We were out West just now, visiting daughter Georgia and her family in Madison, Wisconsin, and daughter Isabel and family in Pinedale, Wyoming, driving overland between the two through Minnesota and South Dakota.
Madison is very lush. Even the weeds look like special garden plantings.
Georgia told me take this picture, through a window in her garage.
Downtown Madison has nice buildings and interesting alleys, not to mention two big lakes.
Sylvia made a nice Warhol-like drawing for our granddaughter, who glued on the sequins. Sequins have come a long way.
Minnesota was suitably vast and Midwestern.
We stopped in a tiny town called Blue Earth, Minnesota, just because it seemed like a nice town name. Earlier in the day we’d hit a Wal-Mart to pick up some food. The Wal-Mart trademarked slogan now is kind of ominous, a single word: Always.
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Blue Earth had a hippie store with dried fruit and this weird single-tree park.
We spent the night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which was kind of a nice place, although there was an enormously loud ventilation fan right outside out window, a recurring problem on the trip. On the Interstate 90 in South Dakota you’re in this endless ocean of rolling grasslands, and get eager for a roadside attraction, such as the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. The murals are freshly tessellated from sawed-in-half corn cobs every year. They were corny.
The Mitchell high-school team is the Kernels!
The clouds were amazing in the prairies, feathery, vast, spaced out from horizon to horizon like cauliflowers in a field.
1880 Town was another SD roadside attraction. Note the mannequin of a woman in the upstairs hotel room. All the buildings were trucked in from all over the state, genuine.
It was surprisingly hot in the sun; a guy working there said it goes up to 120 in the summer. The guy was a retiree from Mississippi who parks his RV for free at 1880 Town in the summer and puts in a few hours a week as an attendant. His wife was with him, doing the same thing, apparently Work for RV Campers is a popular thing for retirees. Sort of reminds me of the pheezers in my novel Software.
I dug the peeling wallpaper in the hotel with the mannequin upstairs.
The RV Work-Camper’s wife told us that most of the buildings were kept up, but that the man who’d donated the hotel insisted it be kept as is till he died because he’d spent a night there in the 1910s. He’s 94 and he visits the hotel every day. Maybe he’s in love with the mannequin. Twilight Zone episode…
Antlers are a favorite form of natural gnarl decoration in the Wild West. One thing that struck me about the WW is that it only lasted 20 or 30 years. I’m thinking there was something similar in Silicon Valley from like 1975-2005, a 20 or 30 year transition period, and I happened to be here for most of it. Maybe I could get a memoir out of that.
We hit the Badlands of South Dakota next. They aren’t all that big, but they’re pretty great.
What made it wild was that most of the time there was this enormous thunder cloud hovering over us.
The clouds under the thundercloud looked dark and the far-away clouds looked light. I shot this intelligent-alien type cloud from my moving car. A flying jellyfish. I considered Photoshopping away the tilt, but the tilt makes it look more desperate and authentic. Shot moments before that intergalactic contact after which everything changed…
Suckling on the breast of Mother Earth.
We were diving this nice PT Cruiser I rented. I like those cars a lot, although the mileage was only about 23 mpg even on the freeways, and the pickup isn’t that great if you really want to pass someone. If they could make a high-mileage turbo PT Cruiser, it would be irresistible.
Gotta hit Mount Rushmore. The road to Rushmore from Rapid City is insane, a roadside attraction every thirty yards for like twenty miles. But once you’re there, the statues really are impressive, it’s intense to see the physical reality of something you’ve seen take-offs of your whole life. The guy who made them was a refreshingly nutty artist, Gutzon Borglum (Danish name).
