Overheard at Mt. Rushmore
- If you don't start acting like a big boy, we're going RIGHT back to the motel.
- Not THAT button. Push the OTHER button. That's the WRONG button.
- Sit with grandma here in the shade. Grandma doesn't want to go any closer.
- That's not the zoom, THIS is the zoom.
- Zachary, Zachary, Zachary, are you listening to me?
- I think old Dubya would look pretty good up there next to Washington.
- You want more money? For what? An ice cream? Didn't Daddy already buy you a nice camera and this trip? Daddy doesn't have any more money.
- I can't hear you...I can't get a good signal...I'm NOT in the office. I've got the kids and I'm in South DAKOTA...at Mt. Rushmore. It's HOT here. I couldn't hear that last thing. WHAT? I have to call you back. You can't get a decent signal anywhere up here.
- Zachary, Zachary, Zachary, get OFF of that.
- Look at how good that little boy is being. You are being a very bad boy.
- Bo, Bo, Bo, Bobo, sit here with your grandma.
- Sarah, don't run. Don't run down there. Sarah. Sarah.
- He's being such an asshole this whole trip. He told me that once he got finished with rebuilding that truck that he was going to be sweet like when we got married.
- Zachary, get your hands out of your mouth. We have to go to that nice place and have lunch now. Zachary, Zachary.
RV Life, Vol. 1 - Rapid City, SD
All in all, the life in the big tin can is quite sweet. Check with me on different days about this, though, because I am sometimes a little dark, dark like the Grinch, dark like Monty Clift.
We have a 26" TV with DVD and VCR, and an auto satellite dish that pivots and twirls till it locks on a giant floating TV machine that floats - always - above the Texas gulf coast. We have hundreds of crystal clear channels, and mostly I just make it go from 201 to 545 as fast as possible.
We have the microwave, a nice refrigerator, three burners, and an oven big enough for the thinnest cookies ever made. We have slideouts in the living room and bedroom, enabling us to increase floor space in each of those rooms by 50%. The bedroom has a nice queen size bed, with room to walk around both sides. Storage is good. I have the seven shirts that make up my wardrobe, and my wife has along about what Diana Ross packs with her when she goes to Europe for a month. The living room has a 4-seater dining room table and a full length couch. You can really stretch out. When the sun's up, we have all the windows open, and the views are almost always pretty spectacular, given where we've been traveling.
The bathroom? Well, the shower is located about half way back in the RV, and on one side, and as long as you're under 6 feet tall, it's an efficient space. Imagine a phone booth. Then think of something smaller than that. Something that would fit inside a phone booth. With running water. And slick surfaces. The toilet area is across the hall from the shower, and includes a stool, wash basin, and enough storage for 2 toothbrushes, some soap, some towels, and the medium size tube of Crest. When you shave in there, your elbow beats a nice pattern on the side of the wall, but if your belly wasn't as big as mine, you'd think you were in a phone booth. Or something that would fit inside a phone booth. With a little chair.
The cab of the motorhome is great, CD player, weather band radio. We have a super handheld GPS unit - given to Beth by her former colleagues at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. - that tells us where we are, and more importantly, which upcoming exits have gas stations - or a Taco Bell! The seats up front are comfy. They tilt, got the big captain's arms. It's like Kirk on the Enterprise, I guess, except I'm pretty sure Kirk didn't have to actually steer as they hurtled through the universe like I'm doing.
By day we drive, stopping absolutely whenever we want, making sandwiches at rest areas or scenic overlooks. Sometimes I take a cigar out and stand there, like today, staring out at the spectacular Badlands of central and western South Dakota. Sometimes we just sit inside, slurp our soup, make phone calls on one of the cell phones, or just marvel at the gas receipts that we sometimes hold up to the light...$87 at the Exxon in Sioux City, Iowa. Are we part owners there now?
Those who know me think it's inconceivable that I've made it through the first week. I'm a bit of a motel whore. I love the Holiday Inn Express, the Radisson, the Sheraton. I'll even be happy at the Comfort Inn, the Super 8 in a pinch. If there's an ice machine, cable TV, and a Denny's next door, I'm there. But the RV life is so amazingly different. While the inside of the RV never changes - much like hotel rooms all sort of run together - the various machinations around parking a 29 foot motorhome and hooking up to power, water, and sewer each night, and negotiating the sometimes dodgy campground setting, bugs, snakes, outdoor bathrooms, etc. is just not part of my nature.
Yet, here we are, day 8 and still married. My wife and I have a great system going; should I ever need a hotel day, she's said, just take it. We'll park the beast, pack up an overnight bag, and let the Ramada Inn care for me for the night. It's a great option, and one that I'm glad to have. Yet, I've not exercised it yet. I want to push on, in the spirit of great adventurers everywhere, Lewis and Clark, etc. I am tough as nails. While watching the Cubs and Marlins last night on TV, drinking a cold Coors Light and watching the hot dogs cook on the stove, I felt like an explorer crossing the Continental Divide. I was making my own way across the country.
Later, after finishing the new Grisham, I set the furnace to 70 degrees, turned off all the lights, got in under the sheets and comforter, thought about those settlers, traveling the same route I was on. They weren't so great.
David Allan Evans - Brookings, SD
God bless Wal-Mart. When we are low on supplies, and unable to park the giant beast in any of the now impossibly tiny town squares of the Midwest, a familiar sign up ahead tells us that all is safe. As we arrive in Brookings, South Dakota, we turn the Winnebago on a dime and extravagantly take up two nose-to-nose spaces in the far reaches of a gigantic parking lot. We stroll inside, buy some new RV anti-freeze, some tiny cans of soup, a magazine or two. We just stand there in the dazzling hum of enterprise. When it's time to go, we go freely. There will be another Wal-Mart. Even when things are darkest, we know one is waiting out there for us, with toilet paper, CDs, Pepsi, and batteries.
