Dharma Bums
[draft]
Tuesday, 7/14
Our long-anticipated western road trip finally began Tuesday, July 14. Since checking out
On the Road from the Grad Library at U of M my freshman year (‘06), I have dreamed of and made vague plans to travel west, but most of those plans never came to fruition. I still wish we would have driven to the Rose Bowl in 2006, and I even wish I was on that Michigan State Rose Bowl trip my friends took in 2014, when I was trying to stay sober. In the summer of 2016, on leave of absence from a law firm, I embarked on a solo road trip that I intended to take as far as Montana’s Glacier Park; driving U.S. 2, “The Great Northern,” I camped in the Porcupine Mountains, at Split Rock Lighthouse in Minnesota, at the Mississippi Headwaters, visited Dylan’s childhood home in Hibbing, and stayed at a hotel in Grand Forks, but I ended up turning the car around mid-North Dakota due to serious ongoing mental health issues. Even this trip got delayed a week.
With Whitney, Adam's part-huskie, part-German shepherd Hurricane Harvey rescue, nestled comfortably in the back seat, Adam picked me up in Millwood around 3:00 in the afternoon Tuesday. In addition to having slept terribly, the previous night, I had to mow the lawn and then shower Tuesday afternoon, so we got off to a late start. Nonetheless we made quick work of the drive cross-state to Ada, where we stopped at Al's condominium for a bathroom break and dinner. We had ideas about camping on Lake Michigan, but upon further investigation we found that those campgrounds were almost fully-booked, not to mention $33 a night; I have some qualms about campsites over $25, no matter where it's located, and when Al offered to make us dinner, staying for the night seemed like the best option. I'm glad we did.
Al got home from work, first, then his girlfriend Austin arrived. Over the stove, Al cooked the four of us burgers and fries, feeding some of the latter to Whitney. Al gave us extra burgers, wings, peanuts, and homemade pot cookies for the road. He and Austin enjoyed meeting and hanging out with Whitney while we caught up and watched
Knives Out, a certified fresh take on the murder mystery genre. Al and Austin went back to her house for the night to take care of Olive, her puppy, after which Adam and I watched
Rushmore; I did not know that my sister-in-law has a tattoo sleeve dedicated to the film. Adam slept on the couch; I was on the personal air mattress Al keeps in a closet for me. Fell asleep watching “Unsolved Mysteries”.
Wednesdat, 7/15
We woke early Wednesday morning — seven a.m. early. In the garage, Adam and I smoked out of a can. He made coffee with his french press apparatus, and we watched three episodes of "Malcolm in the Middle" while stoned, drinking coffee, and waking up. I ate a THC cookie for breakfast, right before we got on the road, making for an enjoyable ride in the passenger seat, “90’s on 9” playing on the car radio.
We had pretty easy driving. We blew through southwest Michigan and Indiana before making our first official pit stop in South Holland, Illinois. At a gas station, there, we let Whitney out, used the restrooms ourselves, and filled up on gas. The bathroom within the gas station was so filthy that I remarked to Adam, upon trading the dog leash, that I thought it might have covid; “be careful”. While walking Whit along the grassy knoll along the busy street, I watched lots of cops patrolling the largely black suburb. “Beautiful dog,” a younger, bald-headed man in crisp navy suit called over to me. He looked like a prosecutor type, maybe a detective, the kind I recognized from my days in public defenders’ offices. With me navigating via Google Maps, we subsequently avoided Chicago proper by means of I-80 West, which took us south through Joliet, home of Rudy Ruediger. I was glad to avoid the chaotic traffic of the city, which always gives me terrible anxiety, but the alternate route provided little in the way of scenery.
MILLER RIVERVIEW CAMPGROUND -- Dubuque, Iowa. Primitive campsite.
I woke at 6:40 Central Standard from a nap in the blue tent; I was grateful to have gained an hour by means of the time zone difference we’d driven into. We had set up the tent to face southeast, towards the Dubuque-Wisconsin Bridge, a big green truss bridge that crosses the Mississippi River, thereby connecting Wisconsin and Iowa. Located on an island, the campsite and surrounding riverfront beach looked like they were primarily utilized as fishing spots by careless locals. Our site was trashed, though not necessarily any more than adjacent campsites; we arrived to find empty Dairy Queen cups, Wendy's paper bags, styrofoam worm containers, cigarette boxes and butts strewn across the rocks and jammed into the fire pit, aluminum cans everywhere, even a maggot-infested fish carcass on the riverside rocks. When we went back into town for supplies, I bought trash bags and co-opted some plastic gloves from the Qwik-Stop, which I utilized in cleaning up camp because I felt so gross about it. At the gas station we also picked up two bundles of firewood, two cups of coffee, and water. Across the street we got food from the Wendy’s drive-thru, then drove into downtown Dubuque, where we picked up a new bowl from a beauty & smoke shop. Adam named the apparatus “Dubuque.” It was on this excursion that I first noted the different reactions to the pandemic as we crossed the country. Everyone in Chicago wore a mask, while maybe one in six people were wearing one in Iowa. However misguidedly, the local Bait Shack billboard embodied the pervading sentiment by comparing the virus to fishing in dirty rivers: “Why wear a mask? We eat fish from the river and don’t die.”
