day can’t figure out why Hearing people have such a hard on against being Deaf. I began to feel the same thing on behalf of the Indian nations when we were at Little Big Horn. Little Big Horn is a place that has tons of money poured into it. The monuments are marble and expensive. The tourist/ visitor center has a movie theatre that tells all about the battle that occurred there, about the culture of the tribes that lived there, and they have a thriving tour business linked to the local college.

Compared to all that I have seen to this point Wounded Knee is the knife in my heart. There is a single building there on the hill, next to the cemetery full of the Indian dead. We actually missed it the first time and drove right past it. We had to turn around in the post office parking lot and go back. The Wounded Knee Massacre museum building is decrepit by any measurement, the inside needing the murals repainted, the outside needing new stucco and paint. There is a lone Lakota man, a young person sitting there beading his horse hair and laying the finished products on the table in front of him in the hopes that people coming to gawk will buy his wares. There is a box asking for donations to keep the museum alive for just a little longer. Across the road are shade shelters built from sticks and covered with branches, or in one case, made from steel pipes and a white tarp. Beneath the tarp is an older Lakota man, speaking in heavily accented English; telling us the history of Wounded Knee from his people’s perspective and how they look forward to the day that they can be free of the Federal Government again. The old man was dark, with a tear drop tattooed beneath his left eye, more than likely a souvenir from the penal system, a man who was soft-spoken yet carried a voice full of conviction that his people had been robbed of all the wealth they had and he was happy to teach me so. He spoke of the gold, buffalo, grain and land. There are developers moving in; wanting to build ski resorts and condos. Part of me sees the benefit of having these things; jobs and tax dollars which allow these people to get out of the abject poverty from which they obviously suffer. There was a young Lakota girl with him, her 4 month old baby girl kicking and smiling in her arms and I thought about how some asshole from a whole other planet of life experience was going to make money, tons of it, off of these people’s land while the baby girl would grow up on fry bread and Oprah, getting fat and making babies she couldn’t afford to provide for because sex is the only thing that doesn’t cost a dime in the short run.

We went to the top of the hill to the cemetery. It’s very small and still being used by the locals. The most recent date of death I saw was 2006. Bob told me to leave a cigarette as an offering as is the custom (tobacco or food is considered a sign of respect) and I felt bad because for once I had left my smokes in the car at the bottom of the hill. The graves had food, flowers, stones, and vases on them, left from previous visitors or family members. As we walked down the hill two white kids came running up, laughing and carrying on, and I found myself getting angry that they would act as if nothing happened here, as if this were just another day in the park and no one had died here. We continued on down the hill and on the wind I heard pipes playing. I paused to turn and look; somehow without my noticing it, a young Indian woman had walked into the cemetery and began playing a mournful tune on the pipe. The rowdy kids immediately quieted, and Bob and I paused to listen. It was at that moment that I felt the full and crushing grief for these people that I am trying to convey in this writing. I looked to Bob and he was standing there, watching silently with his hat in his hand, obviously as touched by this scene as I was. I will never forget this day, out of all of the days we have been on the road. This has been a most powerful day.





The BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) Highway.




The "Massacre" word was finally permitted to be put over the word "battle". How sad that permission must be sought to tell the truth. But the victors write history, don't they?


The Museum; a testament to how money goes where the egos do when it comes to politics. The government would just as soon this place go away so they don't give it a dime.


The Oglala Lakota man who watches the museum. Not much for giving out info but patient about being there. He makes bead work jewelry and leather miniature drums for the few tourists who can find the place.


The only place we've been that I felt it would be wrong to take a rock.

Dead Presidents: Not Neccessarily a Rock Band

Note the hairpin turns on the sign: that was not exaggeration, it was a warning.


A little slice of paradise...


A payphone in the middle of nowhere. Go figure.


the valley we were in really did look like this. the curve of this road was nothing compared to the turns ahead.


We made it!


Bob is happy the man; he even let me take his picture!


One for the guys at Plainfield Harley Davidson.


Pretty self-explanatory.


This was the beautiful weather; in reality we only got a few raindrops on us. We managed to avoid the rain the entire day, chasing it from one spot to another. The clouds always stayed ahead of us. Weird (but good).


The mountain...


The close-up.


I can't even begin to comment on what this means to me.


Bob tries to relax after a hard day.

