[The events of this post take place between Wednesday, July 14 and Thursday, July 15, 2021. A subsequent post covering July 16 and 17 will follow.]
I want to begin this post stating that I've always felt a weird, strange kinship with South Dakota. I don't quite know how to explain it other than it feels like it is somewhere I was always meant to be, as if another Brandon in another parallel universe close to our own was born there, grew up there, and never strayed too far from his roots. As much as I want to live on an ocean or somewhere tropical, that's just a destination and a place to set down roots. However, whenever I travel to or through South Dakota, it feels as if my roots are already there, and that stepping foot onto the red clay soil connects those roots to my feet -- an attachment I can't quite place, a feeling I can't quite shake.
Perhaps it's the mountain man in me, having grown up in West Virginia -- which has beautiful sights and sounds of its own -- or, perhaps, it's the trip I took through South Dakota 30 years ago this year (this month, actually), with my former stepfather's parents, that made me develop some sort of strange attachment to the state. I'm not sure. I just know I feel at ease there, I feel safe there.
This post and the next one are two parts of a very long story -- split into two because there's just so much to tell. There will be photos here and there as well, and as I'm writing all of this up about a week after we returned home, I'm bound to leave out a few of the smaller details that I've forgotten. What follows is the best account possible of how our trip went, so...strap in for a ride, all.
Wednesday, July 14:
Departure Day.
This story really starts on Tuesday the 13th, but I'm going to gloss over a lot of that to actually get into the real details. I took off Tuesday the 13th -- I had the extra PTO to do so, as our trip back home to West Virginia to visit my parents got pushed back to the second week of October. As I did not want to work all night on Tuesday only to jump into the car on Wednesday morning and try to force myself to sleep while Daisy drove us up to Sturgis (primarily because it's really difficult for me to sleep in a car unless I am completely fried/exhausted), I just took the day so I could turn around my sleep schedule a bit and keep it that way for the duration of the vacation.
Tuesday night we were up really late, prepping for the trip and making sure we had everything ready to roll as much as we could. I'd been packing off and on for the better part of a week, since I'd purchased the duffle bag that I'd be able to fit a small child into, and I was planning for every contingency. Extra socks, underwear, shorts? Check, just in case. Toiletries -- including but not limited to Q-tips, flossers, wet wipes, band aids, beard balm, a new toothbrush, two bars of soap, and face wash? Check. A brand new day/night pillbox filled with all the pills I'd need for the duration of the trip, plus an extra day's worth just in case? Check. I even packed two extra iPhone charge cables, an extra vape charge cable in my vape supplies, the sharpest pocketknife I own (which I actually carried with me everywhere I went while up there), a book, my water bottle and our filter pitcher with a new filter in it, a bottle of Tums, cold/allergy pills, etc -- you name it and I probably thought of it, whether I took it with me or not. By the time I went to sleep on Tuesday night, I was confident I had pretty much everything I'd need, and was probably taking about twice the amount of stuff I actually needed with me...but oh well. Better to have it and not need it than the opposite, right?
Daisy, conversely, decided to wait until Wednesday morning to pack her actual suitcase, and ended up just throwing handfuls of clean clothing into it out of the closet with roughly equal ratios of each item, not really paying attention to what she was putting in there but just making sure she had enough. I'll never be able to understand that laissez-faire, cavalier attitude to travel.
It was probably around 4am by the time we went to bed on Tuesday night. I was tired, unshowered, and felt distinctly unkempt and sweaty. Daisy told me not to wake her up in the morning -- we'd wake up naturally, take care of the last of the stuff we'd need to do in the morning hours, and then leave on our own time. We had no need to hurry; we'd get there when we got there. I was fine with this; it's a vacation, after all. We're both supposed to be relaxing and enjoying it.
Something else I should mention before we move forward here is that the Accuweather people had predicted further severe storms for the area on Wednesday and Thursday -- mainly in the evening/overnight hours between the two days, with the possibility of more 80-mph straight-line winds. After the previous week's stress involving the Class III Killstorm and our tree damage, I was very apprehensive to leave the house when there was the possibility that we'd have a repeat of the last storm when we'd be 600 miles away and unable to do anything about it. I was so traumatized by that storm event that even the possibility of similar weather had my anxiety so on edge that I had a serious discussion with Daisy about canceling the trip, or going up on Thursday instead of Wednesday -- having it happen when we're home is one thing, but having something catastrophic happen while we're 600 miles away and unable to protect the house, our belongings, or the cats is quite another. Because of this, I monitored the weather quite closely, tracking percentages of storms for the area, looking up weather models and watching live forecasts of where the local weather teams thought the storms would go and how they would track. Still, that sort of thing can't be predicted with 100% certainty, of course. By Tuesday night it looked like the vast majority of anything severe would be north and east of Omaha, but of course that didn't rule anything out completely.
So eventually, I passed out in my chair. When I awoke, it was around 10:30 am and overcast. I could hear Daisy moving around downstairs, and I was actually surprised I'd slept so long -- I figured we'd both sleep a few hours and be on the road by around 10:30, in fact. The events of the next few minutes were as follows:
1. I stood up, undressed, put my dirty clothes in the hamper, and grabbed a fresh set of boxers.
2. I walked over to my office door -- naked, mind you -- to exit it and head to the bathroom for an immediate shower.
3. As soon as I'd closed my office door and I stood naked in the hallway, four steps from the bathroom... the power went out.
4. Daisy yells from downstairs "good morning my love, the power is out."
What the fuck, man.
This, of course, could not have happened at a more inopportune time. We were planning to pick up and go, to get the shit we needed done quickly and to get on the road. I was going to be freshly-showered. We were going to eat sandwiches in the car during the daytime overcast drive and we were going to talk about all sorts of things, then get there in the evening and see the family before sleeping it off in the hotel room. We were going to wake up in the morning refreshed for the day and ready to do anything and everything with the whole family there in South Dakota.
This. Was not how it was going to happen.