Back at camp, we settled in for a pretty evening on the Mighty Miss. Adam started the fire and I cooked one of Al’s hamburgers, wrapped in tinfoil, over the built-in grill. A super-long barge passed under the bridge while I waited, and the sky above the river was a bouquet of pink and lavender. Some corn-fed good 'ole boys fished at the adjacent campsite, their girlfriends smoking cigarettes from the truck bed, cursing like sailors. The girlfriend dropped an F-bomb once every third word, on average, I estimated. “Remy,” their unleashed dog, chased an older couple of campers, causing the woman to shriek. Consequently Remy spent the rest of the evening in the truck. We didn’t see any of the fisherman actually catch anything there; it appeared to be more of a pastime than actual sport. A little bit of a chill developed in the wind blowing off the river; it felt like perhaps 60-65 degrees, but humid too. Adam and I both wore shorts and hoodies as we smoked and watched the stars emerge. One of the downsides to that particular site, in addition to the fishermen, was noise pollution: we heard the the traffic on the truss bridge, the intermittent barking of dogs from a nearby kennel, and constant music from the exterior of the Q Casino, which is located on the same island as us. Moreover, the dead fish smelled something rank.
I preceded Adam into the tent, but not in sleep. While writing in my journal, I listened to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Color Blindness via phone app, taking satisfaction in jotting down the simple surroundings in our cozy tent. Adam and I lay side by side, with Whitney in her fluffy red dog bed at our feet. In my corner of the tent, I had my quilt, Michigan fleece throw, fishing shirt, and block M hat in a neat pile, with my backpack next to that. Near the entrance of the tent, Adam’s lantern, still glowing, sat on my heavy Under the Dome paperback. Benadryl slowly rendered me thoughtless.
Thurs., 7/16
In the heat of the early morning sun, it's funny, in retrospect, how the headlights of a big barge tripped us out last night. Adam and I laughed about it over coffee around the fire. The lights from the mysterious beams had danced on the truss bridge for a solid twenty minutes to half an hour. Because the barge was slow-moving, we assumed that the lights were coming from a stationary source — perhaps a fisherman trying to attract some infamous catfish, or casino searchlights, or something extraterrestrial. We knew we were stoned immaculate when we finally turned to see the large wheelhouse of the barge passing by, its searchlight scanning the darkness ahead of its deck so as to navigate between the bridge’s multiple pylons.
Adam was up at 6:00 a.m. this morning with Whitney. It was light out, then, already getting hot in the tent, and I briefly considered getting up, but I'm glad I slept in until 9. We only had time to smoke one bowl on the beach before a family with two small children showed up for fishing. They backed their SUV into the campsite next to ours and set up chairs for the day. Adam had coffee brewed when I got up, so that expedited the process of packing up camp. I brushed my teeth at the rest area, put on fresh clothes, and washed my arms and face with bar soap, then helped pack up the tent. "We are definitely leaving this camp cleaner than we found it," I mused satisfactorily. We were out of the Miller-Riverview camp by noon, maybe 12:30, on the road to Dyersville, Iowa, and W.P. Kinsella's Field of Dreams, specifically.
As expected, Field of Dreams was pure Iowa. Hidden behind a series of dirt roads that turn at right angles and miles and miles of cornfields, the red barn gift shop and the two-story white house with white picket fence surrounding it slowly emerged from the corn as we neared the site. It appeared a baseball paradise. Probably about two dozen families were roaming the grounds when we pulled up the long dirt road to the farm house, some running the bases around the perfectly-manicured baseball diamond, others snapping photographs and selfies in the bleachers and in front of separate "Field of Dreams" and "If You Build It" signs, many of them wearing their local MLB team's gear or their own Little League jerseys. I saw a lot of Big Ten schools represented, actually - Michigan State, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Penn State - but no Wiscy representation, to my surprise. There was even a hot dog shack out in left field, plus porta-potties. A group of migrant pickers seemed to be assembling or shooting the shit in an adjacent corn field. Adam and I walked Whit out to right field, where the outfield cornstalks rose above my head; they seemed decidedly tall for mid-July. We pointed out what looked like the site where MLB hosted a game, last season, out past the cornfields from which Shoeless Joe once emerged from. Cornflower blue skies, with Iowa-sized white clouds floating overhead at a leisurely pace, made for a perfect summer day. Reflecting on our sandlot baseball glory days, Adam and I both agreed it would have made a fine day and place for a Cain and Abel baseball game.
Later, on the opposite end of Iowa, we stopped in Fort Dodge on a whim, first at the Walmart to purchase Pepsi, Mio (pineapple flavor), a sheet and travel pillow (I packed too lightly), jerky, and dried fruit trail mix, then at the historic Fort Museum & Frontier Village. Adam, Whit, and I entered the wood walls of the fort to the grass courtyard, feeling we had crossed some frontier to the west. We climbed the stairs of the original block house, where soldiers once looked out of sentry windows for marauding Indians and other hazards. The frontier village, maintained to precision in its original layout, featured a livery stable, a veterinarian office, general store, schoolhouse, jail, blacksmith shop, and a pharmacy stocked with nineteenth century ointments, powders, and pills. In the spirit of the Old West outlaw, I posed behind the bars of the jail cell for a photo op, perhaps even to reminisce; ha!
Back on the road, we turned on the
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life audiobook that we began on some camping trip or another last fall. William Finnegan, who won a Pulitzer for writing the book, narrated; he sounded like a pretty chill dude, we agreed, a guy who had smoked his share of joints, along the way. We flew through the final fifty some miles of cornfields, our general destination for the night being Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
BIG SIOUX STATE RECREATION AREA - Brandon, South Dakota (outside of Sioux Falls)
From the road, I booked campsite number 50, one of the cheaper, $15 primitive sites offered at South Dakota's Big Sioux State Recreation Area. The reservation map indicated we'd have the whole area to ourselves. We arrived kind of late, with daylight beginning to fade to shadows, only to find an older boomer couple sitting at our picnic table, drinking out of paper bags and speaking a foreign language in low tones. Their presence at our campsite flummoxed us, as both Adam and I shy away from confrontation whenever possible. They had no tent or reservation pass visible, so we weren't sure they planned to stay. "I think they're looking at a map before going on a hike," Adam conjectured, though we both knew that was wishful thinking, given our luck. We tentatively set up the tent at site #49, instead, which was immediately adjacent to our booked site and unoccupied, at least, then loaded Dubuque with fresh dope and went for a smoke walk to explore the park a bit. We walked to the trailhead and volleyball courts on the opposite end of the campsite, smoking two bowls in the short time it took us to traverse a small trail from the camp loop to the park area. After feeling some unexpected pangs of homesickness on the drive in to Big Sioux, I felt a heck of a lot more at ease with the situation after smoking.