Howdy!
Yesterday was Dead Presidents day on the Madigan journey. We rode up to Mt. Rushmore to see the sculpted mountain and then came back to camp in the early evening. I have to say that Mt. Rushmore was, for me, almost anti-climactic and frankly it pissed me off a tad bit. Let me clarify: I was fascinated by the workmanship that went into it. I could have sat there all day and listened to the stories of the drilling and how you can make something so big out of a template so relatively small. The sculptor changed the design of that thing NINE times before they got the finished product due to the actually working of the stone. The technical part of the story; how the whorls and cracks in the stone dictated the placement of the heads, the way the scaffolds were made, etc., were the things I found interesting.
The part that pissed me off was the politics. Yes, the greenies had to get their foot in the door so there’s this big display all about some beetle that’s eating the pine trees around here. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s wonderful that there is information available to teach people the reason you don’t move wood. I think the national Forest Service does a great job and the guys working in those positions have a tough row to hoe explaining to ignorant hollow-eyed Berkeley morons why sometimes burning and/or cutting a forest is a necessary and scientifically proven method to keep the trees more viable. But what the fuck does the voracious pine beetle have to do with carving a mountain? Nothing.
Then there was the wall dedicated to the dedication from various Presidents such as Kennedy and Bush Sr. It was purely political; those people aren’t on that mountain. They were kids when the idea was conceived. But the government paid for it and by golly they will use it as a platform to say what they damn well want to say when they want to say it. Why couldn’t the exhibit be more about Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln? Of course they had a few panels dedicated to those four men but the overwhelming feeling I got as I walked through the main hall was this: Mt. Rushmore was built and paid for with tons of tax-payer dollars. In the eyes of a politician that means the monument belongs not to you or me, the monument cannot stand on its own merits, but must be a platform for showing how awesomely wonderful it is that we have a political class of people in this country who are going to look out for us and show us how hard they are working to make life better for us and gee; aren’t they too wonderful?

OK: you’re wondering where that rant came from; frustration. The idea that so much of people’s money went into making a sculpture that they would probably never get to see because they couldn’t afford to get there really bothers me. Don’t forget that this sculpture was carved in the middle of the Depression. People were forced to pay taxes they couldn’t afford in order to stroke the egos of people who could have afforded to pay for it themselves. It pisses me off. Rant done.

On a much lighter note: We rode Highway 16 A for about 15 miles. This road is pretty hairy but tons of fun with two or three tight hair-pin turns and beau coup signs saying “Slow to 25 mph, turns ahead”. (That was an optimistic muber if you ask me.) The curve signs looked like snake warnings there were so many of them. Bob was a real sweetie and gave me a “thumbs up” for doing so well on the curves. He knew I was nervous because I had never done those kind of tight turns before, (really, how curvy is Indiana for God’s sake), and there is no room for mistakes out here. You don’t lean, you fly. It’s really that simple. Some of the road just drops off for a couple of hundred feet; you sure don’t want to overshoot your curve so you gotta lean over as far as you need in order to get around the corners. It was scary but totally exhilarating and one of the reasons I wanted to ride out here. Bob said if I can take those corners Deal’s Gap will be a cake walk because their turns aren’t so tight. I felt kind of bad because we got about three quarters of the way up the mountain and had to turn around due to a wreck. It seems a car and a motorcycle met head on: I really hope everyone was ok.
About half way up the mountain we stopped at a place called Elk haven. It was a beautiful piece of land; the store had a huge front porch deep enough to sit at some picnic tables and sit out of the rain if you needed to. Rocking chairs and a checker board completed the ideal country place. Definitely a place I would buy with that winning lottery ticket. The thing that tickled me was the pay phone at the end of the gas pump pull-through. Not only do you rarely see a pay phone these days; who woulda thought you would see one in Bumfuct, SD?
Today we head for Wall Drug, then Minden Nebraska to see a kitschy little village with a blacksmith shop, pioneer village, and old trains, planes and automobiles. Our kind of place!! I can't wait.

"My Land is Where My people Are Buried" Crazy Horse

Went to Crazy Horse yesterday. We stopped in Custer on the way because hey; what’s a good road trip without any shopping, right? We stopped in a coffee shop for some latte and a couple of homemade pastries. I will never look at Panera the same way again. This weekend is Gold Rush days but we’ll be long gone by then so I figured I better get something now. Bob bought me the most awesome suede coat and we bought some gifts for the family. Sorry, no details on that in case they’re reading this. They have plaster buffalo all over town that have been painted by the local artists much like the cows of Chicago a few years back. Very cool looking. This whole town is rather artsy phartzy. I really enjoyed it.

We spent the day riding up to the mountain; we had to go through Custer National park to get to Crazy Horse. I finally get the whole “prairie” thing. Until you’ve seen it it really is hard to picture it. I always thought the prairie was like Kansas; kind of flat and featureless. Nothing could be further from the truth. The hills are softly undulating, like the full bosom of a nursing mother. The swells in the land provide small valleys for water to run through or for prey to hide in. As we rode past the herds of buffalo and antelope I found myself envisioning the tribes that lived here and how much they depended on the variety of plants and animals to survive. There’s a trading post in Custer that had the hides of muskrat, deer, bison, elk, raccoon, badgers, and on and on. It made me think of the stories of the French fur traders who came here almost 200 years ago to get pelts to sell to the wealthy folks back east. The prairie dogs remind me of Lucy; sitting on their back legs looking around, always curious as to what the bigger animals are doing and wondering whether or not there was anything of interest for them to investigate. I had to laugh out loud when I saw a pair wrestling. I caught myself thinking of little terrier Lucy taking on Bull Mastiff Sake; it would be like the prairie dogs taking on the buffalo. The park spans about 15 miles of road. I’m sure it’s actually several hundred thousand acres but the road cruisers we’re riding on will never see that particular landscape. I saw a sign that said “Buffalo are dangerous animals”. Ya think? They weigh in at roughly 2000 lbs when full grown; I sure wouldn’t want one pissed off at me. How sad that such a sign has to be posted in the first place. Yo! Tourists! Keep your kids on the path and off the bison’s front porch and don’t gripe when they fall in the buffalo shit because you let them run wild.