I don't know if I can properly express how pissed I was at the power being out. Mind you, we'd still had power for a few days when many others in Omaha were still down, including my boss (who had just gotten his power back on Tuesday afternoon) but we had been good, all had been well. To have it go out now, when we were so close to getting out the door, was infuriating.
Daisy called it in. Apparently there was a pole down somewhere, and there was a tree down that may or may not have been the cause of it. They had four crews onsite at the location of the outage and working but did not know how long it would take for everything to come back up. So, I re-dressed myself in my old dirty/sweaty clothes, and I just waited. I can't see in the bathroom to shower in the dark; there's no windows in there. We could pack the fridge stuff into the cooler but for what purpose? To have it sit outside the refrigerator for longer than necessary? We could have packed the car, but it was still in the garage -- and without power we couldn't open the garage door to get it out.
[EDIT: As an aside, Daisy says we can reach the emergency door release lever with the car in the garage and can get out in an emergency. I'm still not sure we can, and I'm also not sure what it entails to reattach the garage door to the assembly after it's unhooked -- especially not in a power-outage scenario. We weren't about to find out when our sole goal was to get on the road.]
The power outage lasted for four hours, with me getting angrier and angrier with each passing hour. I told Daisy I flat-out refused to leave the house with the power out. Aside from not being able to shower or to set up our cameras properly for the trip, there was still the matter of getting the car out of the garage and to make sure the door was locked/would work when the power kicked back on, which we did not have the time or luxury to test. If the power outage lasted a day or more, regardless of whether we were there or not, the food in the fridge/freezer would start going bad and would need to be dealt with. If the compressor on the fridge/freezer or the AC unit blew when the power kicked back on, that would be worse without someone there to realize it and deal with it. After a power outage, my work computer downstairs turns itself on and stays on until it's turned off again -- meaning if we left and the power came back, it would be sitting there running for four days. There were so many variables and every single one of them made me see red even when I gave them the briefest thought.
When the power kicked back on around 2:30, I immediately ran to the shower and Daisy leapt up to continue final preparations for the trip. I stayed out of her way, checked the weather obsessively and let her do what she needed to do (this is when she did her "throw everything into the suitcase" style of packing) and we loaded up the car. We finally, finally got on the road for South Dakota a little after 7pm.
Yes, 7pm. At night. Driving north, then west on what is easily, at the best of times, an eight-hour drive -- most of which would be in the dark through open countryside and terrain where all manner of wildlife could run out in front of the car, with very few landmarks/road lighting outside of the cities, and the crossing of a time zone involved -- with the added possibility of a freak thunderstorm blowing up in Omaha that could once more cause a lot of property damage.
Let's just say it was less than ideal.
The way our trip takes up there from Omaha is strange; we first go east into Iowa, then north up through part of Iowa, then we cross the border into South Dakota, hit Sioux Falls, and then drive in what is basically a straight line west across the state until we hit Rapid City, and then from there, Sturgis and Deadwood and all the other little towns. There's probably another way, or multiple other ways, but the way we take generally works pretty well for us. In the daytime, it's a beautiful drive. In the night, it's nothing but inky blackness for as far as the eye (or road) can see.
We hit Sioux Falls around 10, got gas at some little tiddlywink gas station there, and texted the parents to let them know we were okay and were about to start the long leg of the journey.
In the car, Daisy and I talked about a great many things, with one of the longest conversations being about how she married her father (as I am very, very much like him -- not all in good ways) and how I married Daisy's mother (because she is, yes, basically her mother). It was very dark. It was very quiet. From my shiny new phone, I obsessively checked the radar for back home in Omaha to see that some storms had fired up around the city, but as the weather folks had predicted they were far north and east of us. I watched the cats on our indoor security cameras, all of them sleeping on or around the couch in the living room. I checked our front door cams (yes, we have multiples) and our backyard cam as well. All looked/seemed normal and quiet. For the first time all day, I slowly began to relax. I'd been a major ball of stress, but knowing that no storms were hitting, and knowing that the house and the cats were fine was a major relief to me.
The speed limit in the vast majority of South Dakota is 80, and we used that to our advantage -- it was the middle of the night on a Wednesday and we weren't surrounded by traffic as we would have been on pretty much any other day and time, so the minutes and hours flew by. We crossed into mountain time, passed Wall Drug (still very well-lit even in the middle of the night, when it was closed), breezed through Rapid City -- which is also gorgeous to see at night -- and made our way up the mountain to Sturgis.
Why Sturgis? Well...
When this trip was originally planned -- and quickly planned by Daisy's sisters at that -- the Canadians had gotten a campground with which to park their behemoth RV in Deadwood (it ended up being outside of Deadwood proper, but whatever). Our brother in law, married to Daisy's middle sister, has history around the area and family still up there, and he knows the Black Hills well from being up there a lot during his formative years. The fact that it was the Deadwood area, where Daisy and I had gone two years ago for our anniversary, was completely coincidental. So, as we had a passing knowledge of the area and had been there before, Daisy started looking up hotels in the area as soon as we'd solidified plans to actually go on the trip -- and found most of them completely booked out, even several weeks in advance.
Memorial Day to Labor Day up there, much as it is in most other beautiful places, is tourist season. Towns like Deadwood and Sturgis make a fuckton of money from tourist season. Both towns have wild west history, and Sturgis has the yearly motorcycle rally (or "Bike Week," as they call it there). Not to mention that pretty much anywhere and everywhere in the Black Hills is gorgeous, and a LOT of people go up there on vacation to campgrounds, cabins, fishing/boating trips at lakes, etc. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to in the entire country and absolutely somewhere I believe everyone should see. But obviously, that means that it's really busy in the summer months and there are people everywhere. So, the closest affordable-for-our-budget hotel that we'd be willing to stay in was a Super 8 right off the highway in Sturgis. Sturgis is about 15ish miles from Deadwood, so we figured "eh, close enough" and with my reluctant blessing (I'm really not a fan of Super 8), Daisy booked us three nights there -- Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Because of tourist season, those three nights was close to $500 total -- just to have somewhere to sleep and work from as a base of operations. I'd told Daisy to see if she could get us a room in the Bullock Hotel (the hotel that Seth Bullock himself built and operated -- yes, that Seth Bullock), but it wasn't available, so Super 8 it was.
