Not in your Schoolbooks

For three of us on the road trip, Rochester was a big part of our lives. Heather, Liz and I all graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. The three of us all started our careers there, and for several years, we lived there before moving on and elsewhere.

Tuesday morning, four of us once again woke up in Rochester. Except this time we were in Minnesota.

We weren’t even supposed to be in Rochester, Minnesota.

If things had gone the way they were planned, we’d have been in Souix Falls, South Dakota by that point, but they hadn’t, and we weren’t. We spent an extra six hours in Chicago on Monday, and we had fallen roughly two hundred and fifty miles short of our goal. There was a lot of road to make up. We started driving by 6:00 AM.

Minnesota starts with some very picturesque hills and views of the Mississippi River. The river itself is a bit less awe inspiring than any of us had expected, what with everything we’d read back in elementary school, growing up in the northeast. By contrast, you don’t read much about Minnesota when you grow up in the northeast, and based on what we saw as we entered the state, I expected we might have been shortchanged.

There’s a reason they didn’t write about Minnesota in our textbooks. If they had, it would say this:

"The banks of the Mississippi River on the Minnesota side are gorgeous, with some very picturesque hills. The rest of the state, travelling east, is made of a big, flat open grass field. If you have to drive across it on I-90, do it really early in the morning because you won’t miss anything, and it would be a shame to burn daylight there."

We made up our time and proceeded into South Dakota little worse for wear. The mile markers reset to something in the low 400s, and the grass changed from green to brown. Other than that, you’d have never known you crossed the state line.

Oh, except for the huge sign welcoming you to South Dakota. And the well maintained rest stop-slash-visitors center. And the many, many roadside billboards.

Here’s another tidbit we didn’t learn from our schoolbooks. The chief agricultural export of South Dakota is roadside billboards. They grow there at an alarming pace, and miraculously, without any particular care or necessary seasonal conditions. To farm billboards, all one needs is a stretch of land bordering a highway and a small piece of plywood. You plant the plywood firmly in the ground perpendicular to the grain of the highway, and in just a few days you’ll have a crop of several hundred billboards sprouting over the next quarter mile. The most common blooms show the markings of Wall Drug, though one could just as easily expect billboards showing sentiments against animal rights activists, militant pro-life propaganda, or the names of any of several dozen lackluster tourist traps. Once these billboards reach maturity, they are picked and shipped all over the country, where they are repainted and replanted, though none planted outside of South Dakota ever sprout new billboardlings with the frequency of their South Dakotan ancestors. Unharvested billboards can stand for as many as sixty years, and their slow, methodical decay often serves as excellent fertilizer for new growth.

We knew when we were in South Dakota, and without skipping over too much, we knew when we were leaving it.

We knew going into South Dakota that we wanted to see Mount Rushmore. We also knew that Mount Rushmore was located near mile marker 50, and we entered the state at marker 410. There was a lot of driving to be done between thos points. It was established early on that Mitchell would be a good break point for food and fuel, and the signs approaching Mitchell boasted of the "World’s Only Corn Palace". Curiosity got the best of us, and we were making good time, so we decided that the detour was worth it.


Mitchell has a town Community Center and Auditorium covered entirely in corn. It seems there should be something more complicated about this part of the story, but there’s not. The town loves their Corn Palace; they’re proud of it the way parents pick one child and boast about that child above all their others, proclaiming that child "the favorite" and the rest "disappointing failures made of wasted years, fluids and genetic chaff". Sometimes there are concerts at the Corn Palace. The tour guides were proud to show posters of the summer’s earlier performers, including but not limited to Eddie Monkey, Lee Anne Rhimes and The Cheetah Girls (Raven Simone from the Cosby Show for the uninitiated).

