I Wanna be a Cowgirl, Pt. 2 (Bethany)

Given how immune I am to the majority of tourist traps, I was surprised how much I loved Mount Rushmore.

 If Frank Lloyd Wright was a sculptor, he would have made Rushmore (in fact it is the work of one Gutzon Borglum, fyi, and a big team of helpers)
—the work is clean and simple and inspired, not the gaudy bit of Americana that it always seemed to me. We climbed an excellent National Park Service trail right to the foot of the mountain, looked up everyone’s nose and laughed, and left having had a thoroughly worthwhile experience. Note to myself and any of the rest of you who may come after—skip Rapid City and stay in Keystone, a hokey, cheap-as-dickens wild west town with nice hotels for $50 (White House Inn, Presidential View). Lunch was a hot dog, Dilly bar and Sprite for the kids. We’re great parents.

We hit the road in earnest after that, flying through the last bit of South Dakota and the northeast corner of Wyoming and into Montana, an unending, waving prairie dotted with cattle and spotted horses and antelopes everywhere. There are far more trailers than houses out here, except when there is a proper town. We went through Sturgis, home of the nation’s largest biker bar, and past Deadwood, which advertised everything from bars to car dealerships to interesting caves by sticking a picture of a woman in a bikini on a billboard. The honesty was refreshing: Dudes will look at anything in a bikini, and may then suddenly decide they need a soda or a new car.

Once in Montana, the landscape began to change slowly; trees appeared in creek-beds, there were hills and sharp folds in the earth. We passed through the Cheyenne reservation and the Crow reservation, all trailers and spotted ponies and cars that you can’t believe are on the road.

We passed an early 80’s white Ford with five Indians in it, limping along with smoke pouring out the tailpipe, no plates, no rear bumper, no windows, and the windshield shot through with spiderweb cracks; the brake light covers were smashed out too, so when the brakes went on the lights glowed white. Hard to imagine where they were going. We passed a church with a huge hand-painted sign saying “Jesus is Lord on the Crow Reservation,” right next to a group of trailers that looked like they had been bombed—cardboard-covered windows and upturned cars, the only sign of life the skinny mustangs foraging among the laundry hung out to dry. Think about that for a little bit. I sure did.

It is now about 9:30 p.m. and I have been writing in fits and starts. We’re about an hour away from our destination, a hotel outside Yellowstone, and my eyes are starting to smart from writing in the dark, so I’m calling it quits for now. It’s hard to stop—we wound up at Little Bighorn in the early evening and I want to write about it while it’s fresh, but it will have to wait.

Sleep tight, friends, and think of us, trundling through Montana in the dark.