Returning to camp, we hoped to find our our original campsite vacant, but alas, our squatters remained. So we decided to walk up to the park entrance to see about changing our reservation and buying some firewood, only to discover that the cute girl who greeted us upon our arrival had departed for the night; the headquarters were locked, and a sign on the firewood container explained that, due to high numbers of theft, firewood could no longer be purchased after hours using the honor system; sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding. Adam, to his credit, found inspiration in this dilemma. Instead of driving into town to buy wood, which I humbly suggested, he said he wanted to test out his lock-picking kit on the firewood storage cart. To my bemusement, he actually succeeded; he returned from the park entrance proudly bearing two bundles of wood, having left proper payment and a short explanation in a folded piece of notebook paper. Our neighbors, the squatters, finally retreated to their van, where they apparently intended to sleep for the night, to which we shrugged and planted our stakes in the ground at site #49. Some kids ventured out of their RV’s to play on the jungle gym behind our campsite at dusk, but they disappeared when full darkness prevailed. I put a can of chili on the built-in fire pit grill for dinner, and we snacked on tropical fruit trail mix, beef jerky, and pop tarts when we got the munchies. Adam rolled a joint and we started seeing lights in the sky again, this time shooting stars that we couldn’t discern from lightning bugs moving through the treetops in electric bursts. Great stargazing, sitting in folding chairs around the campfire, a cool 73 degrees at night.
Friday, 7/17 on the Big Sioux River
Slept poorly: Whitney laid across my side of the tent half the night and it felt humid and warm in the tent all night. I wished I had brought another pillow, perhaps a sheet. Adam again woke before me. I heard him and Whitney climb out of the tent, and I heard the neighbors rustling about, too; the wife walked over to meet Whitney while I tried to fall back asleep.
“I don’t have coffee brewed for you yet, today,” Adam announced as I poked my head out of the tent flaps for the first time.
“I’m up earlier today,” I responded, “so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Waiting for the water to boil, I brushed my teeth at the modern bathroom facility, read a chapter of Under the Dome (spoiler: Big Jim Rennie murdered the Reverend Lester Coggins), then packed a bowl to get me moving. We both utilized the shower facilities to fully bathe for the first time; having failed to pack sandals, I laid down a trash bag on the shower floor and stood on that while I showered. We ended up taking a nice hike along the bike path, on which we got our first glimpse of the Big Sioux River. A massive, two-hundred foot-wide body of water, it looked clean but muddy and very brown, with not much visibility beyond a couple inches from the surface; I wondered what fish one might catch in it (edit: in writing this, I am reading that the Big Sioux is considered the thirteenth dirtiest river in the nation, swarming with bacteria; shows my expertise on water quality). Big Sioux, overall, is a well-maintained park, with nice hiking trails and facilities, certainly more visually appealing than our previous camp on the trash-strewn banks of the Mississippi.
Driving through South Dakota, that afternoon, we followed the series of billboards advertising for “Wall Drug” along the side of the highway with increasing intrigue, until the sheer quantity of the billboards forced us to pencil it in as our next stop. Billboard slogans for the tourist attraction included: “Something to Crow About,” next to a cartoon rooster; “Free ice water,” which, indeed, sounded nice in the 95 degree heat; “T-Rex”; “Leather Goods”; “Indian water color paintings”; “Six ton rabbit”; "Jackalope"; “Book Store,” which finally convinced me; “A Real Classic”; “Homemade Donuts”; “5 cent coffee”; and “As Seen on the Today Show”. In truth, they provided a welcome distraction through the relatively boring east-central plains of South Dakota, something to joke about. They obviously served their purpose.
En route to Wall Drug and South Dakota’s Badlands, the valley-like Missouri River offered our first glimpse of hilly terrain, but alas, the subsequent terrain reverted back to flat farms, silos, and corn fields. When we stopped to fill up at a gas station outside of Presho, South Dakota, we noticed the blistering heat outside of our luxuriously air-conditioned SUV. The temperature gauge on the dash read 100 fahrenheit, and it only climbed thereafter. Adam astutely pointed out, at one point, “much like I pictured Iowa as endless cornfields, this is pretty much what I expected South Dakota to be: cows watering at a pond, grass hills, cylindrical rolls of hay.”
BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, Sage Creek Campground — Wall, SD
It proved a scorcher of a summer day in Western SD. Was there any chance Wall Drug could live up to its hype? Probably not. “It’s a big inside joke,” Adam and I agreed after spending the afternoon there, fighting the heat and crowds of tourists; “kinda like the Mystery Spot in the U.P.,” I suggested, “it’s all in the billboard buildup.” Wall Drug was in fact a cool little strip mall, Western style, but temperatures reached 106 in Wall and the whole block was crowded as hell with pedestrians, parked cars, and gaudy RV's. After drinking our complimentary ice waters, I donned my mask and entered the gift shops while Adam waited outside with Whitney, ultimately electing to take her back to the AC in the vehicle and just leave it locked and running. Masks appeared to be optional, with perhaps two-thirds of the tourists wearing one within the stores. I bought some postcards, magnets, and stickers for friends and family, including a prairie dog magnet for Madeline. I enjoyed the Wyatt Earp statue, among other life-size depictions of Old West lawmen and Indian chiefs, and the backyard, where picturesque postcards the size of billboards added a nice touch to the splash pad and jackalope statue area. Reconvening, Adam and I balked at the steep price tags on shirts and hats, finally deciding to get the hell out of dodge, as the saying goes, and away from the tourist masses. We stopped for Subway footlongs before we drove out of town and into Badlands National Park, the road to which took us on a long, winding route through desert-like sage brush, burnt orange rock, and sand holes, out of which dozens of prairie dogs poked their heads like arcade-style Whack-a-Moles.
