2/15/2010
Everywhere but my classroom, media literacy dominates the lives of our American (and global) public.
The average college-bound student may read eight books each year, but will read nearly 3000 web pages and 1200 Facebook profiles. Students may write 40 pages of essays, but will write over 500 pages of email messages. They will be online 3 ½ hours each day, listen to 2 ½ hours of music each day, 2 hours on the cell phone and another 2 with television, all while being full-time students with work and study—all multi-tasking. They will have careers that don't exist today which sort of begs the questions of what we are preparing them for. (www.mediatedcultures.net) How will the Scantron help them repair the global problems they are inheriting?
 And make no mistake, healthy civic participation (which includes literacy) is what public schools are about. We need our students to be critical participants in the democracy. Of course, this means discussing the Clinton election victories through his work with MTV's "Rock the Vote" in our civic textbooks. Logging on to Obama's YouTube Channel is out of the question; participating in the online forums of the 2008 candidates was disallowed.
In other words, so much of what we do in teaching authentic civic literacy in public schools is to deny access to it.
The concern is simple enough: if we allow minors to go online, they may see images which are scandalous. This is true. Yet two points seem salient, to me: 1) if a student is online, we know their web history and who it was that visited the offensive site. In other words, there is more proof of the offense than was ever true about the naughty deck of cards or offensive note passed; 2) they are seeing it, anyway, and in our classes. Phones and iPods dominate the classroom as do "sexting" and Parental Advisory lyrics.
Our response is to seek it out, try to confiscate the tools for the new literacy, truly an endless and futile task. In other words, we have cast ourselves in the role of censors, compelling 2.0 students into a 1950s-model of literacy. (As I often say to my AP students, we are 21st century readers engaging 17th century texts with early 20th century theory.) So much for relevance.
 While the rest of the world is bombarding our students with images and digital pitches, they are often naively vulnerable to its impact. This is not a slam against my students so much as it is a statement that critical literacy, the close examination of digital texts in order to discover their capitalist (or worse) agenda, is absent from our curriculum. Worst of all, rather than help them, we as teachers are often the last they will ever ask about what they encounter—after all, we'll just confiscate whatever they're using.
As a small example, consider the immediacy of digital text in comparison with any other. That is, an unfounded claim goes viral and makes itself news. A recent one is the Facebook Group which claims that the social network site may charge about $4 each month starting in May. Almost 500,000 users joined to protest. Of course, there is absolutely no truth to it: none is offered, none is asked for, and yet FB users leave the service in protest. Consider—how do "innocent" pranks like this one condition, teach, our young people to respond to the next wave of influences? It is in this sense that our youth are vulnerable, that we fail in our responsibility to civic literacy.
 While at a recent conference on digital texts and social networks, I was social networking instead of giving the PowerPoint presentation my full attention. Our students use Facebook in our classrooms from their phones and on our school computers through proxy servers (and our tech department spends no small amount of time seeking out the newest proxy server in order to shut it down). One of them showed me a YouTube video on her phone the other day—it was a video linking Heart of Darkness and the TV show Lost. If I was truly a professional, I would have chastised her and taken the phone.
But then, that's what Iran's government has done with the internet there. In the wake of wildly corrupt elections, the protests of the moderate and well-connected youth in that country have continued to swell. They want free and fair—democratic—elections, and they want the world to know it. Rather than allow the protests to be spread, however, Iran has limited internet access—and proxy servers have proven invaluable for video and news to escape, anyway. Even the mullahs cannot stop technology. GoogleEarth shows images of crowds filling the squares of Tehran; the Iranian protests now have their own Channel on YouTube.
 As I write this, YouTube celebrates five years of video work today. It is rightly proud of what it has accomplished. More than "Kitten Surprise" or Megan Fox videos, it has in its words, "given people a voice" (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/), shown us firsthand the need in Haiti, and helped shift the current of a US election. Entire classroom semesters from universities are online in their own channels (YouTube EDU), dozens of news stations host documentaries (including SkyNews, Fox, Al-Jazeerah, Reuters, ChinaTimes, and the CryGuy29)—remember, our goal is not to find a location of only approved digital texts, but to teach how to discern between them. The US President's YouTube channel has nearly 2000 videos on it, including all of his speeches, commentaries, dialogues, and special calls for participation (http://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom). (And there are dozens of other politician channels!) Even Angelina Jolie has her own channel of United Nations videos. There are channels for science and math, and there are hundreds of student-produced projects assigned, apparently, by their high school teachers. Other students are vlogging, but I'm not sure that most of us know what this is. And now television programs are being uploaded by the networks that produced them, including Anderson Cooper's 360 and Digital Planet.
The goal of the literate is to use their tools of literacy to forward their critically-considered agendas. Gutenberg did it with a printing press and put the monks out of business. Iranian students are doing it with their Sony HandiCams and YouTube. But for us, Bess won't go there.
2/7/2010
No matter how many layers of language and manners we paint over our selves, at our centers, implies Joseph Conrad, is a desperate selfish hunger, a need to account for ourselves by defining the "I" against the "Other," to lash out in violence.
 At some levels, our proclivity towards violence is obvious. We write "Kill them!" in our Facebook posts during the SuperBowl, we threaten friends with the mock "You're dead," we "beat" our friends literally and figuratively at Halo, and we beat them at Monopoly.
What may not be so obvious is that our language is thick with metaphor. Our casual conflation of the literal meaning and the connotative is unavoidable. The Colts and Saints have no plans to cooperate. They seek weaknesses and attack. They blitz in offensive units. They seize territory. And sure, football is easy to see as a parallel to the language of war, but this "institutionalizing" of war through formal sports only satisfies us to some degree. It won't be long before fans trash bars, firebomb automobiles, and stampede each other; insult the team I identify with  and who knows what I will do?
Formal sports, then, gives away to more simple urges such as cage fighting. In the past three months, no less than four separate cage fighting arenas have opened in Waterford where I live. One of them is in the Christian Recreation Center!
So our formal ritualizing of sports and our metaphors of war are the thinnest of veneers over our violence. In other words, while Stephen King and others might argue that we all need a cathartic purging through such civilized devices as soccer, The Stand, and Gladiator films, these behaviors serve a dual purpose. If we have a dark interior, creating social outlets both purges these desires and affirms them. Extreme fandom of the SuperBowl legitimizes my violence, assures me that if I watch the Indy 500 only to hope for the fiery crash, it's okay. All of the best video games are rated "M."
 Conrad's Kurtz exemplifies this, abandoning the lie of ritual violence and exposing its rawness. The Kurtz of Apocalypse Now reads a copy of The Golden Bough, which examines the mythological succession of the priest-king by regicide. Down with the King! He who is Other than Us must be removed by violence. And so Gatsby is removed as is Okonkwo; Sauron and Voldemort; Arthur and Jesus. Good or evil, our mythology tells us, the violence at our centers must resolve the story.
