At Least it's Not Cancer

(Originally written late June 2019; edited and updated November 2019)

We've had a lot going on over the past few months, and not a lot of it has been good, honestly. There is some good, but almost every time something good happens, it is overshadowed by something bad, whether that's something small or something catastrophic. 

For example -- in April, the wife and I both had some moles removed by a dermatologist. They were very questionable for both of us (I had two removed, both from my back -- the wife had one removed from her arm), so the dermatologists sent them to the lab to see if they were cancerous. We had to wait two weeks, but found out that yay, we didn't have skin cancer! neither of us! 

That same week, the car started making grinding noises, and the wife took it in to find that we had to get one of the wheel bearings replaced. Twice, actually, because they replaced it the first time with another bad one. This ended up costing us about $300 or so.

But at least we don't have cancer, right? Yet.

That tends to be the way things go in our lives as of late. And to think, the Chinese Zodiac said that last year was supposed to be my "bad luck" year. I think it's pretty off, if you ask me. Last year I went vegetarian, lost like 40 pounds, sold my old truck, we bought a house, and I collected like ten new hoodies with nerd shit on them. That sounds like a pretty baller year to me.

[EDIT: maybe not ten, but pretty close.]

Next subject on the bad news front -- one of my sisters is dying. Slowly. Maybe. I don't know, exactly. I just know she's been in the hospital for over two months and, while I know the specifics as to why, I'm not going to write about them here. That's not so much out of respect for her feelings or my parents' feelings on the subject (though that is a large part of it) but because I don't even know how to fully process it myself at the moment. I have a great many feelings on the subject and not really any way to actually (or accurately) express them. I may write more about it later, but for now, no.

[EDIT: she made a full recovery and has been back amongst the living for some time now.]

Because I don't like being miserable, and because (again, in other news) my job is slowly getting worse and worse by the day, I brought up to the wife around the first or second week of May that we should try to get away this year for our anniversary -- it was our fifth wedding anniversary and that is a milestone in itself, and after the winter and spring full of snow and flooding and other bad shit happening, I wanted us to be able to get out of Nebraska for a few days and be able to decompress -- leave the state, and Omaha, behind for a bit, spend a little money, and just go do something fun and outside of the norm for us.

She and I passed back and forth several ideas within a day's driving distance -- we only wanted to spend a little money, so flying wasn't necessarily on the table -- including a few spots along the Great Lakes and a few places across the Canadian border, such as Winnipeg or Thunder Bay, Ontario. Daisy is a dual citizen and we both have passports, and it's not like we haven't been to Canada before. From where we are, we can get to Winnipeg in about 8 or 9 hours, Thunder Bay in 10 or 11. Roughly, including stops and the like. That was about the maximum amount of driving we could do in one day, however, and definitely the two most expensive options. However, in the beginning, I also floated the idea of Deadwood, South Dakota.

Why, you might ask? Well, it's in the heart of the gorgeous Black Hills, it's a really historic old west town (I mean, there's literally an entire, excellent HBO series based around it), it's 20 minutes from Wyoming and 30 miles or so from Mount Rushmore, and it's flanked by Rapid City (what appears to be a bit of a hipster holdout in the wild west) and motorcycle hub, Sturgis -- a town that has become so famous because of the biker culture and its yearly festival that there's literally a huge sign on the side of one of the mountains in the town that says S T U R G I S, in big letters, like the Hollywood sign.

Deadwood was also one of the cheapest options for a getaway as well -- a 3-day, 2-night stay in one of the more upscale hotel/casino/convention center destinations was less than $300, all inclusive.

Now, mind you, I'd never been to Deadwood. At least, not Deadwood proper, anyway. I'd watched the HBO show when it was on 15ish years ago with a passing interest only, really, and rewatched most of it again about a year or two ago. I had seen the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore on a trip out west in 1991 with my step-grandparents, but I mean, I was nine at the time, and well, I don't remember a lot of it, nor could I fully appreciate it all as a child.

Deadwood is roughly 8.5 hours from home, one way. After some lengthy discussions involving logistics, sightseeing along the way there and the way back (including the forever-famous-to-Dakotans Wall Drug), the wife stated that even though she found that sort of vacation rather dry and boring, she knew that she would enjoy it or find things to enjoy about it, such as vegan places to eat and the sightseeing, and said if that's what I wanted us to do, it was as good of a destination as any. It was as close to excitement as I would get out of her for it, and so that's what I chose. I took a week off work (our anniversary itself followed the Memorial Day weekend, so I padded it on both ends with PTO), and booked two nights at the Lodge at Deadwood Hotel, Casino, and Convention Center. She took off the two days at the end of the week and the following Monday, and everything was set and ready to go. I was thrilled.