As soon as the brilliant rock formations appeared on the horizon, we realized how besides the point Wall Drug was. "Here was what [we'd] travelled so far for." The internet told of a first-come, first-serve free campsite called Sage Creek Campground, so we followed the signs for that. We arrived to find a loop camp site in the middle of Badlands hills, not a tree in sight to provide an ounce of shade in the 100+ degree heat of the desert. I wanted to set up the tent in the middle of the loop, in the permitted confines of the camp, but Adam insisted on hiking out on the trails to establish our own camp, away from the crowd. We smoked a bowl while hiking out to the creek, discovering pile after pile of buffalo dung along the trail.
“What should we name this camp?” Adam asked.
“Camp Buffalo Dung,” I replied after taking another swig of water, my mouth dry and dusty from the sand. The huge boulders of buffalo dung were all over those dusty grasslands, some dried to caked rock. Thousands upon thousands of grasshoppers leaped from every direction, often landing on a shirt sleeve or hat, reminding me of the setting in Hemingway’s “Big Two Hearted River”
After only a half mile or so, our lack of water in supply became alarmingly evident. The heat, there, seemed to radiate off of the hard rock and sand beneath our feet. There was no water supply, at the camp loop, only outhouses, so we had a decision to make. Regrouping under the shade of some solitary trees, we wisely elected to drive back into town to purchase several gallon jugs of water, which we’d need if we were going to do any sort of exploring through the Badlands. "I guess we did drink a lot of coffee today," I concluded self-critically. Neither of us were prepared for that kind of heat.
Saturday, 7/18 - Camp Buffalo Dung
Two terrific early Saturday morning experiences and a shitty one sandwiched in between defined our stay at Sage Creek. First in the terrific category was a sunrise hike across the creek and up into the rocky hills. The creek bed was quicksand; Adam and Whit discovered that the hard way, dried clay up their kneecaps. Next we crossed the sage brush where, earlier in the morning, I’d witnessed a lone bison trekking across the plains; he stopped, momentarily, to roll in the brush to scratch or play. We started up the flank of the tallest hill within sight, Whitney leading the way. We reached the crest of the hill, then continued along a ridge to an even higher point, the peak of a reddish mountain. From that vantage point, we basked in the views, in having finally made it out to real western wilderness; it provided an aerial panorama of the surrounding hills, rock formations, wasteland, and the rock walls in between which Sage Creek wound like a snake across the landscape.
Hiking back to the tent, we discovered that fierce morning winds broke one of the tent poles, resulting in a rather flimsy-looking tent. Dark clouds moving in indicated the windstorm was not going to let up soon, so we started packing up the tent and supplies, struggling to hold them down, in the gusts, then hiked the final leg to the vehicle, which we'd left in the paved loop of the traditional campground. “Oh shit;” we both thought it, but neither of us said it as we approached Adam’s vehicle, next to which the white pickup truck of a DNR officer pulled up, just as we were lugging our gear onto the pavement. “I knew he was there for us,” I later remarked. “Me too,” Adam said matter of factly. No doubt about it. The DNR officer turned out to be harmless enough, but his initial avoidance of the reason for our apprehension made for an anxious buildup. Noting our plate, he asked what part of Michigan we were from, said he was from Michigan, himself, "St. Joseph area," and that gave us a bit of an in. In his scientific enthusiasm, he reminded me of Kegan. He took the time to explain to us the dangers that dogs pose to black-footed ferrets in the area, then he let Adam off with a written warning for having Whitney in a restricted area of the park (i.e. on the trails). Some Karen must have made the phone call. I hate people who can’t live and let live.
As if a reward for our trouble, we saw many bison on the way out of the park. One sat up on his forelegs majestically atop a boulder, then we came upon the herd in varying stages of crossing the dirt road. We were thrilled to stop and let them pass. The bigger bulls laid close to the side of the road, where they intimidatingly stared us down, while momma bison helped the baby bison cross the road to find a patch of grass or a spot of shade. Adam got some great shots on his camera. "Are the solitary bison excommunicated from the herd, or outlaws by choice?" we wondered. Either way, I identified with those ones.
Back in Hale, we got coffee and filled up on gas, then hit the highway to Mt. Rushmore. In truth, I found the little tourist mountain village of Keystone more intriguing than Mt. Rushmore itself, but that was mostly because Rushmore felt so touristy. They charge $10 just to park for half an hour, then you fight your way through hundreds of tourists, inch by inch, so you can take a photo of those four presidents carved out of the Black Hills, then you are ushered with the throngs back to the parking lots. That was it. We were there for maybe 25 minutes, and by that time we couldn’t wait to get away from the masses. Driving through South Dakota, we had also noticed a lot of Trump merchandise trucks located at heavy-traffic locations, leaving a bad taste in the mouth in regards to the 39th/40th state admitted to the Union.
Post-Rushmore, we passed through Black Hills territory via a mountainous two-lane highway that provided breathtaking views. We stopped at Lake Pactola, where a chalet-style visitor center looked down towards the pristine mountain lake. The lake, probably a couple thousand feet above sea level, was clear, glassy, mountain blue, the surrounding cliffsides and interior rock island covered with lush green pine. We envied those lucky few individuals enjoying a perfect Saturday pontooning on that beautiful lake. The road from there took us through Deadwood, another famous mountain town built at the bottom of a valley, then finally into Wyoming for the first time. Our first stop in the new state was Devil’s Tower, where we decided against paying another entrance fee in favor of just taking a photograph from a distance.