It is no wonder that our Western literary narrative, then, is an allegory of our human psychology. What happens when we remove the Superego, the civilized, the rational, from our consciousness? Beer sales soar during a championship sports weekend, Klingons drink Bloodwine, and Viking warriors fight in a "bare sark" frenzy.
This is no Swiss Family Robinson, no Coral Island, no NeverNeverLand (though this last place had no rules, either). The imposition of the civilized (what Twain calls "sivilization" and James calls "syphilization") upon us may reduce our violent tendencies, but only by channeling them into an art of suffering, a literature of conflict, a public school and economic system based upon competition. Competition, we are told, is a virtue. Diplomacy and dialogue  are weakness.
But while civilized propriety is a gloss over our violence, the relationship between brutality and rationality is somewhat different. I would argue that these are contradictions, that violence in most of its incarnations is the absence of the rational. This is not Vulcan-ized logic, but a suggestion that where reason fails us, the rawness of violence is what remains, the inevitable attack upon the Other. Fear and extremist loyalties can each undermine the rational principle; in this way, the battle between the violent and the rational is within ourselves.
Derrida says that violence upon the Other is violence upon the Self. The two principles are each within us, met forever on the psychological arena as inevitably as Arthur and Mordred upon a single spear, St. George and his Dragon upon a lance. Even Rowling understood it, linking the minds and essences of Harry and Voldemort through a wand. Any attempt to reject the violence inside us is to declare war upon ourselves, the paradox upon which Western philosophy is based.
"Where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves."
--Joseph Campbell
12/30/2009
"I'm just doing my job," she said to me.
In frustration, I responded. "Then let me talk to someone who will do more than just her job."
 Perhaps I was cruel, but it was clear that the customer service operator on the phone was not prepared to service my customer-self. Her utility company had mis-billed me—outrageously—causing my American Express card to flag the charge and cancel my card for reasons of security. While American Express immediately reinstituted a new account for me, this company was now claiming that since my card denied the charge, my utility would be cancelled. Not willing to change my method of payment, I told her that her company caused the problem by triple-charging me (a fact she admitted to) and that my new card would be available to charge again in a week's time. She was sorry, she said, but she would either have to enter my account as "delinquent" (which would affect my credit rating) or drop the service. She was simply (and I used this modifier deliberately) doing the job prescribed to her.
Funny how the real world merges with the academic at the most opportune moments….
I've been reading some Immanuel Kant for fun, recently.
Okay, I understand that reading about Kantian ethics is not everyone's idea of fun (especially in a culture which celebrates the anti-intellectualism of Dumb and Dumber, Jackass, Nicole Ritchie, and the Team Edward/Team Jacob debate), but perhaps that is exactly why I decided to blow the dust off that text which I simply could not bring myself to purge from my shelf last summer.
 Kant celebrates humans for our uniqueness, however, and that's what has me thinking: our ability to reason. Unlike frogs and billiard balls, we think about means and ends, about steps to accomplish goals, about lives driven by purpose. (And yes, my LWW students, Kant anticipated Camus' later distinction between en soi and pour soi.)
A frog does not distinguish between right and wrong (except in Disney movies); a billiard ball cannot decide for itself in which pocket to fall. And, Kant, says, it is just this distinction which helps us understand by which principles to live. In other words, when we honor and respect each other as reasoning beings (Aristotle would call us "rational animals"), we are moral. Any other action which fails this categorical imperative is not moral. And true freedom, he says, is acting morally.
For Kant, then, our reason, freedom, purpose, and morality are all bound together in the nature of our humanity: we cannot abdicate one for another, and to give up (or fail to use) any is to reduce ourselves to the level of billiard balls and t-shirt logos.
This is no small order, I think. If I fail to reason and act freely according to my moral imperative, I give up what it means to be human. If I spend my time aligning myself with rules and procedures despite reason, what is my human purpose? This is not to say that I will never concur with rules and procedures, but that these are not directly relevant to the moral imperative to be human. For Kant, social obligations are not imperatives but only factors influencing my freedom to choose. For Kant, my motivation alone matters.
Take the woman on the phone: "I'm just doing my job." Such a statement is as much as saying, "I am disavowing my choice and giving up my humanity; I am no more than a machine." To use this line as a defense for behavior is simple . . . morally reprehensible.
 Perhaps this is harsh. We muddle along and do the best we can. Decisions are hard, times are tough, and we cannot decide what to do next. But these factors, says Kant, are only distractions, outside influences which threaten to compromise the categorical imperative.
As a teacher, then, what is "just my job"? As an educator, what is my categorical imperative?
I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and I have been coming to some conclusions. To do so, I've borrowed John Rawls, a 20th century philosopher. He said that in order to discover the categorical imperative, we must first imagine that our decisions—whatever they are about—should be made assuming that we eliminate all distinctions: race, class, religion, geography, etc.
Assume, for instance, that I wish to pass a health care bill for our country. Rawls would argue that, whatever bill is passed in the end, any of us would be happy to be any American in the country living with its consequences. I imagine myself suddenly as a pregnant teen, a homeless vet, Donald Trump, or a child in a family whose house in undergoing foreclosure. If I still see the bill as fair and just, we should pass the bill. This, he would argue, is how we honor and respect humanity and our own humanity.
And now I apply this to what I do as a teacher. What should be my task (not merely my job) and for whom?
8/7/2009
 Day Sixteen: Iowa to Michigan
Before leaving Iowa, I had two important stops. The first was at Cedar Rock, a Frank Lloyd house that he imagined was a modest suburban home. I knew a little about Wright's style and personality, but I had no idea how particular he was to the homes he designed, and what a fixture he became in the lives of people who lived in his homes. I asked the guide if Wright knew Ayn Rand, whose Fountainhead character Howard Roarke is so similar. He didn't know, but later checking proves she did. While Rand may have had the inspiration for Roarke earlier than her impressions of Wright, it seems outrageous coincidence that she did not refine her character based upon his work.
Here's what I mean. At Cedar Rock, Wright designed the home, furnished and decorated it, and then had a few more conditions. 1) The Larson family could move in with nothing but their clothing. No new furnishings or knick-knacks could be used; 2) A housewarming gift of a pitcher and cups, because they did not fit Wright's style, had to be removed; 3) No garage or attic or basement would be designed, because these represented clutter, and no family in Wright's home would live in clutter; 4) The chimneys would not draw air because they were too low, but Wright would not redesign them because that would ruin the line of the house; 5) Items in the house had a particular place; if Wright visited the home and found one out of place, the owner was chastised; 6) Wright  produced two front doors with a wall-corridor between them in order to make the home seem unwelcoming to strangers. Not ridiculous enough? When they moved in, the Larsons found that the master bedroom had two separate beds; when she asked him, Wright told Mrs. Larson, "You will both appreciate having your own bed to sleep in more comfort."