The value in the Corn Palace is not necessarily in the artwork of the corn murals — which from a design standpoint are cleverly created on a limited color pallette with an unconventional medium — but that in such an innocuous location, over 100 years ago somebody chose to make something out of nothing, and for a century since, the people of the town have chosen to reaffirm its worth by doing it over and over again. The Corn Palace isn’t a place of particular historical, political, artistic, agricultural or mechanical importance, it’s simply a tradition, and a way to make Mitchell stand out amongst all the other small towns of South Dakota. It is identity by non-conformity. If the palace were just put there in 2002, it would be just another tacky roadside tourism gimmick. But in Mitchell, they really have been doing it longer than any one person in town could possibly remember. There is no reason for it other than that’s what they do, and in some bizarre logic, that’s exactly the best reason for them to continue doing it.

For me, that makes it an art. Art can very well be for art’s sake, and can very justifiably be for tradition’s sake. Sometimes there’s something profound in the mundane. If you’re ever in Mitchell, South Dakota, remember that.

Incidentally, we also saw this sign in Mitchell. I’m fairly certain that their intent was to publicize their "SWEET and sour pork", but several of us saw this and did a double take. If it’s all the same, I’ll just have the sour pork, thank you.

And then there’s Wall.

You’ve probably seen a bumper sticker somewhere before declaing that the car bearing the sticker has been to Wall Drug. They’re nearly as prolific as the "This Car Climbed MT. WASHINGTON" stickers are back in New England. You may even have a grandparent, aunt or uncle with a Wall Drug bumper sticker. We saw billboards announcing the mileage to Wall Drug as early as central Minnesota. So what the hell is Wall Drug?

As Liz put it, “it’s the Paris Hilton of Drug Stores. It’s famous for being famous.”


And that’s about it. Sure, it’s big, but the size is likely only to accomodate the large crowds it attracts. It attracts crowds because of the more than 400 signs for it along I-90. The signs advertise the oddball attractions at Wall Drug, which serve simply as oddities to burn a few more minutes pondering as you break from your drive. Did we stop at Wall Drug because we just had to see their animatronic Tyrannosaurus or the ten foot tall jackalope sculpture? Was the lure of their ice cream unbearable? Did we really need some free ice water? No, honestly, all that secondary stuff is kitschy as hell (not at all like six-million-odd gallons of beer); we only stopped there because that’s what everyone does. Yes, we saw the T-Rex and the Jackalope and ate some ice cream, and even bought postcards, but really, the only regret I would have had if we hadn’t stopped there was that I knew my grandparents had stopped there at least once themselves, and I knew that tens of millions of people had done the same for very similar reasons. If you’re going past it, you just do it.

So, yeah, insert your Paris Hilton joke there.



For our serious cultural event of the day — not that we required anything serious or cultural on each day of the trip — we made our pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore. And really, it’s friggin’ incredible. Four six hours we drove through the flattest deadest flatty flat flats in America and counted billboards and fences. We saw glimpses of the Badlands and regretted that there wasn’t time to go explore the bluffs, buttes and craters to our south. And then out of nowhere, the Black Hills show up and give the state some real elevation variances. The road to Mount Rushmore, Route 16, is impressive in its own right, what with the winding and turning and steep grades all over. But then, bang, there it is, four giant presidents looking down reminding you that any of them individually could kick the collective asses of probably the last ten presidents combined without breaking a sweat. They remind you that, like Batman, some men are best remembered as symbols.


I learned that my favorite president, Teddy Roosevelt, wasn’t even originally planned for memorialization on the mountain, but that Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, decided to put him there very likely because the two were personal friends. That, and the fact that Teddy had been the forefather of the National Parks and Monuments Commision or whatever it is that maintains National Parks and Monuments.

Keith picked Jefferson’s nose.


While walking the Presidential Trail around the base of the carving, I was approached by an exchange student from Bulgaria who was working for the summer at the park. He asked if I would pose for a photo with him, we’re assuming so he could show his friends back home that he’d met "real Americans" in South Dakota. I obliged, confused, and several minutes after he’d gone on his way, it occurred to us that if his photo had me at the proper angle, he’d have a real interesting translation to work on when he got his photos printed.


I was wearing a bright blue t-shirt with a white printed line drawing of a covered wagon and the words, “You have died of dysentery.”

So much for classing up the American National Parks. Somehow I doubt they played Oregon Trail in grade school in Bulgaria.