Daisy's parents had booked their room in another little historic hotel in downtown Deadwood -- I can't remember the name of it offhand, but it was one of the historic buildings there and really was in the heart of the "downtown" area, if you can call it that -- right in the middle of all of the people there during tourist season. Daisy's oldest sister, her husband, and their four boys booked one of the small cabins at the same campground the Canadians had parked their RV at, for $65 a night. All of them, of course, were already there and had been there since Tuesday.
It was 2:30-3 before we rolled into Sturgis -- legit the middle of the night. We found the hotel rather quickly (hard to miss the big Super 8 sign out front) and found that...there were almost zero parking spots open in the whole lot. We found one, at the very back of the building, and pulled into it. As we pulled into the lot, the large overhead fluorescent light that lit the lot was flashing on and off, rapidly, but without any real pattern. It looked like a horror movie.
"Oh, that's not creepy at all," I said.
Nor was the middle-aged gentleman pacing back and forth through the parking lot at the edge of where the light hit, nervously smoking a cigarette.
We got out and went to go check in, which meant we had to walk right by this guy. He gave us the eye as we walked towards him in the dark, and stopped his pacing, turning to face us. I had my hand already on my knife in my pocket, and had undone the safety latches so I could get it open quickly if necessary.
"Howdy!" Daisy said loudly and cheerfully. He seemed taken aback, but I'm pretty sure that was Daisy's intention -- when you're friendly and charming to someone and acknowledge them with goodwill, apparently they're less likely to attack you.
I still had my hand on my knife.
"Do...do you folks have reservations?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.
"We do," we said.
He breathed a sigh of relief. "Good," he said, "because we're fully booked. Looks like you're the last ones to get here."
Turns out, he was the hotel's owner/operator.
"Oh," he added, "and the power's out. It's been out for an hour, we called the electric company, they're working on it -- I guess there's a pole down somewhere. They're supposed to meet me and the cops out here somewhere, so I'm waiting for them."
Holy sweet Jesus, you have to be fucking kidding me.
We went inside, down the (dark) hallways lit only by emergency lighting, to the (dark) desk, also only lit by emergency lighting, where we found the desk clerk legit waiting on us with our paperwork -- luckily already printed out and ready hours before in anticipation of our arrival -- and we signed in and got our room cardkeys. She relayed that the door locks and hallway lighting was running on backup power so we should have no trouble getting in and unloading, etc, it would just be dark in the rooms.
Once we got back out into the parking lot, Daisy began laughing hysterically. It wasn't a laugh of something being funny, it was a laugh of desperation, frustration, and one of those "laugh to keep from crying" laughs. I tried to shush her, because the last thing I would personally want to hear if I were staying in a hotel without power with the lights flickering like a horror movie would be someone outside my room maniacally laughing. Also, it was legit after 3am and people were trying to sleep.
Across the street behind our hotel was a gas station maybe 100 yards away. There was a bucket truck and a cop car over there, and their lights were flickering like crazy just as creepily as the ones were in the hotel parking lot. When we brought the first load of our stuff up to the room (our suitcases) we saw the hotel owner/operator at the far end of the lot talking to another power guy in another utility truck.
The entire layout of the hotel was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen. Multiple exterior doors that all led to the same stairwell platform, no elevators (not that we would've been able to use them anyhow), what appeared to be no internal air conditioning except for in the rooms themselves, and some of the most obnoxiously long hallways I've ever seen in a hotel setup. We got into our room, still found the lights off, and I was still holding my (very heavy) duffle bag.
"Put your stuff down on the bed and help me get the rest of the things," Daisy said.
The room was pitch black, I couldn't see a goddamn thing, and the only light working was the little bathroom light.
"I'm not putting any of my shit anywhere until I check out the room for bedbugs and other bullshit," I told her.
With her help and the flashlight on her cell phone, I methodically stripped the bedclothes to the mattress and lifted it to look underneath, lifted the chair cushion and looked inside it, looked in corners and crevices and everywhere I could think of to make sure the room was pest-free before I even put down my bag on any surface in there. I do this in every hotel we stay in -- I am deathly afraid and paranoid about bedbugs and roaches and any other creepy-crawlers -- I am not taking any of that horseshit back home with me to Omaha.
The room was not only clean with no trace of anything, but it looked remarkably clean for a little run-down Super 8. I was satisfied enough and over the course of the next half hour and probably three more up/down trips to and from the car, we'd gotten everything inside. During this time, they'd gotten main power to the hotel turned back on, and we could actually turn on lights to see what we were doing. The flickering/flashing lights in the parking lot behind us and the gas station across the way were fully on again, too. It was then that I opened up the curtains a bit to look out the window...only to find that our car was parked directly behind and under our hotel balcony, maybe 20 feet from the room. If there had only been a stairwell or an entry point on our side of the building near the car, we could've brought everything inside in less than ten minutes. But noooooo.
I got some food to eat, took my pill and washed it down with a V8, and Daisy texted the parents to let them know we were okay, settled into the hotel, and asked where and when we'd need to meet up with everyone in the morning...and then, around 4am, we finally went to sleep together in the hard mattress of a barely-queen-sized hotel bed.
Thursday, July 15:
Adventure Day.
I awoke for the first time (actually realizing I was awake) around 8:30. The bed was really hard and did no favors to my back whatsoever. Daisy, who loved the hotel bed the entire time we were there, was already up and moving about. I forced myself to get up and get dressed, to find out that we were meeting the entire family at some lake somewhere relatively close to us, as Daisy's oldest sister had rented a boat for several hours.
"Like what kind of boat?" I had asked previously. "Like a sailboat? A pontoon boat?" Daisy didn't know.
We tried to reach out by phone and text, but while we had good service in and around the hotel in Sturgis, apparently the same was not true at the lake because our calls couldn't get through and nobody replied to our texts.
"We'll just go and we'll get there when we get there," Daisy said.
