August 8, 2006: Badlands & Mt. Rushmore

This morning, while Danny went for a quick swim, Tommy continued reading Genesis from the Bible “placed by the Gideons” in our hotel room, something he’s been doing occasionally on this trip. He came to Chapter 8, Verse 21, in which God says “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Tommy took exception to this: “The imagination of man’s heart is perfect when he starts out because he hasn’t had time to learn anything. There isn’t anything wrong with your imagination if you follow your heart completely.”

We had a good discussion about Adam and Eve and the Serpent. I tried to explain the symbolism of the tree of knowledge, the concept of original sin, and the Judeo-Christian notion that certain kinds of curiosity and knowledge are sources of sin. Tommy said, “Learning is never a bad thing. What matters is what you do with what you learn.” I look forward to telling him the stories of Galileo and the Inquisition, and of John Scopes and the Monkey Trial, a case that is, preposterously, still being contested in this country by a handful of vocal fundamentalists who refuse to recognize the separation between church and state.

Driving west, we saw a sign for the town of DeSmet, where one of the many houses of Laura Ingalls Wilder is located. Wilder was author of the Little House on the Prairie series, among Debbie’s favorite childhood books. We didn’t stop there, but the painful puns on billboards we passed persuaded us to stop at Mitchell, site of the one and only Corn Palace: “Corn-ceptual art,” “Corn-sider visiting,” “Ears to You!” and “A-Maize-ing Ear-chitecture!” Accusing the punsters of corniness is simply redundant.

Debbie recalled stopping at the Palace with her family long ago when they made their annual cross-country trips. Danny derided it as “lame,” but I was intrigued. It’s an odd piece of Americana, a curious cross between a theater and a basketball arena. The building is made out of concrete, but its façade and a number of its interior walls are covered with ears of dried corn of variously-hued strains, sliced in half and nailed in place to form large murals. Each spring the entire exterior is covered in corn with a new theme; this year, it was the rodeo.

The first Corn Palace was constructed way back in 1892; it’s been rebuilt three times. It continues to celebrate the crop that provides most of the locals their livelihoods. And for your information, it’s also one of the places where Lawrence Welk, a North Dakotan, got his start. He played the Palace a record five times. I grew up watching the Lawrence Welk Show regularly because my grandmother was a huge fan. Fortunately, this didn’t stunt my musical tastes – and I even cultivated a taste for tap dancing.

While working for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, my sister once met Welk. She listened to him criticize Barbara Walter’s accent, an irony she found fairly amusing, since he spoke with the oddest of accents, a result of growing up in the Midwest in a German-speaking family.

Western South Dakota is on Mountain Time, so we set our clocks back an hour as we headed toward Badlands National Park. Along the way, the sky clouded over, farms gave way to ranches, and we traversed the broad Missouri River, again crossing paths with the route of Lewis and Clark.

We passed signs for Wall Drug even more frequently than we had passed those for the Corn Palace. They trumpeted the store’s renown in Time and People magazines, in the International Herald-Tribune, and on Good Morning America. Many other billboards advertised hotels, motels, restaurants, gas stations, and attractions such as the Lodestar Casino, the Reptile Gardens, and the Old West Trading Post and Antique Mall. A few placards protested abortion.

At the entrance to the Badlands we happened upon a huge group of motorcyclists at a gas station where we paid $3.18 a gallon. Next door, I discovered the visitor center for a decommissioned nuclear missile silo and underground bunker, of which the National Park Service offers tours. Sadly for this child of the Cold War, tours at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site were all booked up for the day.

The Badlands, despite its name, is a beautiful place.

Eons of erosion have revealed not only pastel layers of rock,

vivid colors,

and peculiar formations, but also the remains of species that once lived in the area.




At the visitor center, we learned about the fossils uncovered in the park – no dinosaurs per se, but other prehistoric creatures such as aquatic mosasaurs, terrestrial archeotheria, and flying pterosaurs. We also saw displays and videos explaining the restoration of native animal and plant species, as well as Native American reverence for the region. Understandably, the natives don’t care much for the name that the white man has given their land.

A thunderstorm was brewing when we left the visitors’ center, and as it blasted in, the many bikers in the park took cover.

We forged on through the otherworldly landscape, gaining an appreciation for the natural forces that formed it. As lightning flashed around us, we were hammered by fierce winds and driving rain that immediately filled the gullies.

The storm blew out as quickly as it blew in,

revealing even more fantastic panoramas.