Many people had extolled the landmark, and I loved its name and the terrain in western SD and Wyoming, but I felt a little too groggy and grouchy to fully appreciate it. I was anxious for the Rockies.
For about $60, we stopped at the Gillette, Wyoming Ramada Inn for the night. We both needed showers after the 106 degree heat of the Badlands, and we both wanted to watch TV and vedge. We watched all three Indiana Jones movies in our hotel room, in succession, two of which Adam stayed awake for. I ordered Chinese food from Great Wall and walked there to pick it up. Gillette was a decent-sized town, for Wyoming, with a Walmart, Wendy's, Starbucks, McDonald's, Applebees, Walgreen's, etc., even an Asian massage parlor. Our room in the hotel had a balcony that looked down on the indoor pool and bar area, billiards tables, and a Wyoming wedding reception, at which fishing gear passed for formal wear.
Sunday, July 19, BIG HORNS
On a placid July Sunday afternoon, we got our first glimpse of the mountains — snow-capped mountains, with acres of evergreen down their flanks. Entering a canyon that spanned the horizon, we pulled into a scenic area a thousand feet above Tensleep Creek. I peed into the tall grass on the side of the highway, studying decades worth of sharpie graffiti on the galvanized steel guardrail while I did so, then prepared a bowl while Adam snapped photos with his camera. He appeared to be blown away, so I took the liberty of lighting up first. The sun was at mid-sky, such that its rays shown down on the faded green hills at the very bottom of the valley and made the tar on the highway gooey. On either side of Tensleep Creek, enormous rock walls, grape purple in color, rose at steep angles, with lush green timber jutting out of them. We passed through the town of Tensleep at the bottom of the valley, its welcome sign declaring “Population: 600-something”. “Six hundred smart people, if you ask me,” Adam remarked. Outside of that, the terrain turned relatively flat, once again, with hills scarce of vegetation and white-stained salt lick creeks.
From there, we had a three hour drive to the Shoshone National Forest, where camping a few miles outside of Yellowstone was considerably cheaper and probably more our style. We enjoyed scenic beauty all along the Wind River, making many pit stops alongside it. Humongous purple boulders jutted out of the river, fallen there from thousands of feet up, making foaming white rapids in the turquoise river, its surface glistening in the sun. I washed my hands and face at the side of the river at a scenic pullout, the water cold, clean, and refreshing on a 95 degree day. Back on the highway, we approached a series of three tunnels leading through mountainsides, adjacent to wooden railroad tunnels that looked like the inspiration for Cedar Point’s Mine Ride and Mean Streak coasters. Leaving the Wind River Reservation, we passed a humongous dam that resembled the GoldenEye level, its concrete walls enclosing the mouth of a big lake, flat, black, glistening. There were campgrounds, beaches, and RV parks in little coves along the lake’s rock formations; the nearby Badwater Creek looked like a twenty-five foot wide pudding of quicksand.
Another bit of Adam wisdom: “Wind River is everything the Mississippi River wasn’t.” 26-West to Yellowstone was a tumbleweed route, the gas stations and towns scarce, hundreds of miles in between; ranches with long fields, fenced in by wood, where cattle and horses grazed.
SHOSONE NAT’L FOREST — TETONS, Brooks Lake, Wyoming. Pinnacles Campground.
Pinnacles was easily our best campsite ever, or so I told Adam, at least on par with Horseshoe Harbor in Copper Harbor. We worried about bears and heights on the drive up the switchback road to our mountain camp. Stepping out of the vehicle, I breathed the clean, cool, mountain air: smells like John Denver country. Smell the aloe that is rich pine soil, bedded with needles. We set up camp on the mountainside, overlooking Brooks Lake from what felt like a thousand feet up, on one side, and looking up to a rock wall formation to the northeast, on the opposite side, with timber obscuring all but one other campsite. But we had vetted the neighbors, a young couple, upon arrival, agreeing that they looked like the live and let live type.
Those neighbors, John and Amelia, introduced themselves almost immediately; Whitney provided the initial in, and Adam met them that way, before I wandered over to be polite. From Birmingham, Michigan, Amela said she was a recent graduate of U of M, an Environmental Science major class of '16, and we bonded over our mutual alma mater; John was from Chicago, where he worked at Rush, and where they now lived together, with two cats. We talked about Greektown, where I once lived, and my summer internship at the Cook County Juvenile Justice Center, both not too far from Rush. They were either very friendly or high on uppers. They had a tent set up on top of their Subaru, with a ladder leading up to it, and a yellow hammock set up near the campfire. John pegged us for stoners right off the bat, for a short while after our initial introduction he approached our campsite with a proposition. I was scouring the surrounding woods for kindling, at the time, but I heard him speaking with Adam. “Hey man, I have a certain amount of cannabis that I can't leave the park with, if you want any. It’s fully medicinal and legal, of course. And free of charge.”
Later, John said it was the shorts that gave us away (Adam's were green khaki shorts, mine lime green with navy hula girls embroidered on them), plus Adam’s hippie hair and beard combo. Graciously, he provided us a small bottle of Key Lime Kush, a part CBD blend that tasted like key lime yogurt, and threw in a THC granola bar from Chicago Kush, no charge. While Amelia and I talked old Ann Arbor haunts, John loaned Adam some tools to use in fixing our tent poles, which had busted in the wind at Badlands Nat’l Park. Watching Adam meticulously fix the tent poles, which ultimately took about an hour, I thought about how we both knew, without speaking on the topic, that fixing the tent poles was an Adam job, not a Zac job. "You should read the book
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," I told him in admiration, "you embody that philosophy. I'm always having to work on that." Adam said it was a great compliment.