I was okay with this plan, so after downing a V8 and having a few sticks of string cheese (my normal "put something on my stomach so I can take my pill(s)" routine), and grabbing some drinks for the car, we set off for the lake.
Now, mind you, we had some vague idea of where we were going -- Daisy had the name of the place and the actual marina where everyone was parked plugged into the GPS on her phone, so as long as we had signal to initially map the route, we'd be fine. Getting there is part of the adventure, right?
We drove at least 5-10 miles past the turnoff where the GPS told us to go, because when we got to that turn, there was a big sign saying the road was closed. We figured there had to be another entrance if the road there was closed. There wasn't. We had to turn around and drive back to the "closed" road and drive down it -- it wasn't closed at all, one side had been blocked off for some bullshit reason for about 100 yards, and after that it was fine.
When we got to the marina area, I scanned it with my eyes and found the passenger van the Canadians hauled their family around in, and found the parents' SUV as well, so I knew we'd found the right place. As it turned out, the parents were right in front of the stairwell leading down to the lake/beach, and the family had set up shop there in the shade (I assumed very early that morning before all of the other touristy folks had arrived, as it was the best spot in and around the entire recreational area). Mom and Dad, our youngest nephew from Daisy's oldest sister, and our Canadian brother-in-law were the only folks there not out on the boat. Both of the sisters and all of the other children were out on the lake. This allowed Daisy and I to get some decent photos of ourselves together with the beautiful lake as the backdrop:
I had dressed for all occasions for the day, meticulously so -- I had worn my new transitions-lenses glasses (which explains why they're so dark out there in the sun, naturally), a white overshirt to reflect sunlight, keep me cool and keep the bugs off me, an oversized pair of athletic shorts that moved with my body and would double, if I so wished, as swim trunks, my knee-high compression socks (because I'd be doing a lot of walking and again, bug protection) and my purchased-last-year Asics trail shoes, specifically made for walking/hiking in rougher terrains. I was still hot and uncomfortable, but at least 70% of my body surfaces were protected and covered away from the sun. What wasn't I made sure to put sunscreen on.
And yes, that is a Voodoo Doughnut t-shirt.
The lake was beautiful, as you can see in the photos -- surrounded on all sides by the Black Hills and otherwise mountainous terrain in the area. It was far enough off the beaten path and the roads, back in the woods, to where if you didn't already know it was there, you'd never guess it existed.
The parents were already tired and were cold, despite it being at least 80 degrees outside, and neither of them seemed to have any interest whatsoever in being out on the boat. I myself wanted to go out onto the boat, but I knew by the time we got there (around noon) that we'd never get the chance, as they were out in the middle of the lake and only had the boat rented until 1pm. Instead, we waited for everyone to come in off the water and spent time with the parents and our brother-in-law.
Me and dad take in the sights.
Once everyone was done with the boat and it had been re-parked, they all came back to the landing point where we were, and finally, for the first time in six years, ALL of the family -- the parents, us, Daisy's sisters and their husbands, and all nine children -- were in one place. Eight adults, nine children, seventeen people total, spanning ages 2 to 74. This had been the point of the entire trip -- to get all of us together in the same place, and we'd achieved it. We took the opportunity to take several pictures with everyone (fellow lake-goers were kind enough to take them for us; I won't post these pictures here because of privacy concerns for the rest of the family and their children) and we got the kids taken care of, cleaned up, and (some) of them changed out of their swimwear, and...Daisy's oldest sister's husband had to leave to head back home to Denver, as he had to work the next day. He'd driven separately, and we didn't know he'd have to up-and-leave before we'd gotten there and had talked about it with everyone.
We had everyone there, in the same place, all together for AN HOUR. And that's it.
We stayed at the lake for a bit to pack up and decompress somewhat. The kids who wanted to continue swimming in the little cordoned-off swimming area to cool off did so. The adults mainly hung out around the beach area for some non-boating, non-swimming, kid-free time. We had an eye on everyone, so it's not like any of them were gonna wander off (you can see in the photo above how close the beach area is to where our "staging area" was).
Something else that was really cool (and something I wasn't aware of) is that this lake area is relatively close to a large Air Force base in the Black Hills. I don't know where, and I don't know which one, but a few times during our time at the lake, we heard some deafening roars, and looked up to see actual goddamn fighter jets flying over the lake in formation, pretty low -- easily below 10,000 feet, probably below 5,000 feet, honestly. I couldn't tell you the models, despite knowing a lot about aircraft, but they were likely F-15 Eagles, F-16 Fighting Falcons or FA-18 Super Hornets; they were definitely not the new F-22 Raptors I was hoping to see (they didn't have the same wing shape, and believe me, I'd be able to tell). A pair of them flew over first, going at blinding speed -- and the roar was amazing as they had their afterburners on; you could see the flames at the back of them. They were in and out of sight within the span of about 15-20 seconds max. A half hour later they were followed by four more jets in a wide V formation, though those ones seemed to be flying higher and not as fast, and shortly after that, a low-flying helicopter, looked like a Black Hawk variant of some sort, followed them along with a C-130. What amazed me was that nobody at the lake but us seemed fazed or surprised at all by all of this aircraft activity; many didn't even look up. This tells me it's not an uncommon occurrence in the area.
Yet I'll mention that I never saw any other military aircraft, or really any other aircraft of any type -- with the exception of the touristy, chartered sightseeing helicopters here and there -- throughout the rest of the time we were on the trip.
"So what's the plan for the rest of the day then?" we asked. "We're along for the ride here, we'll do whatever you want."
I'd floated the idea that we should do a big family outing to Devil's Tower, as it was right across the border into Wyoming and not that far away. The adults were mostly behind this, but right down the road (literally a 25-ish minute drive away) was Mount Rushmore, and the kids were more into that idea. I was fine with going to Mount Rushmore again; I figured that we'd likely be going up there again while we were all in the Hills anyway, it's a beautiful drive, and the monument itself is a beautiful piece of art and of Americana as a whole. Yes, it's jingoistic. Yes, in a historical context its construction is glossed over with a very whitewashed lens, and I do see the points within the context of the Native American peoples' strong opposition to it -- but I can't change any of that, really. It's there. It's been done for 80 years. It's still a sight to see and still a monument that's uniquely American. Me taking my nieces and nephews to see it and appreciate it for what it is doesn't change any history. I'll again remind everyone that my original idea was Devil's Tower, which is a natural and not-man-made monument, but I was overall outvoted.