We stopped in Lead, SD, (pronounced leed) to check out the enormous pit-like “Open Cut” gold mine, now unused. For the sake of good public relations, the Lead Homestake Mining company doesn’t actually have a photo of the open cut on their website! I thought it was kind of beautiful though, smoothed off by the weather as it is, and with the lush green grass growing right up to the edge. An earthwork. Those diagonal stripes are veins of rhyolite.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
wow what i was reading this & looking at yur images what about Zappanalle in Bad doberan – anyway i got my passport NOW & would like to meet Norman Spinrad cos i have 2 go 2 Paris , France on the new train FROM ST pANCRAS & my son number 2 Dave has Gone to a stone circle & DID YU SEE ANY bUFFALO IN THE mIDWEST
June 25th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I did see a herd of half a dozen bison (another word for buffalo) in Yellowstone, Gamma, but failed to photograph them.
The other photo I missed that I wish I’d gotten was a line of boxcars parked at the base of a grain elevator in the plains.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:29 am
I went to all the same stops in SD when driving cross country when I moved from South Carolina to Alaska last year; I think everyone who can should take a cross-country drive in their life. Montana and Wyoming are also great, did you get to go by Devil’s Tower or the Tetons in Wyoming? I had to see Devils Tower being a sci-fi & movie geek, unfortunately no close encounters of the third kind. Montana is nice too, big sky and plateaus; even saw some bison there. The airport in Great Falls is on a plateau, airplanes look like their falling off the edge when taking off; pretty cool. One question, did you use any filters or anything on the pics of the Badlands, the colors are much more dramatic than my pics of the area. Thanks for the blogging and great books.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Glad you like the pix, Zack. Rather than filters, I use Photoshop or, sometimes, Camera Raw (another Adobe product, mainly used on RAW files, but also usable on JPG files). In Camera Raw you can set the White Balance “temperature” to warm up a picture. In Photoshop you can do something similar by fooling with the Saturation/Hue menu, or you can in fact flat-out apply a warming filter, though I don’t tend to do that. The two Photoshop tricks that I use the most on my pictures are the simple Ctrl+Alt+L to “set all levels” which usually pops the picture out better, and I almost always use the Image|Adjustments|Shadow/Highlight dialog to dial up the light on the shadowed areas. I like to have the clouds show up, and a good way to do this is to set your camera’s exposure for the clouds, accept that the foregroudn will come out dark, and then fix that with Shadow/Highlight.
Devil’s Tower…soon come!
June 26th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Great photos. I am originally from SD and love to read blogs of peoples trips throught the state. Sorry about the Corn Palace!
My grandfather owns the 1880 Town. He is in his 90s. and loves to hear the comments about the town. He has been a bit sick latly, however up till last year he drove the 25 miles from Murdo SD to the town every day during the summer to walk around a talk to those who stopped to enjoy his “museum”.
I to am in awe each time I see Mt. Rushmore. It is truely an amazing work of art. I hope you enjoy the remainder of your trip.
June 28th, 2008 at 7:47 am
> One thing that
> struck me about the WW is that it only lasted
> 20 or 30 years. I’m thinking there was something
> similar in Silicon Valley from like 1975-2005, a
> 20 or 30 year transition period, and I happened
> to be here for most of it.
What came to an end or finished transitioning? I only know the place by reputation, so I think of it as being the land of empty tech hype, same as it seemed to have been a decade ago…
June 28th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Well, certainly SV is full of tech hype, but it’s not “empty” — e.g. the chips that power the computer you use to post your comment were designed here.
The fact that you think of it as full of empty tech hype is in fact the back end of the transition. In the 80s and 90s there was, I’d say, more of a sense of really discovering brand new things. And in the late 90s it switched to be more about making money, often with empty tech hype.
Contrast, e.g., Deadwood SD when the outlaws were there vs. today’s Deadwood, which is a strip of cheesy slot-machine casinos.
My engineer friend Isaac says you might say that the Wild West pioneer period of Silicon Valley lasted from 1970 to 2000, and that it ended with the dot-com crash.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Hey!
I was wonderingg, you didnt happen to go on the Rapid City to Keystone train did you??
Because i did, around the same time (according to when you posted this) and it was really wierd! these too blonde girls got stuck on the train tracks on their quads!
did you see that?!
hahahaha