Even with all this, the home was beautiful. The choices he made in creating horizontal line, creating corner windows, allowing nature to grow through the foundation of the home, how furniture would unfold into the room, the use of natural light, were all amazing ideas. Landscaping, room names, and redefining social spaces (i.e. dark entryways to discourage hanging around near doors), were intriguing. Homes and owners that lived up to his ideals received his signature tile of approval.
Rand's Howard Roarke differs from Wright only in that he would never ask for money for his ideas, as Wright often was compelled to do. Roarke would design a building and not care if no one lived in it, so long as his personal aesthetic was never violated (when one owner does change his building, Roarke blows it up). But Roarke was truly flawless, marrying aesthetic to engineering. Wright seems to have had trouble keeping the engineering part in focus (poor heat, roofs which leaked, etc.). Oak Park, IL, has many Wright homes, but this seemed a much easier and more intimate stop on the Wright parade.
 Only a few miles down the road is the movie set for Costner's Field of Dreams. Why not? The best part of re-discovering this beautiful farmhouse in the middle of Iowa's cornfields was not the nostalgia of the film, and certainly not the souvenir stand which sold everything from Field of Dreams baseball bats to Field of Dreams ice cream cones. It was the twenty or so people playing baseball on the field. The rules are simple: anyone can play at any time. And the spirit of that was there, with a four year old girl batting, with adults trading sides as the pseudo-game progressed. They just played.
But after that, I was anxious. Looking at the clock, I couldn't help estimate that I would hit Chicago right around rush hour. Sure enough, I hit the north side at 4:00 pm and the turnpike by 4:30. Never mind that I spent 20 minutes at one of four toll booths, by the time that I cleared Chicago and made it into Indiana, it was 7:00 pm (8:00 EST). Now, weary with the madness of tons of steel jostling for positions for three hours, I had to decide to hold up for the night or press on. A quick stop at the Michigan Welcome Center and a meal made up my mind. Time to bring it home.
I pulled into my driveway at exactly 1:00 am and exactly 5600 miles on my odometer since July 21 when I left, American Road Trip concluded. 8/5/2009
 Day Fourteen: The Badlands to the Middle of Nowhere
[Obviously, finding an internet location today was difficult, so I am behind in uploading my updates!]
The storm over South Dakota's badlands was serious enough for a few to lose their tents. Mine held and I slept soundly! My early morning was spent in pursuing two families of deer and fawn through a dried slump of the Badlands, a temporary green spot in the otherwise desolate clay. They seemed careless of my presence, as did most of the other animals I encountered, from prairie dog to rabbit. That got me to thinking about how the badger or rattlesnake my treat me, so I was a bit more cautious.
In any event, the Badlands are amazing in their starkness, but I was surprised to discover how fragile they are, that the rock is wearing so quickly, that the surface is mostly a dry and crumbling clay which often collapses when walked upon. Certainly, the shale and other stone beneath is more durable as infrastructure, but this is truly an environment ready to cave in on itself—that's why the Sturgis bikers were everywhere, on and off the paths. The ranger said to me to enjoy the area, to let its absolute silence work on you. Nowhere was there silence today. When the bikes weren't needlessly revving their engines to hear their own echoes across the canyons, the riders were yelling to each other about the noise.
 I retreated again, first on a disturbing side trip to a nuclear missile silo, one of the abandoned Minuteman I silos and control centers, the place where for a few decades, our soldiers sat strapped to chairs for 12-hour shifts in little bunkers waiting to turn keys that would begin Nuclear Armageddon. The government has left one of these missiles (de-fused, of course) in an opened silo, as well. The military-rangers there were quick to point out the myths about the silos: unlike Wargames, a soldier would never hesitate to turn the key when ordered; that even though the extensive fields of missile silos in South Dakota had been disarmed according to the START talks, the US had at least 500 more Minuteman III silos in the northern plains alone. Re-assuring. They took great pride in reminding us how many years truckers and tourists and ranchers had driven right past these silos in plain view, and who had never considered them.
Spooked a bit to meet the Cold War in person, I turned back to the Badlands for relief, and this time I went to the South Park, the one away from the main drag, operated by the Oglala Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Visitor's Center for this end of the Badlands was quite different, revealing the mystical and  environmental uses of the area for the Sioux nation. Unfortunately, though on a reservation, the US military had used this end of the park for bombing practice by the B-17s during World War II. There were, after all, no residents in the area, they claimed—because the reservation did not insist upon recorded addresses at the time. In any event, this part of the National/Oglala Park was now off-limits to tourists and hikers because of the unexploded ordinance which has polluted the region.
It's too bad, too, because this particular area is important. Here, at Red Table and other rock shelves, the Ghost Dance movement was born and gained power. It was this movement which bolstered the final and tragic resistance of the Native Americans to US incursions at Wounded Knee, just a few miles away. I traveled there to what I was told was a somber and quiet place, virtually unmarked but for the boarded-up church seized by the 1973 resistance fighters. (Remember Leonard Peltier.)
I found the church, but by this time, I was tuned in to 90.1 FM, KILI, the Voice of the Lakota Nation. As I pulled up to the site of the Massacre, a few 20-something Lakota women were in their cars along the road, offering hand-made dreamcatchers to anyone who stopped: $30. The DJ Dawn L (DJsupastar@gmail.com) was playing a series of tribute songs to Michael Jackson ("Billy Jean" was playing at the time). This was not quite the somber experience I had expected; perhaps better that we just keep reading Dee Brown.
My detour through the town of Pine Ridge was little better. I should be happy that a Taco John's and Subway have appeared on the Rez, but when the suburbs for the fast food enterprise are dilapidated mobile homes, roofs secured with tires, some doorways missing and replaced by hanging blankets, I wonder where our developmental balance is. An old man, likely drunk from his stagger, stepped out into the road in front of me.
KILI shifted to a discussion program on vocational education, inviting two local speakers to help the disabled find jobs. The signal for the radio faded on these two as I left South Dakota, but I was moved by their efforts, even as they explained how important it is for a parent to attend an IEP and how everything diagnosed must be on official documents. The Oglala government building I passed had so many letters missing from its sign, I could not identify its function.
 Which brought me to Nebraska, the state without any roadmaps at any gas station I stopped. Town after town went by on US-20 (which I had returned to), populations mostly below 100 people, city buildings usually consisting of an agri-business depot and a saloon. Restaurants and homes, gas stations and hotels, boarded up. Cody proclaims itself on its welcome sign: "The City That Will Not Die," and I wonder at the fatalistic cynicism of it. Ainsworth calls itself, "The Middle of Nowhere." In that case, I suppose it's a good idea that I chose to find Kelly State Park just a few miles from it to make camp.