The parents couldn't make it to Mount Rushmore. Mom was very tired and in a lot of pain (she's old and has health problems, and could not have done all of the walking and stair-climbing involved to properly see it -- which greatly upset her). Dad was tired and wanted to be done for the day, wanted to go back to the campground and be with the family who wasn't going up there. Daisy's oldest sister, her four boys, and our two oldest nieces from Daisy's middle sister decided to go then. That was nine of us altogether -- three adults and six children. Five of them went in Daisy's oldest sister's vehicle, but we took the two oldest and most mature kids of the family -- our 15 year old niece and our 13 year old nephew -- with us in our car. They chose to ride with us to get some fun "aunt and uncle time."
As an aside, "fun aunt and uncle time" is one of the things I cherished most about my own childhood. My aunts and uncles -- the ones without kids, or the ones who'd had their kids long grown up and moved out of the house -- took me on adventures as a child. I'd go shopping with them a lot, I'd go visit family with them a lot, we'd drive down country roads in the West Virginia summer at high speeds with the windows down and the radio blasting. It was wonderful, and I remember those times quite fondly. They're things I miss as an adult, and things I wish I could do again today. So, when the oldest niece and nephew wanted to ride with us up to Mount Rushmore, I was put in the position of being able to give these kids -- kids I rarely see -- some "fun aunt and uncle time," I jumped at the chance.
I want to step back here for a moment and say that all of these kids are great kids -- the younger ones can be little troublemakers at times, but all kids are like that. These kids are amazing kids, coming from two very religious families (the Denver folks are Mormons; the Canadians are Evangelicals), and all of them have been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong and strong moral compasses. They are smart, they are sweet, and most importantly, they listen to adults and obey them. Children from less-disciplined families would be a nightmare -- these kids are a breeze in comparison. I'm sure we've seen the beaten down parents in Walmart or the grocery store trying to corral their multiple children all at once and not pull their hair out at the same time -- I'm here to say these kids are the exact opposite of that. They're wonderful. This is part of why I had no concerns whatsoever about the three of us adults taking six children to a very crowded national monument on one of the sunniest, hottest days I've ever experienced in the Black Hills.
When Daisy and I went to Mount Rushmore two years ago, it was a very different experience. For one, it was before Covid. For two, it wasn't mid-July in the broiling heat of the sun -- it was late May, the sky was overcast, and on our way out of there that day, a breezy, beautiful thunderstorm blew through that let us watch it roll in over the Hills and rain over the mountains. It was picturesque, and I got some photos of it that I posted on Facebook at the time. This time, as mentioned, it was mid-July, in the midst of tourist season, so it didn't matter that we were going on a Thursday afternoon -- it was blazing-balls hot and easily three times as crowded as it had been when we where there last.
On our drive up there, and throughout the day on Thursday, Daisy and I had noticed something peculiar -- we were seeing Corvettes. A lot of Corvettes. Like, every other car we passed was a Corvette. I didn't think a lot of it at the beginning, just that it was neat. Most of them were from the late 80s through the present (the C4 through the C8 -- and yeah, we did see a good number of the new C8s), but at the start, I just chalked it up to being tourist season and the people who liked to drive winding roads in sports cars in South Dakota tended to buy American. However, a few hours of this in our driving around and we knew something was up, especially when the kids started noticing and counting them as well.
"There must be some sort of event going on up here somewhere," Daisy mused. "Like a gathering of the Corvettes, or something."
"Or a lot of white people in the Black Hills have too much money," I replied.
I may or may not have said this in front of the kids, I can't recall.
It's true, though; I was paying attention when I could, and I didn't see a single black or brown person driving any of these beautiful vehicles. They were all affluent-looking white men in their 50s-70s with gray hair or bald heads, or affluent-looking gray haired or bleach-blonde women of roughly the same ages. I don't think I saw anyone my age driving one, and definitely not anyone in their teens or twenties. All old white dudes, just like the people whose faces were carved into a mountain that we were heading to see.
Me, Daisy, and her sister -- and our oldest niece, who had come with us in our car -- had all been to Mount Rushmore multiple times over the years. This particular adventure was my third time to visit "the rock heads," as Daisy calls them, with my other visits in 1991 and 2019. Daisy's sister had been there in high school, and our niece had been there twice before a few years back (so she said). None of the other kids had ever seen it. Our oldest nephew, as it turns out, had a particular interest in it as he idolizes Teddy Roosevelt -- something I didn't know about until this trip. He even bought a giant biography of the first half of Roosevelt's life from the museum bookshop while we were there, and was really excited about it. He is, as I've said before, a good kid.
The "rock heads" were majestic as always -- perfectly beautiful weather to see them. If you've not been to Rushmore in a few years, a while back they did a complete overhaul of the facility -- I don't know exactly when, but when I was out there in 1991, you couldn't get anywhere near as close to them as you can now -- back then there was a scenic overlook you could drive up through, and as close as you could get to them was about half a mile away. They're still impressive at half a mile away, as they are huge, but after the new facility was built, you can get within roughly 300 feet of them (I'm only guessing) from the main viewing overlook, and if you go down into the amphitheater area (down a set of stairs in front of the monument) you can get right up on the base of the mountain and look up at them from a birds-eye view. There are also guided tours now that let you basically climb up stairs along the side of the mountain they're actually carved in, as I saw some folks scaling those stairs and heading up. What I'm saying is that you can get close enough to them now where they completely fill your vision, if you want to -- it's very different than it was before the remodeling of everything, and Daisy's sister noted that it was very different than when she was there in high school fifteen or so years ago, so at some point between then and now is when they did all of their renovations.