Evans's poetry was pretty new to me when I started working on this book. But I took to it immediately because it was so in sync with my own ethos about poetry, place, and the physical world.
He meets me at the door and we go down to his basement to chat. Like other basements I've seen on this trip, this one is full of books. It's well lit, and his computer rests in the far corner. We sit on comfortable chairs and start talking about poems from his upcoming book, a personal best collection of work of his from over 30 years.
I ask him about the poems written about his hometown, Sioux City, Iowa, and despite the fact that he's been in South Dakota now for 35 years, he talks fondly and in detail about the alleys and streets of his hometown.
He talks about his long interest in the physical world. He was a pole vaulter, played all kinds of sports, and is as comfortable fishing or hunting pheasant as he is writing about all of them. When we talk about places that have inspired his work, he rattles off a number of poems that couldn't have existed without the genesis that the world has provided him, a poem about bullfrogs, poems about the packing plant where his dad worked.
We go through his lovely, almost sprawling home, and go out into the back yard. It's sunny today. Crisp. It is a time in South Dakota when it occasionally is already snowing. But it's brilliant and pretty. We shoot some photos. We go around to the front and he admires the size of my motorhome. And then I'm gone.
On Dust, Corn, and Popcorn People
In the southwest corner of Iowa, we pull in to my brother-in-law's house south of a town called Red Oak. He's taught there for almost 25 years, and he's my wife's only brother. He's a funny and brilliant guy who knows enough about history and baseball to keep you talking all night.
My wife's family is from Iowa, and she was born just about 20 miles from here. One of our stops this weekend is to that little town, but we also have plans to see a square of countries, about 25 miles across, six counties, all in southwest Iowa.
Most folks have no concept of the Midwest. To them, it's just a flyover area of blank spaces, a green patch in a road atlas, a place they've never been. There is some sense of cold. If you say "Iowa," some folks imagine corn.
But there's so much corn you can't even fully describe it. As we drive the highways, dirt roads, and gravel roads (all brilliantly straight north and south or east and west) we are always bordering corn or soy bean fields. The corn stalks are dead, harvested, but still straight and standing and whistling a bit in any breeze. Up close they make a rustling sound, like cardboard against paper, dead leaves against a window. Field after field, and nothing but that on the horizon. Trees only intrude inside towns or around river bottoms. The fields themselves are uncluttered, rows and endless rows, sometimes a shocking group of silver silos, a single combine or harvester, a row of gigantic power lines escaping toward Nebraska.
On a blue and sunny Saturday my brother-in-law drives us around. We roll in his giant Buick on dusty roads, the dust pouring in vents or closed windows. Dust so thick it makes a fog around you. Think Pigpen. Think Cary Grant in "North by Northwest." Dust so heavy you can feel it on your tongue. You sneeze. You blow your nose, then take another deep breath of dust. The car is full of dust, but how could it not be. It's been a drought year and dust is what you get from that.
Every town we see has a population of about 800. Some smaller. Some larger. My brother-in-law tells us which towns are dying out, which ones are hanging on. They all look much the same, with old prairie-style homes from the turn of the century, a tiny post office, one or two restaurants (one's always a buffet). Farmers push into town in pickups or congregate on benches or by the feed stores.
Everyone waves, smiles. The sun beats down on a late autumn day. The crop for corn was okay this year, the soy beans won't be quite as good. But it's a beautiful place, even with the dust.
We roll into Hamburg, Iowa, where my wife was born, and where she's not been since that day. It's like most of the other towns we've seen, but a little larger, a little more prosperous. "These are all popcorn," my brother-in-law says, pointing at over a hundred squatty silos, about 40 feet high, about 40 feet across. They have a popcorn festival here each year. We find the hospital, a one story deal, three or four wings, and my brother-in-law looks at me and says, "You should be bowing. They probably have a statue of her in there." I look back and smile at my wife, but can't see her through the dust in the back seat.
We go through town and then head up a small hill that leads through some homes. (There are hills in Iowa, and Kansas, and all the rest.) "These are all popcorn people up here," my brother-in-law says, as we wind up and right into the driveway of a nice brick house, sprawling, green lawn. A kid on a lawn mower nods at us and keeps going. We get out for a minute and peer over the back of their back yard, fields, a distant Interstate, and dust rising off a county road and a single green pickup.
We go by another town, where my wife graduated high school, and another where my brother-in-law's high school volleyball team is going to play that week. One of his players is sick, his best player. She has mono or West Nile, something. She missed the last couple of games. The phones in the area have been buzzing about her; will she get well? Will she back to play Malvern? We have to have her back to beat Malvern.
We head up another gravel road. It's big enough for one and half cars of this size, so we're right in the middle. Dust roars in both sides of the car. I'm smiling, holding my breath. Corn rushes by both sides. Suddenly, a giant red combine appears ahead of us, moving in the same direction, but slower. My brother-in-law is pointing out the window on his side. "One of my players lives there," as he motions at a small farm house down a dirt road. We fly past the combine, two wheels half in the ditch, the combine's massive red arm right at eye level on my side.
When the day is over, we get out of the Buick and the dust settles on me, my clothes. I worry about the motorhome. My tin can will be full of dust. I will have to clean it all out before I get back on the road.