It's a strange campground, because until 15 minutes ago I was literally the only one in the park. It's beautiful, secluded, a nice stream below me, a decent fire ring ready to go, but no one here. The two vehicles which have arrived are not campers, though—they are stopped apparently for the fishing trail which is at the dead end of the dirt road here. Too odd. Back to the Twilight Zone, but tomorrow I move into Iowa and hopefully reach Wisconsin.
 Day Fifteen: From Nowhere to Cedar Falls, IA
Corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn hay hay corn corn cow corn corn corn corn corn cow cow corn corn corn corn soy corn ethanol plant corn corn corn. . . .
A long road day got me out of Nebraska  and half-way across Iowa. The highlight was in the morning when I stopped at the Ashville Falls project in Nebraska, an active paleontology dig of full skeletons of animals killed by the Yellowstone supervolcano. The university interns working on the site answered questions about the work, and—while it was off the main drag—it was one of the classiest operations I've seen. I had little idea, for instance, that Asian camels began in America and migrated, or that wolverines began in Asia. There were saber-toothed deer and a kind of giraffe and rhino here, too. Hmm. Maybe this classy operation is also playing a big joke on the tourists.
The rest of the day was a long run across US-20, an endless barrage of corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn hay hay corn corn cow corn corn corn corn corn cow cow corn corn corn corn soy corn ethanol plant corn corn corn. . . .
Tomorrow should bring me home to Michigan.
Day Twelve: Yellowstone to Caspar, WY
 Early morning (and a bitterly 36 degrees) found me rolling down my driver's window to ask first a moose and then a bison to kindly step out of my way. The bison, in particular, seemed stubborn in an obtuse sort of way. I honestly don't think he understood me.
Even so, I was one of the first of the day to reach the Great Canyon where the Yellowstone River has literally carved out eons of rock to reveal archaeological treasures (and a little beauty, too). After a brisk tour of the northern rim and falls, I fell in with a group taking a long hike around the Lupine Valley (formerly a part of Yellowstone Lake, but now a tree-free bison grazing heaven). The devastation of the park by fire is extensive, but so also is the swiftness of the recovery—already lodge pole pine grown amid the slow-rotting corpses of their ancestors.
 Once out of the park, I began the long descent into Cody (Buffalo Bill-obsessed), and Wyoming turns into a brown and yellow rock maze, slowly devolving into scrub and shallow rubble plateaus, unusable for farming or grazing, yet some farmers seem to scratch out an acre here and there. Again, many of the farms, restaurants, and other efforts at economics are long abandoned and collapsed. When was this area busy? The roads here (which were now cooking at an even 90 degrees) seemed traveled only to move people through the state. In fact, everyone I spoke to was "passing through."
Nevertheless, along the rock edges, the falling scree, the rock and sage scrubland, the people here have fenced off parcels of waste for themselves. Outside of the horse ranchers, I don't see why. Little towns like Meteetse (pop. 564) retain hitching posts to their sidewalks, but Thermopolis can't seem to decide what it wants to be: the world's largest hot springs, a dinosaur dig, historical museums, or what I actually diverted off US-20 to see, petroglyphs found on some old outcroppings. I found the little-used county dirt road to the site, but the site was locked behind a gate; the sign said to pick up the key at the Visitor's Center. And, of course, that was closed on a Sunday. So much for my diversion—even the Dinosaur Park was closed!
 Descending out of Thermopolis and back onto US-20 was great, though: Red Rock Valley runs the highway and a train track along the river through a deep gorge, and the road signs mark the epoch of the stone ("Cambrian, 200-300 million years old"). As the valley floor descended, I sank into the history—or it felt like that except for the pick-up truck tailgating me.
The rest of Wyoming to Caspar was flat rock and scrub, minor twisters of dust whipped up round Wyoming's exotic road kill. But I stopped briefly at Hell's Half Acre, a twisted valley of crag and lime (used for the set of Starship Troopers, I think!). The 300+ acres (hardly a half acre!) was barb-wired off, and I could only get to it via the abandoned parking lot of an old café along the edge. Another guy pulled in (taking his cycle to Sturgis, SD), and we scaled the fence as he told me about the rattlesnakes which "fill the place." Uh, thanks. Didn't stay long.
Pulled into Caspar and found a hotel and shower. Forty thousand bikers are crowding into Sturgis this week for their annual festival. And I plan to roll through that area tomorrow. I'm going to map out an alternative route into the badlands and Devil's Tower tomorrow. It has to be a highlight!
 Day Thirteen: Caspar to the Badlands
Never should I complain again about the Woodward Dream Cruise, a relative go-cart party compared to the Sturgis (SD) Stampede, an annual gather of over 40,000 motorcyclists for one week of mayhem. It began today, just in the area of South Dakota I planned to visit.
A four hour drive brought me back to the north of Wyoming—and by now I've seen enough grazing and scrubland to bid the state adios quickly—but I has hell-bent to see the infamous Devil's Tower. Rising up off the small buttes about it, that rock scraped free of the underearth rose in the late morning sky, clear and stark. (Why is Richard Dreyfus such an amazing actor?) But I couldn't reach it: already the road into the park was swamped with belching Harleys, pouring onto the shoulders and in the turn-offs, gathered under the billboards and around the worn cafés. I pulled off amongst a small group at a farmer's fence and snapped photos, but with regrets moved quickly on.
Trying to get away from the bikers was a challenge all day, and I still haven't fully succeeded. Since little Sturgis can't hold them all, they simply pour out hogging onto the roads in a 100 mile radius. It's not that I'm against bikes or their riders (necessarily), but that so many of them weaving in and out, sorting and resorting themselves on the road—it's a bit dangerous. And helmets are definitely not the order of the day in Wyoming, nor are all traffic rules.
So I took some backcountry roads to approach the highlight of the day from the south, the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is simply spectacle, a family-produced, public-funded decades-long project to build both a testament to the Native Americans but the largest mountain carving in the world. Without exaggeration, all four faces of Mount Rushmore could fit tucked behind the chief's ear.
 
I could write or speak about this for some time—it's fitting and moving, dramatic in scale but also in the efforts of the sculptor's surviving family to continue the construction. This fall, much of the mountain debris will begin to be turned into the larger project, a Native American Cultural Center of North America, starting with the construction of a much-needed university for local indigenous peoples specializing in leadership training. I paid an old bus driver, Hutch, to take me down to the quarry site where only 10 workers were surveying and drilling in preparation for tomorrow's blast. The mountain is only half-excavated for the statue to be carved out, but seeing this project has long been an ambition of mine. Hutch said with some pride, "This rock's good; our friends down the road (Rushmore workers) are paying six figures a year just to maintain that little thing. In the past forty years, we've spent about $400 for a few strengthening bars." That the place was also swarming with Yamasaki's and Harleys didn't bother me—in fact, one biker took my  picture for me!