There were, of course, pictures taken:
This time we did the grand tour -- I didn't even know there was a museum under the actual monument complex, for example -- which we went through, watched a 15-minute movie from the 1980s detailing the construction of the monument -- narrated by Tom Brokaw! -- then hit the gift shop (where there was nothing I remotely wanted for the prices they were asking) before, after being there for probably two hours, finally getting back into our vehicles to head to the campsite.
Herein laid the problem, though -- we didn't have any of the "campsite stuff" with us in the car. We needed to go back to the hotel, in Sturgis, from Mount Rushmore to get that stuff. This included more drinks (again, it was blazing hot and we needed to stay hydrated), the vegan hotdogs and vegan marshmallows we'd brought for the campfire, the skewers for the aforementioned hotdogs and marshmallows, as well as some other here-and-there incidentals. The Canadians and the parents were waiting on us at the campsite to get back from Rushmore to do a big family dinner, as that was their plan. It was a forty-minute drive to Sturgis from Rushmore and another half hour or so from Sturgis back to the campsite in Deadwood...in mid-afternoon, rush-hour tourist traffic. And, to top everything off, we had two kids with us, who would have to make the journey with us back to the hotel as well, as there was no point in doing the back and forth trip twice. Gas, by the way, is about forty cents more per gallon in western, rural South Dakota than it is in eastern, urban Nebraska.
In the middle of a traffic jam (full of Corvettes, I might add) on the way back to the hotel, my phone started going off like crazy with notifications. Signal was fairly spotty in most locations up in the Hills, so it was sending me a lot of alerts at once -- all of them were motion alarms for the cameras on the front of the house facing our street. I pulled up the live feed, once it let me, to see the street blocked off and two giant orange Asplundh tree-service trucks parked directly in front of our house, with the hard-hatted workers milling around on our sidewalk. What the fuck, man?
Try as I did, I couldn't keep my anxiety hidden from the kids. Given that we'd paid $300 the weekend before to get our fallen trees taken away, and given the angle the cameras hit, I couldn't tell what in the everliving hell they were doing. It was clear, hot, and sunny in Omaha too, but that didn't mean that one of our trees didn't come the rest of the way down on the neighbor's house or cars across the street, or what have you. I was an absolute wreck of a ball of nerves -- this was my nightmare scenario. My second thought was that maybe they were sent there by the city to down part of our tree and then we'd get a hefty bill in the mail for their services -- services we never asked for nor wanted, at least not at that juncture (more on this later).
"I almost want to call [Neighbor] or [Daisy's best friend] to tell them to go to the house and ask what the f....the hell they're doing," I said, catching myself because we had two kids in the car.
"It doesn't matter," Daisy said, ever the calm one in times of crisis. "There's nothing we can do about it."
A few minutes later, Daisy dropped an f-bomb in casual conversation with the kids, and I looked at her playfully and said "[Daisy], we don't use that language with children in the car."
"It's fine," our niece said, "I'm fifteen, it's not like I haven't heard it before."
True that, I guess. Not exactly the response I expected from our brilliant, very religious niece, who will graduate from high school two years early next year. But, I mean, kids are kids and language is language.
I watched the live feed in the car, while the kids talked in the backseat, until I lost cell signal again and couldn't anymore.
Once we got back to the hotel, Daisy ran in to pick up the campsite materials, and I stayed in the running car with the kids, with the AC on. She was gone for five minutes, then ten, then twenty. I had no problem being in the car alone with the kids -- again, they're good kids -- but it's not like it takes twenty minutes to walk through the hotel back to our room, grab some drinks and the campfire stuff, and then turn back around and come back to the car.
Since I once again had 5G signal in Sturgis, I pulled up the live feed on our front-of-house cameras to see that the tree trucks were now gone. Watching the recorded videos that the motion-capture software had caught, they never even came on our property -- it looked like they were doing something across the street or at the old lady's house next door to ours. We never figured out what it was or why they had the street blocked off.
Before I knew it, twenty-five minutes had passed and Daisy was still inside the hotel doing who knows what. The kids were content in the backseat, but I could tell they were getting restless.
Figure it out, I texted Daisy, making sure the kids weren't watching when I did so. Not exactly the kindest or most caring sentiment, but I was really getting sick of waiting on her at this juncture, and running the car engine to get AC was burning gas. What's the hold up? I added a few minutes later, but didn't end up sending it as just as I was about to, she emerged from the building.
"The water was off in our room," she said. "Air was coming out of the faucets, it was weird, so I told the front desk and they're working on it."
"Everything's okay, though?" I asked.
"Yeah, no big deal, everything else is fine."
We gave the kids two fresh, cold PowerAdes and got on the road. A few minutes later the hotel called Daisy to let her know that everything was fine now, that the water had been shut off earlier to a section of rooms, but it was now back on.
Among the items she'd brought back to the car was a box of gluten-free Oreos. This was a major point of excitement for the kids, who don't generally get such treats at home -- it was like forbidden fruit to them. I passed them to the back seat so they could have some.
"I should only have a few," our nephew said. "My mom would kill me if I ate more than that."
"Mine would too," our niece said.
"Well guess what," I said, turning in my seat a bit so that they could see my grin of pure evil, "they're not here. Have some more. Eat them all if you want them. Your moms don't have to know."
"Oh, I tell my mother everything," our niece said.
From the driver's seat next to me, Daisy shot me a glance like I was bleeding from the eyes and ears.
"I do love being a bad influence," I said to her, quietly, but definitely loud enough for the kids to hear. I believe she rolled her eyes.
Fuck it, I'm gonna be the "fun uncle." The funcle. Muahahahah.
The kids probably ate 3/4 of the container of Oreos between them, and more power to them -- let them have a treat, it's vacation, for fuck's sake. It's an adventure. Let 'em have some cookies.
We got to the campsite probably around 7pm or so, to find that the rest of the crew had already eaten dinner and were putting away the food. They offered to make us something, but we told them it wasn't necessary, that we were okay and could eat something back at the hotel later, but we did bring marshmallows for roasting and vegan hot dogs (and bread, for buns) to skewer and cook on the campfire.