Leaving the park, we stopped for ice cream at Wall Drug. Where the heck is it? Well, it’s in Wall, South Dakota, that’s where. What is it? A block-long potpourri of touristy fun for the whole family: food, drinks, and gifts; doo-hickeys, thing-a-ma-jigs, and what-cha-ma-call-its; and the most miscellaneous sampling imaginable of Western art and kitsch, historical and fanciful, standing or hanging on every surface and in every niche and corner. The shops in the store sell all sorts of stuff, from antiques to fudge to rocks to, yes, even drugs.

At one time, there was clearly quite a fad of taking snaps of Wall Drug signs in remote locations: in Kenya, in Katmandu, in submarines, and so on. People sent them to Wall by the hundreds, where they were mounted on the walls. Many framed news clippings and plaques pay tribute to the founders of this cockeyed institution, Ted & Dorothy Hustead, who began offering free ice water to travelers in 1936 and whose children still run the operation. They employ hundreds of local and foreign workers, many of them Eastern Europeans using temporary work visas and staying in on-site dormitories.

The store has a “backyard” featuring fountains, sculptures you can pose on, like the “jackalope,”

and even a ferocious animated dinosaur.

Danny put on a good show of being terrified.








All day we had been surrounded by motorcycles in big packs along the highway and at every stop. I’d never seen so many tattooed, leather-skinned, middle-aged white guys in my life. Nor had I ever seen so many beards, bandanas, or beer bellies. When we finally asked why, we were told that they were here with their hogs and girlfriends for a motorcycle rally – but not just any rally. It’s the 66th annual Black Hills Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, one of the two Meccas for American bikers (the other being Daytona Beach).

The town of Wall was thoroughly festooned with “Welcome Bikers” signs. They know what side their bread is buttered on! In my head, Steppenwolf was howling “Get your motor running / Head out on the highway / Lookin’ for adventure / In whatever comes our way...”

I asked a biker (the one with “Born to Be Wild” on his bandana) if one had to have a Harley to go to Sturgis. He said, “No, but it helps.” His friend said, “People go there with all kinds of bikes. You can even go in a car. I’ve seen people take their children there, but I wouldn’t. It’s way too crowded.”

Our next destination was Keystone, the Black Hills town closest to Mount Rushmore National Memorial. It was a mini-Sturgis, its streets lined with thousands of motorcycles. We didn’t stop but continued on to the memorial, passing ads for dozens of other attractions along the way, like Rushmore Cave, Crystal Caverns, the Incredible Christmas Village, the National Presidential Wax Museum, Cosmos Mystery Area, Borglum Historical Center, Big Thunder Gold Mine, and Bear Country USA. In a musical mood, I was moved to sing the Beatles’ ballad “Rocky Raccoon” in its entirety: “Somewhere in the black mining hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon…” It was a passable rendition if I do say so myself, and great fun to sing, but the boys were not impressed.

For me, Gutzon Borglum’s 60-foot-high sculptures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt are indelibly associated with the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest, but this is of little significance when compared with the colossal effort their carving required. Most of the work was done using precisely-placed and carefully-calibrated charges of dynamite, followed by chiseling with jackhammers and hand tools. It required a crew of hundreds laboring over a period of 15 years, from 1927 to 1941.

After nightfall, we ate dinner at the visitor center. Returning to the amphitheater below the sculptures, we heard a speech and watched a video about the four presidents’ charismatic leadership, inspired vision, personal sacrifice, and environmental stewardship. At the end of the film, the faces were illuminated. Our ranger emcee then brought all the veterans in the audience – dozens of them – to the stage to help retire the flag. While it was folded and passed from man to man (and the occasional woman), the ranger read a short patriotic poem, a paean to duty and love of country.

We turned down a pricey hotel room in Keystone, thinking we could do better, but we soon regretted it. It may have been the last room not occupied by bikers or other tourists for a hundred miles. We struck out in Rapid City, too. Debbie and the boys slept as I drove past the towns of Sturgis and Spearfish, noting billboard ads for beer, bikes, and Deadwood casinos, and tried my luck in Sundance, Wyoming. A kind motel owner shook his head as he told me we were wasting our time looking for a room at such a late hour.

We gave up, drove to Devil’s Tower, and bunked in our car, Debbie and I in the reclined front seats, Danny on the second row of seats, and Tommy behind the luggage on the floor at the very back. This brought to mind the occasion my family was caught out in Yellowstone in 1968. All five of us had to sleep in a sedan. We were luckier in 2006: we had a minivan and only four people. But we resolved not to repeat our blunder and get well away from Yellowstone before looking for accommodations the following night.