So anyway; we get to the sculpture and I’m just blown away. You can see it from around 5 miles away and the face is very distinctive. When you get to the actual visitor center you’re still about a mile from the mountain, it’s just so freaking huge it looks like it’s within touching distance. The place was jam-packed with people and I’m OK with that. It keeps federal money out of the process and allows the family to do the work they do to carry on the dream of the original tribal leaders and the sculptor. Out of all the places we’ve been so far I think this is my favorite. According to the "orientation" video we saw they were offered $10 million by the federal government twice in the last 60 years and both times the Lakota people and the sculptor said "Thanks, but no thanks". They believed having the government involved would only fuck things up and only free enterprise would get this thing built. All the people on this project believed that a free person can accomplish so much more than a person who takes government hand-outs. Even if it takes a thousand years, better to have the whole dream untainted by politics and the scum who reside in DC. Ain't that the truth. Now if only everyone else could get that lesson.OK, Beckie, no politics.
Moving on...

We got back to camp in time to watch a true South Dakota whopper of a storm; the winds were so bad the Dawg Haus shook but miraculously our bikes stayed standing, they just got wet. This was actually a good thing because after the rain and lightening were over I went out with a flashlight and got all the road dust and bug splat off of the fenders so tomorrow they’ll look freshly washed. It got a bit chilly here so I’m really glad Bob bought me that Alpaca poncho in Broadus at the wool shop. That sucker is toasty warm. I just hope I don’t wind up fighting with Sake and Lucy over it.
Bob downloaded “Deadliest Catch” and I cried like a baby even though I knew Cap’n Phil died last spring. Not sure how I got caught up in the whole show but I sure did. It has become our ritual to sit together on Wednesday nights and eat popcorn and raisinettes while watching those guys bust their ass to make sure we get crab in the flatlands.

More adventure today as we hit highway 16A and the hair-pin bridges that everyone is so excited about around here. We’re about 1 hour from Mt. Rushmore; we’ll fart around and then come back to camp where we will prepare for our next leg of the journey: Wall Drug and a stop at the Oglala Lakota Nation. Wounded Knee is on the list as well. See you soon Constant Reader.



The local bank which is now a steakhouse.



The Trading post: cool stuff but lots of junk too.



the coffee shop where they serve a pretty fine latte



Lemon bars: why don't I make these? I love lemon bars!



Peanut Butter Turtle; peanut butter, chewie brownie, chopped peanuts, caramel. (Hey, it's hard to bake like this on a campfire!)


This picture made me think of my friend Ronda: she has a thing for birdhouses and has been doing this same thing for years.


This is an old Studebaker: It's on my post because I love my husband and think he should get to have some "Bob" pictures on here as well. I have no idea what year it is.



The local VFW: I wish the tent hadn't been there. The mural was cool.



The prairie. These pictures were taken on the way to our campsite while we were still in the truck.



The brown patches you see are Prairie dog holes...



A helmet-cam is definitely called for!!




A panorama shot of Crazy Horse from about 5 miles away.




The progress on the mountain so far and the statue they use for a template.



The rails on the head are for workers, the rails on the arms are for tourists to go up and look out.


The white paint is an outline for the next phase: carving the horse's ears and then moving on to the head.



The wonderful man who made this all possible and his groovy wife...


The mountain as seen from the visitors deck.


A lucky shot: a hawk flying around while I was taking pictures.


Someday this will be a cultural center and a medical college for both modern traditional and ancient medical learning. All Indian nations will have a place here for study and teaching others as well.



This sign is on the road leading to the worksite of the actual mountain. nice of them to warn us, don't you think? (side note; they only blast for one day in June and one September.Check the website if you want the exact dates)


This letter to the public was written by the sculptor. (sorry, I can't spell his name, look it up.) It explains why Crazy Horse was chosen to be depicted in granite.



The sculptor as a relatively young man. He worked on the mountain almost his entire life. He sired 10 children here and 7 of them still work on the mountain to this day.



Indians doing a traditional dance. I missed out on the show; it was too crowded to get on the deck and the next show was long after we were planning to leave. Oh well, next year I guess.


The flags of all Nations hanging from the ceiling in the visitor center.



Bronze statue of two horses fighting. (I actually saw two stallions doing this on my way to Billings, Montana. It is an awesome sight.)