The campground itself was less of a campground and more of a cabin with a cafe and restaurant inside it, with running water, laundry and bathroom/shower facilities, and a lot of large parking spots for RVs, trailers, and campers. Scattered around it strategically were smaller rentable cabins -- Daisy's oldest sister and her boys had rented one for the past several days -- "The Chalet" -- and while it was small, it was more than large enough for the five of them to sleep in comfortably. The pictures on the campground's website hadn't really done it justice -- the pictures made it look like it was the type of shack that Jason Voorhees would corner you in as he raised his machete for the kill -- but the inside was quite nice for what it was: $65 a night. Electric, but no running water or bathroom (that was about 50 yards away at the main lodge cabin). Still, having now seen it, I'd stay there. It would be hot and stuffy at night with no AC, but I could do it for $65 a night for a few days to enjoy the rustic life a little more.
Our oldest nephew, once everyone had settled in at the campground, immediately started working on putting together the campfire for the s'mores and hot dogs. I, with a fresh energy drink in hand, was finally able to relax a little bit and spend a little time with the Canadians and Mom and Dad, who would be leaving the next morning to get back home to Omaha. This, of course, included more pictures of everyone together and some good family time. The kids had all gotten tie-dyed shirts with custom printings of "Deadwood" pictures on them, sold at a little tent shop across the street from the campground on the side of the road, and we were all taking turns signing the shirts with permanent markers, making sure all of us had each signed each kid's shirt. It was adorable and one of those snapshot-in-time experiences I'll remember for the rest of my life. I made plans with Daisy's middle sister (the mother of the Canadians) to get one made for myself the next day.
During this time, I got to formally meet my youngest niece -- the one who was born in Canada, after that side of the family had moved up there, so we'd never met her before. This was our first time seeing her in person and the first time she'd met these weird fat people from Omaha, one a big fat aunt and the other a big fat uncle with a long gray beard. She's four, and will turn five soon.
"Hi [niece]," I said, walking up to her and bending down to talk to her at her level, "I'm your uncle Brandon. I'm so glad to finally meet you."
I stuck out my hand to shake hers, and this shy little girl with big brown eyes and tousled, dishwater blonde hair looked up at me, grinned, took my hand and immediately wrapped herself around my leg in a big hug and a giggle.
After that point, she was on me like glue anytime I was in her presence. That little girl adored me. She led me by hand to the playground, where her parents followed (with our youngest nephew from the Denverites in tow) and I pushed her on the swing. She then led me around the campground by hand, showing me the sites, babbling in kidspeak that I only understood about 40% of, she would flop down in chairs with me and/or hang on me or want me to hold her on my lap, she would show me everything she could think of to show me and take me everywhere she could, even though it was getting dark. She was, and is, the sweetest, most precious child imaginable.
"She really seems to like men with beards," her mother told me later.
"Ya think?" I said, laughing, as the kid legit wrapped herself around my leg again. She didn't want to give anyone else the time of day; Daisy introduced herself to her and she basically ignored her. I was the kid's top priority for the night. It was cute; it was endearing. Here I was, a man she'd never met, and all I had to do was tell her I was her uncle and I was happy to finally meet her, and she imprinted on me like a baby ducking.
Becoming friends with that kid was my favorite part of the trip. It seemed like all she wanted was someone who cared that she was there and wanted to include her in everything. Of course, there were multiple very cute pictures of us taken together, but as much as I want to post them here, I won't for family privacy's sake.
Once our nephew had gotten the fire going and it began to get dark, the parents decided that they were very tired and done for the day, and would be returning to their hotel to get some rest before returning to Omaha in the morning. It was a tearful goodbye; there was a line for hugs and kisses for grandma from all of the kids, and she was crying that they had to leave for home. The trip had been hard on Mom; it is very difficult for her to travel as it's hard for her to exert herself and to get around, and she has chronic pain issues that makes a lot of daily life unbearable for her even at home in Omaha, let alone 600 miles away in the mountains. I hugged and kissed her and told her to be safe going back home, and she cried on me too, getting tears on my cheek and shirt. I felt so bad for her because I knew all she wanted to do was just spend the entire night with all of us, and get as much time in with everyone there (minus the oldest sister's husband, who went back to Denver earlier in the day, of course) as she could, but wasn't physically able to do so.
Once it was dark and the campfire was going strong, all of us gathered around it and started skewering marshmallows and hot dogs. Our second-oldest niece, age nine, brought up a set of family skewers and sat them on the table next to the fire.
"All of these are for everyone to use," she said to me, "but this one in particular is [brother's] skewer. It has to be kept apart from the others and nobody else can use it so that it doesn't get contaminated, or he could get sick and die. If anyone tries to use it, I will stab them." She waved her own skewer menacingly to make her point.
The oldest son of the Canadians, eleven years old, is and always has been allergic to almost everything under the sun, to the degree where if there's even the hint of something he's allergic to in the air, he can go into anaphylactic shock and his lungs start closing up, etc. The family's goal was for this to be the first family vacation they took where they didn't have to rush him to the nearest hospital at some point. I really wish I were making that up, but I'm not. When he was a child and I was still a smoker, I would have to smoke far away from him and basically sanitize myself before I could get near him again afterwards, as tobacco smoke was one of his many triggers. Campfire smoke and vape clouds from my vape devices aren't a problem, though. His allergies are well known throughout our large family, and we all take great strides to keep everything clean so that there's no cross-contamination of anything that would send him to the ER. Sometimes that's easier than one would think, other times it's much harder.
The second oldest son of the Denverites came up to the campfire and began to pick out skewers. His initial grab was to reach for the one that had specifically been set aside for his allergy-ridden cousin.
"No, not that one," I told him, "that one is for [cousin], specifically for him so that he doesn't get sick."
From the far side of the campfire, fifteen feet away, our niece (who had heard this conversation) angrily waved her own skewer at her cousin and repeated "I will stab you!" My nephew jumped back from the pile of skewers, hands in the air like he was being mugged.
Stifling my laughter as much as possible, I handed my nephew one of the skewers we'd brought and tousled his hair. "It's okay bud, use this one. Here's some marshmallows. Do you want a hot dog?"