I took a walk down the camp road to take a peek at the lake, but I missed the sunset, for the most part. I stood at the top of the dirt road, looking down onto campsites below, where campfire smoked drifted up against the backdrop of an RV, shadowy, blue-green timber, the silvery lake, and the massive, fully-shadowed mountains, behind that. “Great to be here,” a fellow camper remarked, and I felt that on a spiritual level. “No one is unhappy, here,” I concluded to Adam at the fire. I struggled, however, to capture the imagery at our camp and the emotion induced by such natural beauty. "I feel like it's tough to put the majesty of the mountains into words," I confided. "That's why I went into photography," I adam smirked self-deprecatingly, "I don't envy your job".
With fresh batteries purchased from the Gillette Walmart, I got my little red radio working again. We listened to a classic rock station while stargazing around the fire. The comet Neowise was supposed to be visible, again; Adam had pointed it out every night since Big Sioux, right there beneath the Dipper. Adam possesses a pretty good general knowledge of the solar system from having taken an Astronomy class at community college. He pointed out Orion’s Belt and Betelgeuse, which is reddish in tiny and “Orion’s elbow, or something,” according to Adam. The North Star was straight ahead, above our camp. I put on jeans, a long sleeve shirt, another tee shirt on top of that, and my zip up Nike hoodie, then wrapped myself up in the Michigan fleece blanket to read around the fire, but my hands were freezing, shivering. Amelia, in her yuppie Patagonia puffer jacket, had said it might dip down to the mid-forties, overnight, and I regretted my meager packing job. Heated up a can of beef barley soup on the fire, had that for dinner with a banana and nutri-grain bar. I remembered what my Mom had said on the phone earlier in the day: “trip of a lifetime.” “Maybe not once in a lifetime,” I told Adam,” but we’ll never be at this stage of our lives again; we’ll never be in this moment again.”
Monday, July 20 — Pinnacles/ Brooks Lake
“I felt bad for you sleeping, last night,” Adam commented first thing on waking in the tent. “I could hear you shivering.” Indeed, it was a bone-chilling cold that prevented me from sleeping much, a cold that harkened to U.P. camping trips in late fall, early spring.
“I underpacked again; this ain’t the first time,” I remarked. “Freakin’ amateur.” I guessed that was how I always learned — the hard way. I slept in my jeans, hoodie, and three blankets, including one Adam loaned to me, but still I suffered through the night, “At one point, I tried to entice Whitney to lay next to me for warmth, but I think she was too comfy.” Adam said he photographed some elk at the campsite, early in the morning, while Whitney and I slept in, enjoying the relative warmth of morning.
John and Amelia wandered over to invite us on a dip in Brooks Lake. We made coffee, unpacked the tent, and put on our bathing suits, then the four of us plus Whit hiked down the mountainside to the lake shore. John and Amelia jumped in like pros, and Adam followed suit. Without flip flops, I tiptoed on the jagged rocks in the shallows, taking frisbee tips from Amelia. Her prompting finally compelled me to take the plunge; the water felt cold as Lake Superior, but spiritually rejuvenating.
“I was telling Adam I can feel the elevation, here,” I commented as we all hiked back up to camp, winded from the climb; “feelin’ a little out of shape.”
“Same.”
“All I’ve been doing is drinking and cocaine on this trip,” John joked, “who would’ve thought that’d effect anything.”
Adam and I both laughed, but only after the fact did I reflect he might well have been serious. “His pupils were huge the first night,” Adam suggested later when we discussed it, “it wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
“Amelia also said she really enjoyed driving through Montana on LSD. They must have a drug supply like Hunter S. Thompson.”
They told us they had spent a week traveling through Montana and Glacier National Park, prior to arriving at Brooks Lake, and they implored us to go there. They also recommended the band Phish, hipcamp.com, and magic mushrooms for stargazing. Before going our separate ways, Adam photographed John and Amelia with Whitney in front of their hammock; we exchanged phone numbers and promised to send pictures of Whitney in Montana. “We should go camping as a group, sometime.” It was only about one o’clock in the afternoon, Mountain Standard Time, so we reluctantly packed up the last bits of camp and prepared to hit the road. The sun had risen above the treeline, turning it into a hot, humid day overlooking Brooks Lake.
“That’s only the beginning of a story with John and Amelia,” Adam reflected wisely after I told him “last night was part of a new story, I think.” Driving back down the switchback road, feeling spiritually rejuvenated from the camaraderie and the dip in the cold lake, Joe Cocker sang “I Get By (With a Little Help from My Friends)” as mountain views opened below at every turn. Tom Petty Radio played “Wildflowers” next, which Adam claimed was appropo given the white, pink, and yellow flowers on the mountainsides. I said “American Girl” made me think of Amelia.
At over 9,000 feet, crossing the continental divide seemed like a fine way to spend a Monday morning. “Best Monday morning in recent memory,” one of us philosophized. Even bigger mountains appeared on the horizon, which resembled, in my estimation, the logo on an Ice Mountain bottle of water.
Monday saw a change of mood, in the afternoon. Maybe it was because we had to pay a $35 fee to get into Grand Tetons National Park, and then another $35 fee to get into Yellowstone, but a damper emerged at the Yellowstone Gates, which looked more like a theme park than a wilderness park, based on the tourist traffic. Inside the massive park, we found some hidden spots, including a lake where we smoked in solitude, but most of the points of interest within the park (i.e. Lewis Lake Falls, the geysers, the black sands) looked like crowded parking lots. Old Faithful’s Lodge and Visitor’s Center looked like Wall Drug part deaux. The geysers and springs around Ol’ Faithful looked fully active, spouting steam from the earth. Monument Basin Springs, too, with steamy smoke billowing from crevaces in the rock surfaces.
