State by State

by Matt Weiland

  So the first thing we did the morning after arriving in Rapid City was to drive ten minutes through wide vacant streets to Staple & Spice Market located on Mt. Rushmore Road. It was a nice store, clean and airy, but it was a far cry from Integral Yoga Natural Foods in Manhattan, where I shopped once or twice a week.

  “They don’t carry teff,” I let Karen know.

  “Who cares?” Karen said.

  “I’m disappointed.”

  “Would you rather eat bison burgers for the next eight days?”

  We spent the greater part of an hour carefully choosing all that we thought we’d need to survive our week. In a burst of inspiration I recommended buying a bottle of toasted sesame oil as a quick and easy way to add zest to our salads and sautés. In the end our total came to $126.69. This, unfortunately, did not include any fruits and vegetables, which Staple & Spice Market for some reason did not carry.

  “You can try Albertsons,” the cashier offered.

  Albertsons was on Omaha Street. It took us fifteen minutes to get there. It should have taken us five but I read the map wrong and we got lost.

  “Look how gigantic it is,” Karen said as we pulled into the parking lot.

  Whereas the airport in Rapid City was the size of an elementary school, the grocery store was the size of an airport. Upon entering it we were immediately dwarfed by the brightly colored boxes and bottles and bags that towered above us, running aisle after aisle. We meandered slowly through the near empty store. Where was everyone?

  “Is it a holiday?” I said to Karen.

  “Oh, no,” Karen exclaimed. “The rice milk is cheaper here!”

  For a moment we debated returning to Staple & Spice, but the day was getting on, and the Badlands were waiting, and so we quickly loaded up on romaine lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes and mustard greens and bottled water and bananas and oranges. I felt guilty about the bottled water. I recalled how Mayor Bloomberg had just recently informed New York that not only was New York tap water the best in the country, but that the trillion discarded plastic water bottles were doing irreparable harm to the environment. I wasn’t sure if South Dakota could make a similar claim regarding its tap water, and who knows what had happened to the generations of South Dakotans who had consumed it, and so rather than take a chance I bought eight gallons.

  After that, we were hungry.

  So we got back in the car and drove another fifteen minutes until we happened upon Main Street, which looked to be the city’s premier shopping district. The street was exceptionally wide and exceptionally spotless, and it was fronted by little restaurants and shops, most of them not yet open for the day, even though it was almost noon. It just so happened that the Central States Fair annual parade was taking place that morning, and Karen and I watched as burly men in cowboy hats rode past on horses, followed by little girls on horses, followed by municipal garbage trucks, followed by Shriners wearing maroon fezzes and riding mopeds, followed by Bozo the Clown, followed by a silver Mustang Convertible carrying Lynae Tucker, National American Miss South Dakota Junior Teen, waving cheerfully to the smattering of onlookers that lined the sidewalks. Karen and I waved back.

  Across from us was a place called B&L Bagels, which, despite being shiny and new, made me think fondly of Kossar’s Bialys on the Lower East Side that’s been making bagels for something like sixty-five years.

  “Let’s eat bagels,” I said enthusiastically to Karen.

  As we were waiting for our bagels to be toasted, I happened to overhear a woman behind me talking about yoga, and after some hushed discussion with Karen I got up the nerve to ask the woman if there was a yoga studio in the area.

  “Oh, yes,” the woman said, smiling warmly at me. In fact, she was the teacher. But it turned out that the class was only held once a week. She gave me the information anyway and I wrote it down and I promised that if we ever happened to be in Rapid City on a Tuesday night at seven o’clock we’d definitely come by and take her class. Then we chatted for a little while. She was about thirty-five years old, and she was lean and lithe like a yoga teacher, with blond hair and clear skin. She said that she was originally from Fort Lauderdale, but had moved to Rapid City ten years ago because she “didn’t feel safe in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “I love it here,” she said. “I feel completely safe.”

  I told her we were visiting from New York.