So going to Mt. Rushmore was a bit underwhelming in contrast. It was good to see it, but I did not anticipate the concert stages, the auditorium, the lights, the ice cream bars, and, worst of all, the obscene town of Keystone which somehow compels every car which visits Rushmore to drive through all four tourist-trapped city blocks. The narrow streets were lined with bikes, the balconies of the hotels and pizza parlors were lined with bikers watching them, and one little Toyota Camry tried to inch its way through. I will be paying for the largest freeway overpass in history. . . .
So I turned south away from Sturgis and headed for the Badlands, my goal for the evening. I will describe these more in the next entry, but this desert moonscape does not belong here, rising quickly without warning from the buffalo grasslands. I pulled in this evening to a primitive campsite in the Badlands, the wind is kicking up big time (I hope my tent holds), and I am typing this as I look at the rose sunset on accidental peaks. 8/2/2009
Day Nine: Idaho Falls to Yellowstone
Part of me expected to reach Yellowstone (and flee Idaho) by mid-morning, but I knew better.
First, the only T-Mobile dealer in Idaho (because all that exists here is AT&T and Verizon) was in a Wal-Mart. So began my very first trip into a Wal-Mart Superstore, much like a glorified Target, but prettier. I dodged the insipid grin of the greeter and walked quickly (I thought running might be a give-away and you don't want to scare them with sudden movements) to the Electronics section.
Kirby helped me, though he knew absolutely nothing about the phones before him or what to do about them. He had a very difficult time just recording my information so that he could look up my account. While he did, an AT&T rep tried to sell me a phone: I let her try, because that gave me some bargaining power with T-Mobile later (though as it turned out, Kirby could not call them). "What? You won't replace my phone? Did you know that AT&T is standing right here with a Blackberry Curve ready to sign me up for $0.00?" (They were.)
Kirby did tell me that there was a T-Mobile store in Idaho Falls, despite what the website failed to list. I recorded the address, got directions, and set off, finding that indeed Kirby was dead wrong. The address he gave me didn't even exist. In frustration, and seeing that it was approaching noon, I walked into a nearby Target and looked for their cheap phones. An amazing girl named Abby, not far out of high school would be my guess, not only helped me find an easy phone to use, she went to customer service, located the T-Mobile customer service numbers (I had them, too, but they were on my broken phone!), and let me use the store phone to call T-Mobile myself.
T-Mobile tried to sell me their I-Phone Wannabe, but I stayed with the upgraded version of my new model. They waived the fee I would have had to pay because I was just short of 24 months from my previous purchase, and mailed the new phone to my home where it will be waiting when I return. In the meantime, they credited me $20 for the cost of the cheap replacement phone I bought at Target, kept me as a customer, and everyone walked away happy.
 Except that escaping Idaho Falls was not to be so easy. No city maps, and I was caught deep in the city, thinking only to go north to pick up US-20 (my route for the rest of the trip). That plan failed, and a nice woman at the gas station—did you know that Twix had an ice cream bar?—set me straight.
Driving to Yellowstone (taking a quick dip into Montana again) was completely unremarkable, save that I was surprised that West Yellowstone (the main tourist drag for the park) had hotel rooms available. Taking a risk, I figured to run into the park to see if anything was left: just one campground had openings at 4:30 pm, Lewis Lake, and it was 60 miles deep into the park near the Tetons southern gateway.
With hardly a pause (and once again the only car going in my direction), I drove 90 minutes to the far side of Yellowstone (park descriptions later!) and made it into the campground where I now type this. Beautiful, quiet, rustic site and I will stay here three nights. I'll spend most of my time concentrating on the southwest and central parts of the park for the next two days. Good night.
Days Ten and Eleven: Yellowstone
My sleeping bag is rated at 32 degrees; I chose it for its lightness and reliability—and, after all, who is ever going to camp in places of freezing temperatures? Last night the temperature dropped to 37. I now have to "papoose" myself into the bag (using its little attached hoodie) to stay warm. I say this favorably, however, since the daytime temperatures here have been between 60 and 78.
  I've spent the past two days shooting over 400 photos and exploring everything geyser- and falls-related in the southwest corner of the park. Better to see a few sections in depth than to try everything (so much for Mammoth Springs).
To describe Yellowstone as beautiful is to avoid its impact. Academically, I know that I am literally sitting on a super-volcano which Discovery Channel reports could blow again any minute, sending me and the ashes of thousands of bison and RVs to Texas. It's quite another to feel it. The ground is constantly bulging and dropping (so say the scientists), but I literally see the geysers and mudpots, springs and fumaroles, altering landscape. This is because (for those needing a quick bit of geology) the magma of one of the most active volcanoes in the world is just a few miles below us (as few as two) whereas it's over 30 in the rest of the world. Here at the Continental Divide, I'm sitting on the baking crust of the world's largest pie. Between this factoid and seeing the rebirth of the forest after the 1988 fire destroyed over 1/3 of the park, it's been a fascinating two days.
 Elk in the morning, bison in the afternoon, pelicans in the evening, but the bear have mostly moved to higher ground for the summer. Stalked by marmots on my way to Mystic Falls the first morning. The little vermin perched on the ridges and logs above  me, looking down, watching. They would run and scamper back and forth, communicating to each other about my presence, whispering, and then appear again around the next corner. I would raise my camera and they would vanish. . . .
Yes, Old Faithful is cool, and since it is now surrounded by a plasti-board grandstand, the crowds which gather in the evening (there were only three of us to see the 6:30 am eruption) are equally interesting. They carry their espressos from the lodge a few yards behind them and applaud the geyser; I chuckled aloud, I'm afraid. Who or what exactly is being applauded here? Hurrah, the seismic plumbing and venting beneath them has once again released the right amount of gastric pressure from the subterranean pockets as it has for hundreds of years, completely dumb to whatever mammals do above. I suppose that by doing so, the release of pressure has somehow delayed the upcoming mega-eruption, so perhaps the crowd was applauding the fact that they will be alive a few more days to see another moose.
 [My favorite part of the geyser trails was the warning signs—the idiot child (though I did in fact see an older woman run out onto one of the hotbeds) and better, the completely uninterested man walking away. Um, that would be me.]