Adam, again, summarized: “Yellowstone really killed the momentum of this trip.” By the time we left through the Teddy Roosevelt Arch at the north side of the park, I was hungry, frustrated, tired, and moody. It was 7:30 and we had no camp reservation or plan; all the campsites within the park were booked, and we didn’t have cell service to search for any outside the park borders. Adam seemed irritated, too. He wanted to drive past the town of Gardiner, on the outskirts of Yellowstone, so I sat back and let him. He ended up paying for a motel room at the Bozeman Inn in Montana. It was a dive. Adam said he wasn’t feeling well, so I got us McDonald’s for dinner, though he barely touched his quarter pounder with cheese. I ate all five of my plain hamburgers watching “The Office,” including the episode in which Jan and Michael first kiss outside of Chili’s. Early to bed, Monday night, which for me translated to roughly midnight.
Tuesday, July 20 — Bozeman, Montana
I woke up early at the Bozeman Inn feeling motivated. Went to Walmart to buy a razor to shave and another $3.00 sleeveless shirt, on sale from Independence Day, plus a $2.00 pair of American flag socks. I almost bought a Montana State University tee-shirt, but I couldn’t justify it financially after spending too much the previous couple days. On the way back from Walmart, I stopped at a gas station for two coffees. Over coffee, Adam and I decided against Glacier; it was a difficult decision, for me, one that weighed heavy on me the rest of that day. We were running pretty low on dope, for one, and Adam noted that Glacier would probably add another two days to the trip. I was sad to leave Bozeman and all the western Montana cities I didn’t get to see (i.e. Helena, Missoula, Glacier Village); Adam was more motivated about starting east. So it goes, then. He found a campsite in eastern Montana, Makoshika State Park, where dinosaur fossils have been unearthed, so that gave us something to look forward to, at least. Moreover, I was happy we’d get to spend one more night in Montana. Makoshika is the Lakota tribe’s word for “bad earth” or “bad land.”
The drive from Bozeman to Makoshika basically took us east along the Yellowstone River. A billboard told us that Little Bighorn Battlefield was at the next exit. We took it on a whim, only to read the next sign: “Little Bighorn Battlefield 55 miles”. We U-turned back to the original route. “Noon-forty,” as Adam called it. Our collective mood had improved a great deal since Yellowstone, indeed.
Spoke too soon; pulled over for going 86 in an 80 outside of Miles City, Montana. A crew-cut Montana trooper asked Adam to come sit in the front seat of the cruiser to see the radar clock. Whitney and I waited in the car nervously. A few minutes later, Adam finally re-entered the car with a slip of paper, stone-faced. Then his grin gave it away. He got away with another warning, thank gosh. It was a K9 patrol cop, too, so we got fairly lucky. Whit may have won us favor, once again. The trooper looked like Shannon McGrail’s husband - crew cut, beer pudgy but healthy, Irish stock. He highly recommended Makoshika to Adam, suggested we hike in on the trails to discover terrain “unlike anything [he’d] ever seen before.” Sometimes, after it rains, the trooper indicated, fossils emerge from the washout; "and it just rained there yesterday," Adam mused.
“We’re straight edge for the rest of the trip,” Adam joked. “We got two warnings but it’s three strikes and we’re out.” Laughs aside, we were fourteen miles outside of Glendive, and I needed a puff. The police encounter made me shaky; too many traumatic encounters with them. Nonetheless, Adam’s spirits continued to rise. The warning seemed to give him an adrenaline boost. He was thrilled as we entered Makoshika State Park, the entrance of which featured a fossil Stegosaurus sculpture. “I saw dinosaurs on the website and I was sold,” he remarked with a smile. My spirits, as usual, rode shotgun to his, but I was feeling, as always, a little more mellow, tired, and semi-charmed. Adam pulled over multiple times within the park to take photographs; indeed, better views than we saw in South Dakota’s Badlands. He picked out a large campsite isolated from all other sites, site number 24. It was situated atop a high bluff overlooking a valley of rock formations, canyons, and caves. Adam dragged me back into town to pick up dinner goods and firewood, then finally coerced me into a hike into the canyons. I knew I'd regret it if I didn't hike in.
After descending to a stone formation I dubbed the “great sandcastle,” I finally had to beg off as Adam’s energy did not appear to be declining with the sun. I told him to go on without me. So I climbed back up the bluff alone, looking for rattlesnakes underneath boulders, breathing heavily in the low sun’s orange rays; Adam and Whitney returned to camp about twenty five minutes later, just as heavy winds from the canyons started blowing the tent around.
At sunset, I reflected that dusk and after were my favorite parts of the camping experience. I love gathering kindling, starting the fire, putting a can of soup on, watching the sky turn different colors, then stargazing. The radio was on, always a classic rock station to be found, no matter where you are; the bowl was packed. “Smoke ‘til you’re in Kubla Khan.” Describing our sunset, Adam said he sticks to the eight primary colors. I told him, as a writer, that I was a student of the color palette. “Joyce and David Foster Wallace invented their own colors, like the snot-green sea, the scrotum-tightening sea; we have rose gold, peach, and lavender in the western sky, more of a mauve and a periwinkle blue in the eastern sky.” Adam proved quick to the task: “it almost looks like a banana just ripening,” he said of the yellow-green spot on the horizon where the sun sank not long before. He was accurate. “That’s not a color I see in the sky very often,” I agreed. We had beef jerky, pringles, and shared a can of mini ravioli for dinner; I ate an Italian sub from the gas station plus two Snickers bars, as a late lunch, so we had a really late dinner. At full darkness, we hadn’t even put the can on the fire yet.