  “I love New York,” she said. “I’ve been there a few times. I would never feel safe enough to live there, though.”

  Safety was obviously paramount for her.

  “I think New York’s pretty safe,” I said.

  “In Rapid City,” she said, “you can stand on the sidewalk and talk to someone without getting mugged.”

  This seemed to be an outlandish child-like view of the danger of urban life and I wanted to say so. I also started to suspect that the word “safe” was really a euphemism for “no blacks or Hispanics,” and that the two of us had been speaking in code. Then again, it was possible that “safe” meant “safe,” and I was guilty of my own outlandish child-like view of the inherent racism of middle-American life. This was troubling.

  “In the wintertime,” Laura continued, “old ladies will go shopping at Albertsons and they’ll leave their car doors unlocked with the keys right in the ignition so they can keep the heat running. That’s how safe it is here.”

  “That does sound safe,” I said reluctantly.

  Laura smiled at me as if she had won.

  Then the guy behind the counter was telling us our bagels were ready.

  We took the scenic route to the Badlands, driving east on Route 44. We passed wide tracts of empty field that were dotted with silos and water towers and a billboard of an adorable little baby telling us, “I have the right to life.” We arrived at the Badlands just before sunset. Karen parked at an overlook so we could get out to watch as the light shifted over the tall white buttes that rose and fell around us like teeth in a mouth. Beyond the buttes, stretching as far as the horizon, was the soft yellow prairie of the Great Plains. I reconsidered my observation that South Dakota was minuscule.

  “It’s beautiful,” Karen whispered.

  “It’s stunning,” I whispered back.

  We stood for a while as a breeze gently blew around us. A deep silence encompassed everything. How could it be so vast and yet so silent? I thought of the barking dog in Apartment 1303. A small black bird with a white stomach fluttered past. Slowly the prairie began to change from yellow to orange and then to red and then to utter darkness.

  We got back into the car without saying anything and drove to our cabin where we were instantly dismayed with what we discovered. The cabin looked less like a cabin and more like a rundown one-bedroom apartment owned by an absentee landlord. It reminded me of an illegal sublet I had lived in for two years on East Eighty-third Street when I was broke and single. Everything about the cabin was worn and shabby, including the stack of towels that had been left for us. Had the towels been washed? A dozen flies buzzed and swirled around giving the impression that something was rotting beneath the floor. Another dozen flies could be found here and there smashed against the walls, murdered by a previous tenant who had been so demoralized they had not bothered to wipe away the carcasses. There was carpeting in the bedroom but it was worn and matted and I resolved to keep my shoes on at all times. A basket of plastic red roses had been placed on the nightstand in what looked to be a last-ditch effort by the absentee landlord to give the appearance of care and consideration.

  “This place is disgusting,” Karen said.

  As I began unloading our groceries and eight gallons of bottled water from the car, Karen set about washing the mismatched dishes and silverware that had been supplied. But when she turned on the faucet and began to scrub a long trail of ants appeared on the countertop, marching their way somewhere. To combat the ants, Karen sprayed Off!, which eliminated the ants but also rendered the countertop unusable. That evening, while the pressure cooker scre
amed with steam, I bent over an unsteady plastic table sawing away at our Albertson vegetables with a butter knife as I recalled my former troubled life on East Eighty-third Street.

  We had not come to the Badlands for the cabin, though: We had come to the Badlands for the Badlands. Nearly 250,000 acres of moody wilderness, mythic and theatrical, with weather ranging from blizzards to violent thunderstorms, and where deer, coyote, and bison could still be found roaming free.

  So the next morning, with four bottles of water and our fanny packs stuffed with as many snacks as we could fit, we set off. We began with the shortest trail, the Window Trail, just a quarter of a mile, and gradually worked our way up until, by the fourth and last day, we had done them all except the longest, the Castle Trail, ten miles round-trip. It sounded daunting but we both felt that we had satisfactorily conditioned ourselves for the challenge.