 I was more impressed by the other geysers, those far older than OF. Sawmill and Castle, I think are my favorites, both for their random violence (the former) and their subterranean growling (the latter). Castle's eruption can be felt over a mile away (I know because that's when I knew it went off). The rumble through the venting of the surrounding geysers sent smaller trembles through the thinning crust. We talk about deep sounds like freight trains and lowering thrums of artillery, thunder even, but this was the sound of millions of pounds of sulphuric pressure thrusting through the rock and forcing thousands of gallons of water into the sky as steam and river. Please, don't let me be anywhere near this place when the big caldera bursts again, Discovery Channel. (The geyser here is neither of these. It's an old one, though, perhaps as old as Castle, called Great Fountain.)
My first full day in the park was 15 hours of driving and hiking. My second day was calmer, exploring the areas from West Thumb east through "Please Whatever You Do Don't Go" Fishing Bridge. The park allowed tourists to fish the cutthroat trout for years and, combined with the invasion of the Great Lakes lake trout (which enjoy cutthroat for brunch), the cutthroat are failing fast. Worse, they are primary food for bear, which will impact their population (or eating habits. . . ). So the new law is, no cutthroat may be killed, but every lake trout pulled from the lake must be immediately executed without debate. The park management pulls over 70,000 a year from the lake in deep-water nets, but it is not enough.
Finally, I should write about something that I guess I never learned or forgot in biology class: there are bacteria and such which can live in extreme acids and  extreme heat: consequently they are called extremophiles, or more specifically, thermoacidophiles. No kidding. And we are using these for all kinds of interesting science. For instance, our basic knowledge of how DNA works came from this research, new research into medicine including HIV, and even in waste erosion and management. Oddly, this is just the kind of research which John McCain often cited during his campaign when he talked about "pork" spending. Needless to say, the rangers were none too happy when they listened.
Tomorrow I will venture farther north to see the Great Canyon and the Upper and Lower Falls. I'll do an early morning there and then with regrets leave Yellowstone for the rest of the "Wild West" of Wyoming. If I can make it to Casper, I'll be doing well!
It's a series of hard calls, this trip. I will miss Jackson Hole (no great loss for my tourist dollars) but also the Tetons (that's a problem). I know I cannot see everything in the 400 mile zone of each stop I make, nor can I stay for great lengths of time at any stop. Nevertheless, the cross-section of this country I've never seen has already made this well worth it! Yeah, America is pretty great, even if Americans sometimes aren't. 7/30/2009
 Day Seven: Sorest Calves in Glacier
This morning's hike took us into the "Heart of Glacier," a flora identification trip to Iceberg Lake, about 10 mountainous miles round trip. The hike began well, with seven of us outfitted with boots and packs and a cool crisp morning.
About two miles in, though, dark clouds suddenly poured over the Ptarmigan Wall (the caps of the mountains here), the temperature dropped, and the rain and wind whipped in. We plowed on, of course, slowing to identify bear sign and fireweed along the way. My knees and ankles kept pace well, I thought, especially because my knees gave me some trouble in Nepal.
When we finally arrived at Iceberg Lake (1200 feet up), the temperature dropped again as the wind swept across a lake plenished by ice fields falling from the mountains above. Late July, and the lake was full of ice. We had lunch.
 Ranger tours are one-way, as it turns out. Our guide left, and the small group dispersed. I ended up walking back on my own for more of the five return miles, though there were so many on the trail, that every four or five minutes someone would pass, one teen in flip-flops (idiot). I enjoyed setting my own pace, since I could pause (carefully unwrap the camera that I had poncho'ed against the rain) and take photos.
The last mile was a steep slope down, and this is where my ankles and calves, then my knees protested. I am in my camp now, having gathered for a few minutes with a crowd grizzly-watching through telescopes. Given the multiple activities in which I could engage, all involving the extensive use of calf muscles, I opted to write this update.
Tonight I will attend a talk with the Blackfoot Jack Gladstone, grandson of Chief Red Hawk, who will discuss the status of the tribes in the area. Tomorrow I will head out early on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, see Glacier's west side, and then move south. High on the list will be a new phone, servicing the Camry in Missoula, doing some laundry, making it into Idaho, and perhaps finding a hotel for a night.
 Day Eight: Glacier to Idaho Falls, ID
Left early this morning (6:00) to get a head start on Logan Pass, the Going-to-the-Sun Road, but when I stopped in St. Mary's for a quick cup of coffee, the tiny moose-ornamented café was playing classical music and serving omelets. Okay, a little later than I planned.
Good thing it was no later. Once again, I had the road mostly to myself, so I could pause and pull off frequently to see everything. The pass literally moves across the Rockies for 50 miles, and it is spectacular. The occasional delay from construction only gave me an opportunity to get out and see more. Lakes appear in the upper altitudes. Waterfalls form a series of cascades across miles, and from above I can see them all. Rock falls are fairly common, I gather, since I actually saw two small ones (dodging rolling stones from one) on this one trip. Water constantly drenches the side walls on one side, sometimes splashing across the pavement and over the edge into the valleys below. To be sure, guard rails are sparse, and the low rocks that do appear as rails would hardly stop a car crossing them. Also found two ram near the crest of the pass!
 Two hours later I reached East Glacier—glad I stayed on the west side where the views are better. All of the east locations I can see are forest-heavy. Great fishing, though, from what I can tell!
Kalispell was big enough to find a Toyota dealer to get a regular scheduled check-up (and since I've now driven 2200 miles, it's probably a good thing). One hour later, I'm back on the road, heading by the enormous Flathead Lake (practically a sea!) that is surrounded by boat docks and retirement communities. Drive drive drive on by.
Southwestern Montana returns to the agri-business that I saw in the east, but because the farms are more poorly-equipped and often buried in valley-crevasses only a mile or so wide, they appear to be family-owned.
I was anxious to be free of Montana. The people were nice, but the battered-pick-up syndrome was getting on my nerves. Besides, I was also on the hunt for a phone, and my internet search at the Toyota dealership found that I was not in T-Mobile country. South Idaho had dealers.
But Idaho, in the Bitterroot Mountain area, was a great change of pace. I followed Salmon River for about 100 miles, with winding roads through low foothills peppered with pines which scrabbled their roots through the scree. (By the way, the Salmon High School teams are called "The Savages." So much for sensitivity, and I was again anxious to move on.) Red Mountain was dramatic, and through the sometimes narrow rock crevices that US-93 traveled, I found small ranches and remote trailer homes overlooked by crags and deep hills.
 Once the mountains faded into a Rocky Mountain break, I turned east at Challis towards Idaho Falls. And the land changed into non-arable scrub and hillock. As two storms crossed my path, I realized that this was the kind of land where—if someone were lost in it—they might not be found for weeks. Certainly it was easy to imagine (lonely road that it was in the dusk) that a lone pick-up pulled along the side of the road could have any story attached to it.
