Oddballs & Badlands
Dispatch XIII
A Vagabond Adventure
Continent # 1: North America
Heading West on I-90 Towards the Badlands
Wall Drugs is one of the most unique places you’ll find in America, and the Badlands nearby look like something from another world.
Day 48 - November 12, 2021
About halfway across South Dakota you begin to see the signs. They come with increasing frequency until eventually it’s as predictable as a metronome: “Wall Drug 186 Miles To Go; Only 5¢ - Hot Coffee - Wall Drug; Homemade Pie - Wall Drug; Wall Drug - You’re Almost Here!”
If you had never been aware of this place and its ubiquitous portents, the signs would make it impossible to avoid, which is, of course, precisely the point. These days the store draws two million visitors a year, even though it’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
It wasn’t always this way. In 1936, after nearly five years of operation, Dorothy and Ted Hustead, the drug store’s founders were near the end of a five-year commitment they had made, determined to scratch out a living at the pharmacy. It wasn’t looking good. Then Dorothy had her bright idea. She and Ted placed a sign on a (relatively) busy Route 16 and added this simple suggestion - “Get a soda/get a beer/turn next corner/just as near/to Highway 16 and 14/free ice water/ Wall Drug.” The rest is history.
Naturally, Cyndy and I visited.
But I’m getting ahead myself. Cyn and I hadn’t yet found Wall Drug. We were still passing the morning heading dead west on I-90. We crossed the majestic Missouri River, the one that took Lewis and Clark to the other end of North America, then we coasted into foothills of the Black Hills. (Cue the Beatles Rocky Raccoon” — “Somewhere in the Black mined hills of Dakota lived a young man named Rocky Raccooooon-ah …”) Along the river’s western edge, the slopes rolled up looking more like Appalachian hummocks than the outskirts of the rockies, except here the land was treeless and covered with the black dirt beneath the prairie grass that gave the hills their name. Not long afterwards, we saw the first Wall Drug signs, and barreled into the unrelenting wind that buffeted the car and kept pushing us into the center line.
Before the end of the day we counted twelve 18 - wheelers toppled by the gusts, most of them biting the dust within a half an hour’s time. They lay like beached whales, silent on the grassy median. We saw no one in the trucks, not even one police car. It was as though they had been deposited there quietly, but of course the wind had not been quiet and we knew that more than a few lives and jobs and supply chains had been upended.
November darkness came by 5 pm, nevertheless we met our goal and made it across most of South Dakota. As the sun disappeared, we settled into our motel in Wall, a very flat place, with it’s broad streets, one story buildings and signs everywhere explaining how to get to you-know-where.
From Top Left: Some of Wall Drug’s Oddball Sculptures (Wild Bill Hickok), the store’s main street, downtown Wall and outside of Wall, Bigfoot. And he looks angry! (Photos - Chip Walter)
The Wall Drug Experience
A Wonderfully Odd Place
We arose the next morning eager to visit Wall Drug. You can walk into the place from almost anywhere and feel you have arrived in its middle, somehow immediately surrounded, or maybe assaulted, by every kind of curious image or message or thing. Wall Drugs is tens of thousands of square feet of curious. It's a mash up of food, clothing, gear, pharmaceuticals, every kind of western/cowboy/Native American paraphernalia and art; part museum, part mall, part gallery, part side show — the ultimate pitstop and curiosity shop rolled into one.
Cyn and I were here to explore rather than buy which, reasonably enough, is the main purpose of the Wall Drug emporium. This wasn’t because we couldn't find anything worthy, but because, being vagabonds, we have no room! Our two bags are the clothing equivalents of sausage, already filled beyond capacity. So we wandered, which is easy in Wall Drug because it isn’t one store but a whole passel of them, linked like the rooms of an enormous single-story house. You can ramble from a pharmacy to a bookstore, into a cowboy clothing shop or a Native American boutique, all of them chock-a-block with history, old games, odd-ball sculptures, maps and, of course, food which exists an abundance at the Wall Drug restaurant, a place where you really can have a $1 hot dog and a cup of coffee for five cents, and it's not bad.
The Famous (and Cheap) Wall Drug Hot Dog
Well, you have to try it, right?
After our repast, and more meandering throughout Wall Drug, we departed to make our way to Badlands National Park which finds itself the south of Wall. Unless you have been there, I doubt you’ve seen anything like it. We hadn’t. You drive into the park thinking you’re simply among endless prairie, and suddenly you have arrived on the moon. They call this the Badlands because once you arrive you are surrounded by a terrible beauty: barren pinnacles of stone that rise and fall at steep angles for miles, baked and blown.
A Bad Land. Visiting Badlands.
Once upon a time this land looked much like the Black Hill mountain range to the west (where we would soon be headed). Thirty-five million years ago it was lush, wooded and filled with rhinoceros and deer. But Planet Earth is in constant flux. Over time streams from those mountains filled the land with volcanic ash and gravel and rocks, which then turned to a thick clay that finally solidified into rock. But the rock was soft enough that rain and snow and the wicked wind began to shape it in Luciferian ways. That work began fairly recently, if you happen to see things the way a geologist does, a mere 500,000 years ago, about the same time Homo sapiens began to emerge on the plains of East Africa (stay tuned for that trip later in our journey).
The Luciferian landscape of South Dakota’s Badlands. (Photos - Chip Walter)
These lands were also home to herds of dinosaurs (prior to being wiped out by an enormous comet that hit the Earth on the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, killing off almost all life on earth). Big predators roamed there. Eight Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons have been found in the Badlands. One of them, a T-Rex named Sue for a Black Hills Institute geologist who discovered her, is the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found. These days Sue (the T-Rex, not the geologist) passes her time at Chicago’s Field Museum.
We swung south and north and east through the 38 mile loop of the park. We hiked into its wild landscape, spitting the dirt form the bitter wind and laughed at the prairie dogs popping up like whack-a-moles to inspect us and make a comment or two among their fellow pip squeaks. At the end of the road, we stopped and gazed a long time to the west and the Rockies, the mother of so many American stories, including a place we had been looking forward to seeing from the beginning of our trip — Mount Rushmore.
The sun was setting. I felt elated, standing in this strange and beautiful place. Cyn and I took a grinning breath, eager to imagine what places and characters would come next. Beyond lay Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota and Montana, Monument Valley, Zion, Crazy Horse, Bryce Canyon, Moab. Soon we would witness so much of its beauty, learn so much more about its wild history, and enter, at last, that unique and mythic place known as the American West.
We put the car in gear, and rolled on.
This is a series about a Vagabond Adventure - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.
——————————————————————————————————————
As of this Dispatch …
We have travelled 4500 miles, across four ferries, on five trains, visiting three World Heritage Sites, through 13 states, two National Parks and three Canadian provinces, in 25 different beds, and seen more different kinds of hotel keys than there are prairie dogs on South Dakota’s Badlands.