  The trail wound through the prairie and was almost completely flat, happily requiring little exertion. It was also incredibly narrow, and Karen and I had to walk single file most of the time. In the beginning I took the lead because I was male and Karen said she was afraid of being attacked by the rattlesnakes that the park signs had warned us about. The prospect of snakes, however, frightened me just as much, maybe more, and I kept my eyes glued to the ground, proceeding with great caution and flinching at any sign of rustling. Eventually, Karen complained that I wasn’t walking briskly enough and that what should take three hours was going to take six, and so we switched places. The pace increased. Our footsteps sounded in unison. I felt lulled. A gentle breeze blew from time to time bending the tall grass. This time of year it was supposed to be a hundred degrees, but a heavy rain had cooled the region. It was eighty maybe. It was cloudless. In the near distance, rising out of the prairie, were buttes that looked less like pointy teeth and more like small delectable slices of cake.

  “Don’t they look like slices of cake?” I said to Karen.

  “They’re crumbling,” Karen said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The buttes—they’re crumbling. They’re really just sand and clay. I read about it. Every time it rains a little more gets washed away. In 500,000 years the Badlands will be completely gone.”

  The thought was sobering. We walked on. I brooded.

  Soon the trail veered sharply to the left and took us off the grassy plain and out onto what looked like the surface of the moon, white bubbly earth surrounded by giant craters. The soft rocky terrain crunched under our feet.

  “Look!” Karen cried out, stopping suddenly.

  I lurched at the sound of her voice. “What is it? What do you see?”

  “Look.”

  “Where?”

  “There!”

  I looked in the direction she was pointing, not down where a snake would be, but out and over, many hundreds of yards away, maybe a mile away, and sure enough there was the tiny white shape of a bighorn sheep moving slowly along the prairie, and then, as if it knew it was being watched, pausing and looking toward us.

  The next morning we repacked our groceries and our bottled water and our pressure cooker and departed for the Black Hills. Part mountain range, part forest, the Black Hills cover the western edge of South Dakota and some of Wyoming. The discovery of gold in 1874 prompted a mad headlong rush into the region. A fly followed us into the car and accompanied us on our drive west along Route 240, as we passed silos and water towers and billboards advertising homemade donuts. It was with great apprehension that we arrived two hours later at our destination in Hill City—population 780—and pulled up to our cabin.

  “I’m going to scream if it’s gross,” Karen said. “We’ll find a hotel,” I said.

  We need not have worried. The cabin was large and spacious with a comfortable couch and a loft space that held our bed. Above all, it was pristine. We could very well have been the first tenants. It had been built out of logs so it had a quaint authentic feel to it, but the bathroom and appliances were entirely modern so it had none of the drawbacks that come with quaint authenticity. Nor were there any ants or flies. There were deer, though. And as evening approached, Karen and I sat on the porch watching them come out of the woods to graze in the wide grassy field in front of us. The mother, or perhaps the father, would lead the way, bouncing over the grass, barely landing before it rose again, followed by the young children who floated with even less effort. Then they would all pause to nibble.

  “They move like ballerinas,” Karen said.

  That evening, as I chopped our vegetables for dinner—using a chef’s knife—I had a thought. Perhaps we might consider moving out here one day. A summer home perhaps. Or a winter home. It might be a nice place to get away to, a nice reprieve from the Lower East Side. We could watch the deer in the snow.

  “I wonder how much a cabin like this would cost,” I said aloud.

  “It’s $180 a night,” Karen said.

  “No, how much it would cost, you know, to buy. To own.”

  “I have no idea.”

  We were in the Black Hills, which is forest, as opposed to the Badlands, which is prairie and teeth and lunar surface. The landscape, therefore, was gravely anticlimactic, and after one brief hike huffing and puffing up a muddy path in the woods, where our fear of deer ticks outstripped our fear of rattlesnakes, we decided that we would spend our remaining days pursuing other interests.

