Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy

After the tornado scare (see previous post) the rest of the drive wasn’t horrible, and we made it to South Dakota with relative ease by driving through the night. Since I’m generally the sleepless one, I usually do the graveyard shift driving (let’s say, from 4am-9am or so). When you drive at this time you get to appreciate things like the sunrise, which I’m never, ever awake for in normal life. Driving due west also means that the sun rises directly behind you, and seeing it in the rearview mirror gave me a satisfying feeling, but I can’t figure out why.

Our plan was to roll into Rapid City, SD and maybe unwind for a few hours, maybe spend the night and then drive the other 7 or so hours to Yellowstone. Well plans changed when we got to Rapid City and there was actually nothing there. I guess I was expecting Rapid City to be, I dunno, a city? But as far as I could tell there were just farms, farm equipment shops, and weird little tourist sites. I made an executive decision that we would keep driving.

Then there were the bikers. What we were only vaguely aware of when heading towards SD is that this week was Sturgis Biker Week, where thousands of bikers meet up in Sturgis, SD for a week-long motorcycle festival (lonely planet says up to half a million bikers may attend Sturgis each year). This meant that there were bikers everywhere. Everywhere. I’ve definitely never seen so much leather chaps or man-ponytails in my life. And they gave me a little bit of an uneasy feeling. I guess I really don’t know much about bikers, just what tv teaches you, so I had mixed feelings of curiosity and fear. I kept my distance for the most part, not that any of them wanted anything to do with me anyway since I drove a car with New York plates. I cant stress enough the alienation that this brings, people really seem to react negatively. Maybe like wearing a swastika in a synagogue. No, not really. More like wearing a huge confederate flag t shirt in New York (excluding upstate). It just marks you as that kind of person, take that as you will.

Now, lemme tell you ‘bout Cody, Wyoming. Apparently this is a town where Buffalo Bill Cody hung out while he was in Wyoming, so they named the town after him at some point and turned it into the largest piece of crap tourist town I have ever seen. Complete with nightly rodeo, old fashioned trading post and “old west miniature village”, it was like Disneyland ate the movie Tombstone and then took an enormous shit in this spot. Old timey wooden buildings with neon store fronts made us both gag, and it was a relief to drive right through the place without stopping on the way to Yellowstone.

So, couple hours later we made it to Yellowstone and after buying park entrance the Ranger told us that the park was completely full (really, full? It’s a pretty big place, from what I understand…) and that we would have to stay somewhere else tonight. Unfortunately, the only town within about two hours of The Eastern Park Entrance is… yeah, Cody.

Balls.

We drove back into town and looked for a motel for the night. Unfortunately, the Sturgis bikers were really interested in hokey wild west towns and all the rooms everywhere were booked. All of them. But we didn’t discover this until after driving to about 15 motels and walking in to ask for rooms. After unsuccessfully trying the Holiday Inn (complete with cow skull behind the reception desk) we were both pissed off and tired. With no place to stay, nowhere to eat and no options we both agreed on one thing: we missed Chicago. Things there had been the sort of magical, wacky adventure I had wished for, but this was now the sort of stressful and wandering trip my more practical side had counted on. We both reiterated how much we wished we were still in Chicago until we were both sick of hearing it, then after struggling for another hour, we found a campsite outside of town and stayed there for the night. We ate at Subway, set up our tent and tried to sleep.

Elliot fell asleep pretty quickly, but I was feeling restless as usual and stayed awake for a while. In the middle of the night, a car pulled up to the tent site next to ours and a man and woman, who sounded married and middle aged, got out of the car and started to set up a tent. I never actually saw them, but it was pretty easy to get an idea of what they were like and what was going on from the noise they were making. The two of them had come camping, brought their two dogs and were now struggling with the difficulties of dealing with both of those things at once. The dogs (there were 2 of them) were pretty upset, after having been dragged to an unfamiliar location and then made to sleep in the car while the two people slept in their tent.

“Be quiet!! Dogs, shut up!! Shut. Up!” the woman yelled at the dogs in one of those whisper yells that clearly showed she wanted to frighten the dogs into listening to her, but not embarrass herself in front of her new camping neighbors (i.e. us). The two dogs kept on barking, and the woman lost her temper after awhile. Then she opened the car door, rustled about for a second, and screamed:

“I’M GOING TO BEAT YOU, PUGGLE!!”

…at the time I found this to be pretty hilarious, and I laughed about it again later when I recounted the story to Elliot. I mean, the whole thing was absurd as hell, and to cap it off with such a ridiculous exclamation was just too funny. And puggle? Basically the funniest dog breed name it could have been, except for maybe “labradoodle”.

But later on I started feeling kind of bad. After all, it wasn’t the dog’s fault that it was so upset. What did the woman expect? She takes it to the middle of nowhere and leaves it locked in the car, while she and her husband sleep in a tent about 5 feet away, teasing the dog with the prospective comfort of its owners company. Not only that, but even the funniest part of the whole thing, the fact that she had called it “puggle” was kind of sad too. She hadn’t even used the dog’s name, kind of reducing it to a blanket concept, or even a thing. It was like when a pimp yells at a hooker “Ima slap you, bitch!”. He doesn’t use her name, he calls her bitch to make it less personal, so it’ll be easier to actually go through with the threat when the time comes. This made me think that she was the type of person who would actually beat a dog, and I felt bad for this thing that I now felt kind of close to, even though I had only heard it, not seen it. I thought about all the things I maybe should have done, stepped in and told the woman to shut the hell up, that dogs don’t speak English but I definitely do so she was really just bothering me and not them. That it was her fault and she shouldn’t be mad at them. Just completely bitch her out, loud enough for everyone around us to hear. And then I would insult her by calling her “old lady” or even better yet “you bitch” or the even more unlikely but satisfying “you old bitch”. That way when I thought about the whole thing later I wouldn’t feel bad about it, because she would be, to me, just some old bitch.

-jason

(as if it wasnt obvious, this was me trying to be david sedaris. anyway, next time: Yellowstone.)