Road trips are a big effing deal for me -- I love the time in the car with Daisy as we have had some of our deepest conversations ever on long road trips, plus there's always stuff to see, we stock a cooler with drinks and snacks, etc. The road trip itself is generally one of the best parts of the vacation for us, as the destination -- while fun in itself -- ends up being secondary. We were in good spirits, I would have (thanks to my cunning use of PTO), eleven straight days off from work, and I'd have almost a full week off to get stuff done around the house before we even left. Finally, I would be able to relax and decompress and have something fun to look forward to, for once, instead of a neverending slog back and forth to and from a job I was, and am, increasingly finding more miserable by the day. This trip would be something positive, something good.

Two nights into my days off and three days before we would leave for Deadwood, we got the most horrific thunderstorm/hailstorm I've seen since I've lived in Nebraska (if not in the midwest as a whole), and it washed out and destroyed the retaining wall at the back of our property adjacent to our neighbors' property, taking a good chunk of our yard with it and leaving our picket fence bent over into our yard and hanging by two of the now completely exposed fenceposts. In addition, it washed out all of the fill dirt underneath the concrete slab upon which our large outdoor shed was built. Said concrete slab is now cracked down the center, and while it is sturdy for the moment, in order to replace the wall and repair the fence, it will all have to be removed, including the shed, and the ground will need to be completely leveled out across the yard.

All estimates to perform all repairs, restore the wall, demolish the shed, level the yard, and fix the fence breached the five figure mark very quickly.

I...I don't even have the words, folks. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. There were more storms and rain predicted for basically the rest of the week, including the entire time we'd be in South Dakota, and neither I nor the wife knew whether the rest of the wall and fence were stable enough to remain stationary in the event of any more ground saturation. I tried to cancel the Deadwood trip. Daisy said not to -- if it got worse it got worse, there's nothing we could do about it or stop it. Moreover, there wasn't anything we could've done to prevent it; every contractor we spoke to said, upon their, ahem, postmortem examination(s), that the wall was poorly and improperly constructed in the first place several years ago, and nobody ever would've known that it was deteriorating from the underground, from the inside out, until a catastrophic failure like this occurred. Well, it occurred.

We asked our other neighbor to keep an eye on the house, wall, and fence for us, and left for Deadwood three days later.

Despite the stresses going on in our lives (my sister was already in the hospital by this time, and had been for a while), we were determined to push as much of it as possible out of our heads and to try to enjoy the trip -- since it was already bought and paid for. Before we left, I alerted Daisy to a few rather sobering facts about South Dakota:

1. There is not a single Whole Foods anywhere in South Dakota.
2. There is not a single Trader Joe's anywhere in South Dakota.
3. There is not a single Natural Grocers anywhere in South Dakota.
4. There are only three Aldi stores in South Dakota, and all three of them are in Sioux Falls, on the opposite side of the state from where we'd be.

I'm not sure how many Walmarts and/or Target stores South Dakota has, but without looking it up I want to say less then twenty total for either chain -- we drove across the entire state, from east to west and back again, right down the center on I-90. I saw one single, solitary Walmart (with a Sam's Club in the same plaza!) and maybe three Target stores the entire time we were in South Dakota. I have no idea where the vast majority of the state gets their affordable food and clothing, not to mention toiletries and home goods, unless they really do pile their families into a big truck/van/SUV and make a several-hour drive to the nearest store every few weeks. Amazon, maybe? How slow is Prime shipping to the Badlands, or to the towns like Deadwood far up in the mountains through slalom passes and thick forests?

Further than that, I'm not sure if South Dakota knows about the internet, nor am I sure if they actually have cell phones that work, because the signal for both of our phones across the entire, gorgeous state full of mountains and fields was piss poor. Piss poor to the point where we couldn't even route the GPS on Daisy's phone while we were driving, because we kept losing signal across large swaths of the state.

I also say they may not know about the internet because the wifi in the Lodge was just as piss poor, to the point where I had trouble actually getting apps to pull up on my phone even with full wifi signal. So maybe Amazon isn't much of an option for them either.

I don't want to speak poorly of the state, though -- it is beautiful open country, nature reserves, and friendly people -- all of whom apparently love fireworks and gambling. Every sort of firework is legal in South Dakota (I made the joke that it's because there's literally nothing there to blow up), as is every form of gambling. I'm not sure what the titty bars or alcohol laws are like, though, since we didn't, ahem, partake in those sorts of establishments.

Completely coincidentally (meaning, I didn't plan it at all), the premiere of the long awaited HBO movie follow-up to the Deadwood television series was on our actual anniversary, the Friday night we were in town. There was a premiere event in town at one of the big theaters where you could go see it on the big screen and meet some of the cast -- none of the big name players I was told, but some of the minor characters, and one of those actors (I can't remember which one) had a band who was playing the after-party -- that we had heard literally nothing about from any of the locals until we had already done all of our touristy stuff for the day.