We experienced very strong winds at camp, that night. It almost blew one of the canvas chairs into the fire. I retreated early to the tent to read Stephen King. Overnight, it got windy to the extent of cold.
Wednesday, July 21 — Makoshika State Park, Badlands of East Montana
Woke to read and write around nine a.m. The radio antenna broke, last night, so the radio is fixed to a country music station. A beep from the radio ushered in the CBS news, on the hour. A country music DJ subsequently digested the news for those incapable of reaching their own conclusions: “they’re disguised as protests, but we know what they really are. Violence, riots, lawlessness.” I quickly turned the dial to static. Better static than propaganda. “No, I don’t need a fucking country DJ from the plains digesting the news for me,” I articulated. Committed to the cause, at that point, I used one of my vandalism stickers to tape the antenna piece back on, thereby allowing us to listen to classic rock, again; I never heard a classic rock DJ spouting out nationalist jingo.
By 9:30, Adam had water boiled on the morning fire. He used it to brew the coffee, then made oatmeal for himself. Shirtless, we sat around the fire reading and drinking coffee, feeling the heat of the sun reflecting off the rock already. We ruled out a morning hike on account of the heat. Whitney slept in the tall grass at the edge of the cliff, laying in the shade of cliffside pines. Before the second batch of coffee, Adam announced that he was finished with Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, his read throughout the trip; “what a good book recommendation,” he added, a nod to my literary interests. “What does he do at the end of the book?” I asked, genuinely not remembering. “He’s getting ready to go work as a forest fire lookout in a mountain.”
“Critically low,” I answered to Adam’s inquisition regarding the weed situation. He claimed it was legal in Indiana; maybe we can re-up there. Indiana sounded like a pretty conservative state to be legalizing marijuana, to me. "Maybe it's Illinois," I suggested. As we cleaned up camp, a man in a blue tractor rode back and forth down the park’s gravel road, dragging a massive rake behind the tractor that smoothed and leveled out the road.
Exiting Makoshika, we stopped at the park headquarters to refill our water jugs. We ended up not only refilling the jugs from the well but sticking our hands and heads under the spigot. The cold earth water felt cleansing on my dusty pores; everything in the Badlands caked in a thin layer of dust. It was already 88 degrees by 11:00 a.m. From Makoshika, we got on I-94 E to Bismarck, North Dakota, which went to Fargo and beyond. I turned on “Deep Tracks,” on Sirius XM radio, a station we hadn’t listened to yet. The DJ played a good set: Dylan’s basement tapes with the Grateful Dead, Zeppelin, Kinks, Beatles, Beach Boys, “Pet Sounds,” Richie Haven’s “Peace Train”. Little Missouri National Grassland passed by; still signs of the Badlands formations, there.
“We still have 189 miles to Fargo?” Adam asked incredulously. I informed him that I was considering booking a hotel room in St. Cloud, Minnesota, that night. Both of us were pretty exhausted from camping and the road, not to mention sweaty, again, and without clean clothes. North Dakota via I-94 was no better than I remember it via U.S. 2: a pretty boring drive through dusty plains. Around rush hour, we stopped in Fargo for gas and Pepsi's, then crossed into Minnesota with little enthusiasm for adding it to our list of states traveled on the trip. On the last hour or two of the drive to St. Cloud, we listened to the Barbarian Days audiobook. Arrived at the AmericInn by eight o’clock, central standard time, got in the hot tub by nine. Separate fast food joints, for late dinner.
Thursday, July 23 — St. Cloud, Minnesota, DAY 10
I slept through an alarm and we both missed the AmericInn’s complimentary breakfast, which ended at ten a.m. At least they left the coffee out. I downed two cups in the hour before we had to check out, packing the vehicle in between sips.
When we got on the road home, I felt terrifically bummed by the thought that we’d be home later that night. In part, I didn’t want to go home; I felt like I should be living out west. Even my Mom said I sounded happier from out west. Partly, it was the prospect of driving through Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I theoretically should be living had I not passed on a great job offer in 2019 for a stupid girl. Partly, it was not feeling like I had any control over the direction of the trip anymore. The last two days of it, Adam didn’t want to stop at any of my suggested photo ops or rest areas. Tom Petty was right when he said coming down was the hardest part.
Then, of course, driving through Eau Claire, Wisconsin made me think of Ashley, who probably should have been my girlfriend while I lived in the U.P. all along. These passing memories made it very evident, on the last day of the trip, that my future lies not in suburban Michigan.
In Wisconsin, I saw on Instagram that the Seattle hockey franchise unveiled their logo and nickname. They chose “Kraken.” The sweaters look nice enough, but I kind of liked the Sockeyes name for its salmon reference. Inspired by their new name, Adam and I contemplated the old trivia question about major professional sports teams whose nicknames do not end in ‘s’. My Uncle Paul used to ask me the question when I was a boy. Back then, there were only five or six answers. In googling it, I was surprised to find that number had skyrocketed to nine, including the newly-minted Kraken of the NHL. Having brainstormed for an hour, we both kicked ourselves for not getting the Colorado Avalanche, bitter rival to Detroit in the nineties, but Adam named most of the others: Thunder, Wild, Jazz, Heat, Magic, Lightning, Red Sox, and White Sox.
Bumper to bumper traffic jams throughout Chicago served as the gateway back to a different world. I felt the negative collective energies given off by busybodies in a hurry, fast lane warriors, and overworked nine-to-fivers, and I shrank further into the passenger seat. The familiar anxiety creeping over me, I focused on breathing in and out, and reminded myself that nightfall was just around the corner. Better yet, the pandemic-shortened Major League Baseball season started at eight p.m. When confined to the city or the burbs, I’d always found refuge in baseball and the darkness brought on by nightfall. Camping and the road are the only proven cures for morning light I’ve found yet.