Daisy and her sisters all sat on one side of the fire together, and I was semi-in-charge of helping the kids get the marshmallows and hot dogs on sticks so that the kids could cook them. The kids ate s'mores and hot dogs, and played board games by the light of a lantern they'd ingeniously hung in the tree above a picnic table, and I tried not to melt -- the fire was close and it was smoky and hot, and it had already been a very long, tiring, and hot day. Attached to my leg or in the chair with me the entire time, leaning heavily into me because she was so tired, was -- you guessed it, my new shadow -- my youngest niece.
"You're tired, aren't you, sweetie?" I asked her quietly as she essentially laid across me in the camp chair. She looked up at me and sleepily nodded.
"It's okay, you can go to bed soon."
"She's up really late for her," her mother told me. "She's normally in bed by 7:30, but she didn't want to sleep tonight, she wanted to stay up with everyone and do the campfire stuff."
Our Canadian brother-in-law, who didn't get much fire time as he had been cleaning up the campsite at the RV and making sure everything had been put away properly, came to take the kids in small groups of 1-3 at a time to go shower and get ready for bed. After another hour or so, it was just us adults (and my shadow) left.
"So what's the plan for tomorrow, then?" I asked. "Mom and dad are leaving in the morning, so we won't see them -- but [Daisy] and I are here until Saturday."
"We have to leave by the afternoon hours," Daisy's oldest sister said, "so if we're doing something all together as a group, let's do it as early as we can in the morning."
At this point it was nearly 11pm, and the last thing Daisy and I wanted to do was another early morning -- but we didn't drive all this way to sleep in a hotel, we did it to have adventures with the family.
"Well, I looked it up and Devil's Tower is two hours from here," Our brother-in-law said. "That would be two hours there and two hours back, not even counting the time spent there."
"Oof," I said. "That's a long haul."
I legitimately didn't know it was that far away, and immediately felt like a dick for bringing up the idea earlier in the day.
"Yeah," he continued, "so that will likely have to wait for our next trip up here together so we can plan that as an event, especially with [oldest sister] needing to leave early."
"What about Spearfish?" Daisy asked.
Spearfish -- or, rather, Spearfish Canyon -- was a large hiking trail area with a lot of beautiful wilderness and picnic areas. She was and had been interested in wandering through the trails and taking in the sights and sounds of nature, and had brought it up earlier in the day as a possibility for something for all of us to do. Spearfish the town was different than the canyon, and was about fifty miles away. We did not know this at the time, but this will play a semi-important part in the story later.
"We can do that," brother-in-law said, turning to the other sister wives. "Is that good for you two?"
They agreed, a morning nature hike and the like sounded fun and a good last activity for all of us to do together, and tentative plans were made. We were beginning to put out the fire when the topic shifted to this sort of trip not being a one-time event, but an every year event for all of us to get together in South Dakota in the summer.
"I'm all for that," I said. "Sign me up. I have zero issues with doing this trip every year moving forward. I love it up here."
This is all true; I feel at ease, at peace in South Dakota more than I do probably anywhere else on the planet, save for being back home in West Virginia.
"Well, hopefully the next time we'll be able to give everyone much more notice when we're doing this, instead of trying to throw it together in two weeks," said the brother-in-law.
"Let's just set up now then," Daisy's oldest sister said, excitedly. "You give us the dates, we'll make it work. I'll put it in my calendar right now. [Daisy], Brandon, are you good with that?"
Very intelligently, I let Daisy answer that question first.
"Maybe tentatively," Daisy said, "but we can't just plan something out a full year in advance -- I have no idea what I'll be doing in my job in a year, Brandon may have another job in a year, etc. Plus we have [cousin's] wedding in Nova Scotia to plan for, and Brandon and I will be going to that if at all possible."
Daisy's cousin (well, cousin to all of the sisters, I guess) is getting married next summer in Halifax. It's not a big wedding, but the reception that will be held afterwards in the tiny little town the rest of the family hails from will serve as not only the reception, but a family reunion for everyone up there. This cousin is vegan, and Daisy adores her. She doesn't want to miss the Canadian family reunion in her mother's hometown in the maritimes, a place that we haven't been to since 2015. I also have to admit that I am also looking forward to returning to Canada for a week or so, as it is also one of my favorite places on the planet.
Anyway, the discussion about scheduling another trip for next year died off after a few minutes and the Canadian middle sister, while we cleaned up the remainder of the picnic table area and disassembled the hanging lantern, took my new shadow niece with her back to the RV for bed.
"Goodnight sweetie," I told her, kissing the top of her head. "We'll see you in the morning. It's okay."
We cleaned up the rest of the firepit area and made sure the fire was out, and made sure everyone was safe and getting settled into their respective beds in the RV and in the cabin before we got into the car and went "home" to the hotel.
Driving back to Sturgis from Deadwood at midnight is a harrowing drive. Outside of Deadwood proper, there are no streetlights whatsoever and you are literally driving down a mountain for most of the drive. On the sides of the road are signs like "Bighorn sheep crossing, next 4 miles" and while it would be awesome to see one during daylight (we didn't, though the Canadians saw an entire herd of them cross the road in front of them as they arrived in town on Tuesday), seeing one with just enough time to hit it in the middle of the road going down a mountain at midnight would be goddamn terrifying.
"No sheep, no sheep, no sheep," I repeated like a mantra as we wound our way down the curvy roads of the mountain in pitch blackness.
We made it back to Sturgis with thankfully no wildlife seen, and with both water and electricity working well in our hotel (there's a first for the trip). We once more pulled into the last spot in the hotel parking lot -- right next to a beautiful, brand new white 2020 Corvette C8...which I'm sure if I'd gotten any closer to it, I would've drooled on it. I instead admired it from afar a bit later, as after I got something to actually eat and put on my stomach to take my pills, and once I'd showered, I sat outside in the cool night air on the balcony and played on my new 5G phone a bit to wind down. It had been a long, exhausting day...and we still had two more days of the trip to go.
To be continued in part 2: Live from Deadwood.