I got gas in Mackay, Idaho, and spoke briefly with a large woman who lived there, her casual sweatpants and her baby's hat both camouflage. It was a quiet village, with no apparent need for clocks, as some of the locals hung out at the gas station, and I knew from here it was another 50 miles to Arco.
Arco is tiny and adorned with "Atomic Burger" and "Nuclear Park" signs. Outside this town in the scrubland, my last town before Idaho Falls, the US built the first atomic reactor. All the experiments were done here. (Cynically, this was the part of the country the government called "expendable.") I discovered that enormous sections of this land had been cordoned off by the federal government for electricity experiments which are still being conducted. In the distant gloom, I saw the occasional side road with dusty signs describing "Fuel Storage" stations and "BRDN-E1." Security lights in the distance. Something from a science fiction conspiracy film?
So why not drive up to the original reactor site, which is now abandoned? In the failing light, another storm brewing in the west, I drove a mile down one of these roads to find a fenced building, labeled proudly as an historic monument. It was creepy.
I pulled into Idaho Falls, found a hotel with internet service, plotted my course to find a phone tomorrow morning, and then I will push on into Wyoming and Yellowstone on Thursday.
Day Five: Minot, ND, to Chester, MT
It's hard to imagine just how big the American agricultural machine really is. Knowing that I am only scratching the northern tip of flax, corn, and cattle country, this day has been (until its end) an exercise in open sky and broad fields.
 Fleeing Minot was an easy choice—after all, Motley Crue and Culture Club were scheduled to perform, and if Taylor Swift sold out, then surely. . . . but once out of that town, the rest is a series of ranching, old mining, and seed towns linked by railroads and the Milk River.
Once we vanquish trees from our existence and flatten the space around us, the earth drops away and the sky is indeed larger. My peripheral vision cannot absorb it all: multiple weather fronts can be seen from dozens of miles away. I contrast this to my home where I might spot a tornado only if it appeared 50 yards from my roof. Over and over I saw trains with dozens of grain cars—but I saw the entire train, from engine to caboose, and then had acres of room before and after it. Rivers—when they appeared—wound into horizons, not around bends. And, on the horizon, five miles out, behemoths rise . . . two grain elevators, one rotted and abandoned, its windows broken and debris landscape; the other functioning, twenty feet away, slowly shedding its steel and aluminum siding, one corner tower bent askew.
But there is a fine line, I think, between awe and boredom. During some moments of the 8-hour journey, I spoke aloud in surprise: hundreds of hay rolls, spotting the landscape against a series of power lines and a lone river; the nearly florescent lavenders or yellows of flax fields, carved against the gentle slopes; the startling blue of water painted against the green. And the same images later, with my car on cruise control and my legs tucked up against the seat: endless electrical poles against another river bank; pastures of cattle beating the scrub grasses around one fertile field; nearly nothing but green and dirt yellow, green and dirt yellow.
 There is not a car on US-2 (well, except when I slow to 45 to pass through a one-intersection town with a bar called "Bear Paw Pub" or "Black Bear Tavern" on the corner—then there is sometimes a pick-up pulling into or out of the lot); there is not a single worker on any farm (which I contrast to Nepal where endless rice paddies were always spotted with the vivid colors of women working or the ox-plows with men pushing). Occasionally I see a network of automated field sprinklers, hundreds of yards long, slowly wending their way across the sodden fields; rarely I see a combine churning through the green.
So of course I had to find something to do. The stop at a pretty but uninformative "Montana Welcome Center" was thrilling enough. But then I heard about the Fort Peck dam: What, the second largest earthen dam made by hydraulics in the country? Of course!
The stop was worth it. Not only did I find that Montana was working of a tourist theme called Dinosaur Highway in combination with the Lewis and Clark Trail, but the dam (and its New Deal history) was actually stunning. How, in the 1930s, do we decide to dam up the entire Missouri River for a power project and simultaneously create a new reservoir larger than Delaware, New Hampshire, and Connecticut combined? And once the workers of Fort Peck finally finished (and FD Roosevelt cut the ceremonial ribbons) what becomes of the town which rose up during the years of construction? The town is now a living museum with only 1/10 of the population remaining, and the recreation site and wildlife refuge created is one of the largest in the world.
 But where to stay tonight? To break the monotony, I thought I would push on and push on to the next town, but not to get caught searching after dark. What's more, I was driving into an enormous electrical storm. Lightning cracked down in the distance, striking into the town miles away (which I could see because of that flat land (see above!). Sun to the north and south, deep gray-blue anger to the west ahead of me. Could be tornadoes, too—how was I to know?
When I arrived in Chester, I looked for the camping signs (hearing that there were some good ones here near a reservoir). A woman pointed me in the right direction. "How far?" I asked, looking at the front moving closer. "How do I know?" she said. "I just look for the signs." And so I drove south (into the path of this south-easterly storm, down a gravel "highway" bordered by more cornfields. Stopped long enough to get a beautiful photo of an abandoned house against the looming storm—straight out of Andrew Wyeth, so definitely worth it, but then realized that the campground was 15 slow miles down the gravel road.
As I've come to expect, it was nearly empty. I threw up my tent and made a fire as the storm inched closer. The campground was nearly treeless, just shrubs and a sapling to shelter me—ha. Cooked a fast meal, dove into the tent, and the rain and wind came down.
It lasted all night, but I slept hard and the tent held. The only mystery when I rose early to leave in the morning was that the few campers I saw in the distance had pulled out in their RVs sometime in the night and that—I try not to think about how this happened—one of the hot logs I had left in the iron-grill covered fire had vanished: not ashes, not a miscount—the charred smoking thing had been taken.
Day Six: Into Glacier
So I fled the campground without stopping for breakfast. It was too isolated, too weird: Andrew Wyeth meets Franz Kafka narrated by Rod Serling. And I didn't realize just how close I was to Glacier! By 8:30, I was in the park, winding my way along curved roads, past dozens of B&Bs, trying to hold myself to the road while I gawked at the next bend's angle on the Rocky Mountains. I would see it all in time—I concentrated on getting into the park, going up to Babb and hoping for a spot in one of the most popular camps, Many Glacier. I got in, with only two or three spots remaining. Yes, the light from the public toilet (flush!) is over my right shoulder as I type, but it is a small price.
 Went down to walk the Grinnell Glacier trail for an hour while I waited for a nature walk to start. Met a small group there and we returned to the ranger-led trip. Saw a black bear, fairly close, missed the grizzly that was reported 20 minutes up the trail, spent a fair amount of time with two moose in a small lake, and saw baby calliope hummingbirds. Pretty good for my first afternoon there.