  No trip to South Dakota would be complete, after all, without visiting Mount Rushmore. So on day six of our vacation we got back in our car and drove a mere fifteen minutes to one of the world’s most famous attractions. I realized I was excited to finally experience in person those four presidents’ heads I had been seeing since I was in first grade. Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington. I also realized once we arrived that I had been operating my entire life under the false assumption that a visit to Mount Rushmore entailed parking your car on the side of the road and strolling around on the tops of the heads. I had even gone so far as to picture a staircase leading down into an ear. Perhaps I had extrapolated it from my experience at age five of entering the Statue of Liberty and ascending toward her crown.

  The reality was much more regimented and mundane. It involved first parking in the underground parking garage for eight dollars, and then walking with a crowd of sightseers with gift bags through a gauntlet of flags, billed as the Avenue of Flags—a flag for every state and territory—as if this construction in itself were some sort of major achievement, and then finally coming out onto the Grand View Terrace where 500 feet in front of me—maybe a thousand feet—were those familiar heads rising out of the mountain, each staring off in a different direction. The heads looked exactly the same as any photo I’d ever seen of them, and considering we could barely get any closer I wondered if the fifteen-minute drive had been ill spent. I watched with irritation as a young couple took a grinning picture of themselves with the heads as backdrop.

  “I’m disappointed,” I said softly.

  There was an audio tour “wand” that you could rent at the Audio Tour Building for five dollars. An organization called the Association of Partners for Public Lands had apparently selected it as the winner of the 2007 Media and Partnership Award in the audio/visual division. Karen and I rented it.

  “They gaze over the landscape as if sentinels,” a man’s voice intoned in my ear as soft music played in the background. “A living memorial that speaks to us, listens to us, and challenges us.”

  The voice was firm, gentle, and wholly optimistic.

  There was a concrete path that ran around the base of the mountain and we were instructed by the voice to follow the path, which we did, stopping when it told us to stop and pressing the next number on the wand when it told us to press it.

  “To learn about the transformation of Mount Rushmorefrom a roadside attraction to a national memorial, press the pound key.”

  This was how five minutes of viewing Mount Rushmore became three hours. This was also how I learned almost everything there was to know a
bout the sculpture, the mountain, the Indians from whom the mountain had been stolen, the artist—Gutzon Borglum—whose idea it had been to carve the mountain in the first place, his son—Lincoln Borglum—who took over after his father’s death just months before it was finally completed in 1941. A lot also seemed to be made of the fact that, while the heads were already gigantic—each the size of a six-story building—they were actually scaled to a figure who would stand 465 feet tall, and that that figure, if it had ever been sculpted, would then be taller than the Statue of Liberty.

  By the time we reached the end of the audio tour, number twenty-eight on the wand, Karen and I were more exhausted than when we had walked through the prairie. We lay down on a bench and listened numbly as recordings of everyday people described what Mount Rushmore meant to them.

  “Symbolism.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Provocation.”

  “Understanding.”

  “They’re not eroding,” Karen said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The heads—they were carved in granite so they’re not eroding. I read about it. One inch every ten thousand years. That means even a million years after the Badlands are gone they’ll still be here.”

  On our last day in South Dakota we went trout fishing. I had never fished before, of course, but Karen said her father had taken her fishing as a little girl and she thought that her early childhood experiences would see us through. We planned to grill what we caught along with the remaining vegetables as a fitting final dinner of our trip.

  The owner of our cabin was kind enough to lend us two poles and a plastic bag full of gear. The nonresident fishing licenses we had to buy ourselves for fourteen dollars each at a minimart. Then we drove twenty minutes to Sylvan Lake in Custer State Park. The very park where the reunion had been held for the nine living survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn!

  I had hoped for a small secluded lake somewhere deep in the woods, more pond than lake, some approximation of Huck Finn, where Karen and I could recline on the bank with our poles in the water, maybe even nap. Sylvan Lake, instead, was big and public and so well maintained that it looked manmade. There was a parking lot about twenty-five feet away and as we were pulling in a tour bus was pulling out.