[EDIT: The actor was W. Earl Brown, who plays Dan Dority on the show and has been in a billion things over the years as a character actor.]

"Oh yeah, they're having a big party down there at the theater for the movie, they gave away a bunch of free tickets and everything, got the band playin' afterwards and all that, heard lots of people are excited about it," the older man running the Mount Moriah Cemetery gift shop told us. "If you're in town for your anniversary you should go to it, especially if you like the show."

It is at this point that I should mention -- and probably should've mentioned it way earlier -- Daisy has never seen the show, aside from walking by the TV once or twice while Ian McShane was swearing up a storm or beating the piss out of somebody. She had a vague idea it existed, and an even vaguer idea of how good it is and of its critical acclaim (mostly from me telling her about it), but Deadwood isn't something that Daisy would ever actively seek out to watch -- it is not, as she would tell you, the type of media she likes to consume. It's not her bag, it's not her thing, and that's okay. Truth be told, a lot of the historical accuracy of the show is up for debate anyhow, and it's not something I would force on her to get her all hyped up for our trip or anything like that. That's not who I am.

So, at this point, I darted my eyes over to Daisy, who gave me a "meh, if you want" sort of shrug.

It was our anniversary, however, not just mine -- and I wasn't going to force the wife to go to an event that she didn't give a single solitary shit about, and truth be told by that time I was already quite tired, we still had a gold mine to tour, swimming to do in the Lodge's indoor pool, and a night of gambling ahead of us -- all stuff we'd planned out in advance -- not to mention that we'd already left the hotel at the asscrack of dawn to go see Mount Rushmore first that morning, and had come back up through Rapid City to go to a fantastic vegan restaurant Daisy had found in her searching for good food in the area. We were tired, and would be checking out and driving home the next morning before 11.

I only regretted it a little.

I told Daisy, however, that I had one solitary request, and it would take less than five minutes of her time -- you see, while they had the big premiere in town for the Deadwood movie that night, it was also unique as that was the night that it would also be premiering on HBO.

"I want to watch at least a small chunk of the Deadwood movie on HBO," I told her, "so that I can say that I watched the Deadwood movie, about the town of Deadwood, based on the series Deadwood, that was written about the people and locations in Deadwood, some of those people whose graves we visited today, while actually staying in, eating in, and sleeping in fucking Deadwood."

She agreed to this. I checked to see when it was on, and turned on our hotel room's big flat-screen TV, grabbing the channel listing card off the dresser to find HBO.

The hotel didn't get HBO.

What the fuck, South Dakota? 

What the FUCK, Deadwood? 

HBO had made that town about a billion times more famous than it ever would have been otherwise and the high-end gambling resort hotel we stayed in didn't have HBO on its cable package.

This is, to this day, the only hotel room I've ever stayed in anywhere that didn't get HBO. Even the Budget Inn I lived in between homes when I was living in Missouri got HBO.

Anyway.

We, ahem, celebrated our anniversary, went gambling and lost $100, and went swimming in the actually pretty neat indoor waterpark the Lodge offered, then showered and went to bed. The next morning, we were back on the road for Omaha.

Overall, the trip was fun. I glossed over a lot of the stuff we did and saw for brevity's sake. Part of the experience was to get away, and part of it was to celebrate our anniversary somewhere new. While we were driving, I told Daisy how excited I was to have the opportunity to see Pronghorn again, because they're one of my favorite animals -- and the upper west, especially South Dakota and Wyoming, are goddamn full of them.

"What's a pronghorn?" she asked.

"...they're like deer, but not," I said, trying to explain it to her. "Part deer, part antelope, part goat. Sort of. They're as populous out here as deer are back home."

"Uh huh," she said, rolling her eyes slightly.

I almost made myself look like a fool too, because throughout the entire trip there wasn't a single fucking one of them that made an appearance on the side of the road. We saw buffalo, actual deer, eagles, beaver dams, and all sorts of other wildlife, but the pronghorn had proven elusive.

That was, until we were driving back home, and saw them everywhere.


***

In the months since I originally wrote this post, we did get the wall rebuilt and repaired -- it was finished the night before Halloween (so, five months later) for about $10k total, give or take. It was done by a group of independent contractors over the course of a month, after we'd had at least ten different companies come out and provide estimates ranging anywhere from $11k to $35k. The group we hired not only removed the shed and concrete slab, but rebuilt the wall, rebuilt our fence -- including adding an entirely new section to it -- and completely leveled out our yard. Daisy will be using the back corner where the shed once was to put in an actual garden in the spring, more than likely, as there is no longer grass there (just dirt/fill dirt).

The night the wall was completed, as if it were an omen, we got an inch of snow. Temperatures have remained mostly freezing since, with only a hint of warm weather here and there -- today, for example, it's 67...and it's supposed to be 19 and snowy tomorrow night.

More to come, eventually.