Went down to see Glacier Hotel which my brother described as Stephen King-esque, and he's right. If the hallways were a little more narrow and winding, I could ride a Big Wheel down them and see the twin girls. Picked up a forgettable boat cruise at the hotel (why did I do that, again?), and saw that the canoe rentals were expensive and wouldn't get me very far in the lake—portage, my brother's suggestion—seemed like an unclear possibility without maps and such, which are hard to find  here.
And then, around 6 this evening, I tried a hike to Akkupenny Falls, only a mile into the mountains. The rangers start with hiking rule #1: Don't hike alone. I reasoned that if many others were on the trail, that counted as following the rule. Lots of cars at the trail head, but no one on my particular trail. This afternoon's ranger underlined the danger of bear and cougar attacks, and I started singing my "Mister Ed" songs again (see Alaska stories). Okay, so maybe my imagination is vivid, and maybe that is combined with a reality statistic of 350 or more grizzly, an unknown number of mountain lions, and real incidents of people dying from attacks. Those odds are better than automobile accidents (and I drive cars) and lotto winners (which I've occasionally played). I, uh, turned around about a half mile up, talking about statistics to any bear that was listening. Besides, I have more to do with my life after my trip to Glacier.
Tomorrow I try the "Heart of Glacier" hike, but it is ranger-led and with a group. Pretty challenging for this 46 year old body, I think, but it will be a good mid-way point to the trip. Wednesday I will leave early to do the Going-to-the-Sun Road early enough to beat the traffic and see some wildlife—then we'll see what the west side of the park brings.
But tragedy struck today. Not only is my phone out of service up here, but it fell to the rocks during my near-hike to the Appekunny (I used it for a clock). The screen has broken, and so Twitter updates and text messages are no more until I find a new one. I'm surprisingly emotionless about it; but I type this blog in the now silent campground, large buzzing critters about my head as I sit at this picnic table, and the temperature drops.
7/26/2009
 Day Three: Porcupine Mountains to Chippewa Nat'l Forest
Early morning is probably the best time to visit the three falls along the river here. Again, eerily, no one is on these trails—outside of the occasional wooden post suggesting a marker, I can easily imagine these as they have always been. . . . My closing view of the Porcupine Mountains is of the slow waters of the Presque Isle River emptying into Superior.
Most of the day was spent, then, wandering from tiny town to tiny town: Rose Peak (Pop. 425), Benning (Pop. 112), Pole's Lake (Pop. 52). From Michigan's Upper Peninsula through Wisconsin and most of northern Minnesota, a long wooded patrol of abandoned gas stations ("Where is the nearest station?" "Don't know. Next town, mebbe"), homes the size of hunter shacks (their doors open and rotting), battered trucks in high weed. Religious fundamentalism is in high form here with hand-painted signs in lawns arguing for "Unconditional Election" (John Calvin?), "No Jesus, No Peace," and, disconcertingly, "Devotional Paintball." The forests are thick with mosquitoes. This America votes, too.
 I detoured through 13 along the northern coast of Wisconsin in hopes of exploring the Apostle Islands, but the short trip through tiny Bayfield was enough to turn me away—suddenly the primitive was filled with flower-boxed coffee shops and tourist-priced boat tours, the small dock clogged with plaid-skirted or fishing-hatted seniors paying $60 for a three-hour tour. The Apostles may be pretty, but I'll save my land travels for a road less traveled.
That road took me to the Red Cliff Indian reservation, some Lake Superior lakeshore, and—again—a walk and lunch along the rocks and water with no one in sight.
This was soon to end as I reached Minnesota (with apologies to Duluth because it has a beautiful skyway and views): I pushed past Grand Rapids through the Chippewa to Bemidji, but was completely unable to find a campground (that wasn't a KOA RV heaven) or even a hotel. I drove 40 miles back through the Chippewa and found a remote insect-laden site deep in the woods. By this time it was late, a crew of drunken boys made random animal noises somewhere in the distance (probably more dangerous than the animals if I knew where they were), and I pitched my tent and slept.
Day Four: Minnesota to Minot, ND
 Fled Minnesota early after I broke down and bought a large breakfast. As I predicted, the forests finally clear away quickly, leaving flat land and a sky piled high with clouds. Outside Bemidji, everything west and into North Dakota is an exercise in industrial agriculture: towns are labeled as the "Cattle Capital" and the "Ethanol Empire;" gray grain silos with only company abbreviations (CHF or STU) rise hundreds of feet over the miles of wheat and corn, perhaps obscuring the missile silos which are managed by nearby Air Force bases.
Every truck is a Chevy with rear windows painted with US flags. Men stand in circles near stopped field machinery, their hands stuffed in the back pockets of jeans. North Dakota may be the most obese state in the nation. The ride is very long, but I am saved by books on CD.
 Devil's Lake is a welcome reprieve. I turn south along 57 to reach Fort Totten and a National Wildlife Refuge, but along the way (passing the Spirit Lake Reservation's hilltop casino), I pass atop the rocky transom over the lake itself. Devil's Lake has long been a site of the old Chautauqua tents which traveled with their revival shows (love irony), but this lake has lived up to its name.
The shores are desperately engineered rocks against an angry blue-slate water which apparently has been rising for years. The lake has no rivers to drain it. Melt-off feeds it. And dozens of feet out in every direction are the corpses of trees rising from the water as it slowly consumes more real estate. Signs warn me to watch for water over the road. Boats anchor in the turbulent water to fish among the treetops.
Fort Totten (once a barracks for the army to defend railroads against Indians—never needed; once an Indian school, once a tuberculosis clinic) is now a tourist museum currently being formed. I am left to wander the buildings (there are no others here) on my own and I see the effort to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," our country's historical goal of ethnocentrically reprogramming boys and girls, removing the primitive culture and civilizing them. Of course, we abandoned this  approach in the 1930s, but the residue of our history is outside the steel fence around the grounds: the Spirit Lake reservation is here, its boarded one-story square homes have tire-anchored rooftops over the littered yards—they are reminiscent of some of the slums of Nepal. The casino, at least, is doing well.
Rugby, the geographical center of North America, has only that to show for itself. A small cairn of rocks sits before an internet café to announce the honor.
And, with trepidation, I chose to splurge on a hotel room for a hot shower tonight, and to find one in Minot (rhymes with "Why Not?"). Yes, I had heard when I entered ND that Minot was hosting the State Fair this week. I did not know that Taylor Swift was doing a sold-out show here. I also did not know that the State Fairgrounds were the first thing I would encounter off the exit. The people lined up for 40,000 carnival games, three automobile contests (beginning with Monster Trucks), two rodeos, 42 elephant ear stands, and Taylor Swift seats are a mash of color and sugar and exhaust fumes. North Dakota may be the most obese state in the nation.
On a whim, I check a hotel here and ask if there is a room. The woman sets down the phone and says that she just received a cancellation; I have the last room available in town. And the shower is hot. |
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