Easily 10% of this state is Wall Drug billboards, the remaining 90% grass and casual racism.
That a South Dakota shopping mall is famous because its owners decided to slap ads all over the damn landscape is perhaps the single greatest testament to American capitalism since the digging of the Panama Canal, but I have zero interest in Wall Drug. Off Exit 110 I take a hard right, heading away from the town of Wall and straight for Badlands National Park.
Over the past seventy-five million years, the place now called Badlands has been a shallow sea, a subtropical forest, and a savannah. Today it is mixed-grass prairie and barren hills, their crests rounded by erosion, their sides layered with the sediments of time. Thick bands of lilac-gray alternate with thin stripes of magenta, down to an ochre foundation, which gives way here to the green of the prairie, there to the pale brown sand.
Atop these striped hills, bighorn sheep and their lambs graze on sparse grass and the odd shrubbery. The pickings look better down in the valleys, but then—who knows what else might be down there looking for a meal. Two lambs follow their hungry mother to the top of a hill. They glance down at me, poised with my camera, then square up with each other, charge, and knock heads. After one headbutt, they turn to mom for approval. She has her back turned, busy attending to the grass in front of her, but I swear I can see those lambs smiling: Mommy, look what we can do!
On another plateau, prairie dogs scurry in and out of their tunnels. There is a huge colony here, and all we see aboveground are the front doors to an underground metropolis. I approach a pair poking their heads out of a hole, and one of them opens its mouth in an alarm call—it sounds adorable, like a bird chirping, but I know it means Go away!, and I’m not the type to disobey a small rodent.
On my way out of the Badlands, I pass a red STOP sign with a mountain bluebird perched atop it. I wonder if this stands for something.
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This is the ninth post in a cross-country road trip series. To start from the beginning, click here!
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