I Wanna be a Cowgirl, Pt. 1 (Bethany)

It’s late afternoon and we’re somewhere in Montana driving on one of those terrifying, two-lane not-quite highways through hundreds of miles of nothing but cows and pronghorn antelope and widely separated one-saloon towns. Huge double-trailer trucks come barreling down on us, looking for all the world like they are in our lane and we’re all going to die, and you can see your death coming from miles away because everything is totally flat. They rush by and the van bends to the right just a bit. It’s the kind of road where you develop relationships with the other cars that are there with you for a while and the truckers wave just to have some sort of human contact. We had an old guy and his wife behind us for a bit—he had a giant cowboy hat on and they were driving a dented old Lincoln that passed us at about 120 mph. We loved them.

We just drove through Broadus, a tiny, sleepy, rusted little town with the Sunday afternoon rodeo in full swing downtown—big bleached 80’s hair and cowboy hats. You get the most meager of glimpses of these things, of course, whipping through town at forty miles an hour, but I feel like I know it better than I care to admit—brought back memories of the Fort Saint John Rodeo in British Columbia when I was a kid. We brought horses there to sell, and I have a distant memory of riding in a chuck-wagon, a souped up thing meant for racing around a ring with teams of horses. It’s all pretty far back. Here in these wide-open places Adam points to groups of cows and horses and asks questions about branding chutes and irrigation ponds and Angus cattle and I know the answer more often than not.


Recently I became friends on Facebook with one of my best friends from my bizarre girlhood in B.C., but we have not yet had a real conversation. This trip and all its little triggers are making me want to talk to her, almost desperately, to check these things with her and see what she remembers. I have a picture of her, blonde and smiling, arm draped around the neck of a palomino horse whose name I can’t even remember—Summer, maybe, Autumn? It gets further and further away as I get older, which is both a blessing and a tragedy. I wish I could disappear for a few days when I get to Seattle and drive up there, but I’m afraid it will have to wait for another time.

Anywho, back to the trip. It’s funny the things that come up when you’re in the car for days and days.

I know Adam covered the trip out of Michigan in great detail, so I will just add a few of my impressions. Most of the day on Friday was spent driving in an arch around the top of Lake Michigan, with Adam declaring that he wanted to stop for pasties every five feet and then blowing past whatever establishment was advertising them and being bitterly disappointed, until we passed the next place that he wanted to stop at, blew by, was crushed, etc. When we finally stopped at a gas station and he got himself a pastie of his very own, it was a great relief to us all. It is remarkable how huge the lake is, and therefore how much lakefront property there is, and yet most of it was just pretty sad and desolate, though charming in its retro poverty. There was a great deal of artfully arranged yard trash. I couldn’t help but think of the lake-house I could have for ten bucks and some beaver skins.

I drove in the rain through most of Wisconsin, which was rolling and beautiful and filled with huge dairy farms, as you might imagine. We stopped at a charming family restaurant in a small town off the highway, and people came in, rocking their workboots and green jeans and greeting each other by their first names, all plump and round-faced women and broad-shouldered men in trucker caps. Minnesota went by at night, and I slept for a few hours in preparation for another shift behind the wheel. There was a good hour of late-night navigating when we were detoured off the highway through endless cornfields and grain silos, train tracks criss-crossing roads that turned to dirt periodically. The poor truckers who had been detoured along with us downshifted and roared in frustration and kicked up huge clouds of dust on either side of us.

We passed into South Dakota sometime in the wee hours of the morning, made more wee by losing two hours to first central and then mountain time. Adam turned over the wheel somewhere in Minnesota and went to sleep, so I was alone when the hills disappeared and the stars seemed to reach right down to the horizon. Adam and I had a long, serious talk before he went to sleep, and I had popped a No-Doz, a leftover from my college days, and so I was deep in thought and then it was two, then three, then four in the morning, and at some point I had to pee so bad I just pulled over and cowgirled it in the bushes and had a semi-religious experience, not from the peeing (which to its credit was spectacular), but from what happened when I righted myself and looked around. It was the darkest black night I have ever experienced, and the sky was swimming with stars—seemingly millions of them, dizzying and completely unlike anything I have ever seen. There was no light anywhere on the horizon, nobody else on the road, no sound at all. It made Mackinac Island seem like a cacophony. After a minute, of course, you start hearing things—chirps and squeaks and rustles. The smell of the prairie sage was overwhelming—like cinnamon and mint, and varied depending where you were standing. All of your senses seem to revert to their natural state when there aren’t so many things to filter out, and just standing there by the side of the road in South Dakota was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. We got on the road again, stopped at a truck stop to get gas, and I had a quick lovely chat with the Indian dude behind the counter (I’m an INDIAN, he said, when I asked him something about Native Americans in the area). There was a buffalo skin on the wall and they sold knives made from their horns, and bison jerky. We were very close to the Pine Ridge Reservation.

We pulled into the Badlands National Park about 5:30, just as the sky was getting dusky around the edges, and slept for about an hour. We woke to Jed going mad with joy at the sight of so many rocks that he could climb, and before my eyes were even fully open, he was off like a shot across the otherworldly hills, pink in the early morning light, sleepy Meg and her sleepy mama trying in vain to keep up, sleepy dad doing a better job. We spent a remarkable morning there, meandering up paths to sheer drop-offs, running off down dry creek beds littered with tumbled rocks and fossils. On our way out of the park we stopped to hang out with prairie dogs and bison and then picked our way over to Rapid City, S.D., to the crap-tastic Foothills Inn, where we were greeted by one surly clerk after another. Breakfast this morning was a frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich and a shrug in the direction of the microwave. Still, it was clean enough and I was so tired after 28 hours on the road that I would have slept standing up on a spike. Rapid City is a frankly terribly depressing place, filled with pawn shops, multiple outlets of every fast food joint you have ever heard of, and little storefront casinos with tired Indians smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Our most nutritious option for dinner was an Outback Steakhouse, nestled in the warren of hotels off the highway, a more upscale option than we could find in town, which is saying something. It’s pretty hard to eat well when you’re on the road, and I’m sure I will return ten pounds heavier and completely cured of any secret attraction to fast food. If I ever see another Hardees, it will be a billion years too soon. On our way out of town, at yet another drive-through, this one a Starbucks, a very cheerful and clean-cut young Indian guy leaned out the window and struck up a conversation with Adam, who asked him a million questions about his background and his experience, which he answered cheerfully. He said he was Oglala Sioux and was pretty excited that we knew a bit about the reservation he was from (the appallingly impoverished Pine Ridge). In my long experience with Adam, people’s responses to his barrage of questions are a pretty good indicator of how interesting and smart they are, and our friend was very happy to share his rez experience (bleak), and offer advice to well-meaning guilt-ridden white folks like ourselves (“You can send all the books you want, but you can’t make kids read them,” he said). He had found his way out through the National Guard, and given the number of armed forces recruiting centers all through town, he is one of many. We wished him the best and sped off in the direction of Mount Rushmore.