Uncrowded America: Bikers, fish and one old grouch

We're about to take off for the Fourth of July weekend. We're spending it, as we always do, at our place in New Hampshire's Monadnock region. While I can't wait to get there and crack a beer, I'm not looking forward to being on the highway for the next four hours with thousands of other people. Four-dollar a gallon gas notwithstanding, the roads will be mighty crowded this afternoon.

Makes me nostalgic for some of the uncrowded places I've seen in my journeys around America.

Like Sand Cut, Florida, the "Speck Capital of the World." This little burg sits on Lake Okeechobee, the best spot in Florida to fish for speck, also known as speckled perch or black crappie. Sand Cut gets a lot of fishing visitors but has a permanent population of fewer than 10 souls, including the "old grouch" who merits mention on the hamlet's welcome sign.

Then there's Aladdin, Wyoming, population 15. When the kids and I drove through it, we stopped at the Aladdin General Store, where dozens of bikers on their way to Bike Week in nearby Sturgis, South Dakota, were hanging out on the store's porch chugging Cokes and smoking Marlboros. I sat on the porch and marveled that, for those few rest stop minutes, we and the bikers had swelled Aladdin's population to triple its normal size.

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South Dakota's temple to corn

A recent issue of Smithsonian carried a piece called “What’s Eating America,” adapted from Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Corn, writes Pollan, is king of the American diet. Of the 45,000 items stocked in the average American supermarket, corn figures somewhere in more than a quarter of them. And, it figures in the very structure of the stores themselves.

Writes Pollan: “It’s not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it’s not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods; it’s not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself – the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built – is in no small measure a manifestation of corn. "

In Mitchell, South Dakota there’s a building that is nothing but a manifestation of corn. The kids and I were on our cross country journey and were headed east toward Sioux Falls, where I planned to hook a 90-degree left turn from I-90 onto I-29 and drive to Fargo, North Dakota just so I could hear the locals there talk. I was hoping they’d sound like Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson. (Enough of them did to have made the jaunt to Fargo worth my while.)

South Dakota's spare, beautiful, wind-whipped monotony can tax the endurance of the long-distance driver, so I pitstopped anywhere that smelled even mildly entertaining. (A real gem: Pioneer Auto in Murdo – for antique and classic car buffs, this funky, labyrinthine museum is worth the price of a plane ticket to Rapid City or Sioux Falls from just about anywhere.)

But Mitchell's Corn Palace took the cake. From Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:


An architectural phenomenon is firmly planted in the middle of downtown Mitchell. The Corn Palace is an American artistic statement brilliantly rendered. In corn. Corn art. Art in corn. Corn-as-art. A building made of corn. Covered, embellished, inside and out, with cobs and kernels. A stationary, architectural Rose Bowl Parade in feed instead of flowers. I bought postcards and a corn-shaped candle from a gift shop cashier who told me this year’s exterior and interior corn murals “weren’t quite done because there hasn’t been much rain, and the grain is weak.” It looked done to us. Like nothing we’d ever seen. Artists compete annually for the honor of crafting a piece of the next year’s Corn Palace. Photographs of Corn Palaces of years gone by lined a lobby wall. The building’s skeletal shape stayed the same, but each annual Palace was a new work of iconic American art. Mitchell changes the way you look at corn.



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Free camping day at family-friendly KOAs

May 12 was Come Camp With Us Day at KOA . If you missed the campground chain’s giveaway day this year, you’ll get another shot at a free site next year. Come Camp With Us Day, when KOA gives away some 25,000 campsites for a night in May, is an annual event (2006 is number three). KOA locations start accepting reservations in February, so mark your calendar.

The kids and I got hooked on KOAs on our trans-America trek. Backcountry types will scoff and say staying at a KOA isn’t camping. By their definition, they're right. Nobody’s roughing it at a KOA. These are tidy, well-lit, family-friendly enterprises with pools and WiFi and microwaves to heat the pizza and Chef Boyardee ravioli that you buy at the camp store. They're located close to civilization -- and often close to go-kart tracks, burger joints, gas stations and Dairy Queens. If you want remote, pitch your tent elsewhere. At a KOA, you'll have plenty of company.

As a woman alone on a 12,000-mile road trip with two kids, these places were just the ticket after 300 miles of hot, dusty driving. They had activities, movies and video games for the kids, and electricity for me, so I could pull out the laptop and get some writing done.

We tent-camped quite a few times – and it’s the tent and RV sites that KOA offers as freebies on Come Camp With Us Day – but we fell in love with the Kamping Kabins. For less than 50 bucks, we got our own little bunkhouse with four beds, a desk, lights and outlets, a porch – sometimes with a swing – and a little patch of front lawn. Water pumps were steps away. KOA offers ritzier cabins with bathrooms, separate bedrooms, heat, AC, and even kitchens, but the economy models suited us fine.

We had some great KOA moments: eating canned chili by the fire in Santa Rosa, New Mexico while the long, sweet whistle of a hundred-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe filled the desert night; sitting poolside and swapping road stories with other traveling families in Cedar City, Utah; gathering under a purple High Plains sky in Belvedere, South Dakota to sing "You Were Always on my Mind" along with Almost Willie Nelson, whose braided pigtails hung to his waist; watching Dana, who'd signed on as a volunteer mucker, grin big as she shoveled clots of haystuck manure from the Mount Rushmore KOA's horse stables.

I made sure she washed her sneakers under our water pump before letting her back inside our cozy Kamping Kabin.

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Gerard Baker: Removing the rose-colored glasses at Rushmore

I just read the May issue of Smithsonian and had one of those it's-about-time moments. An article by travel writer Tony Perrottet introduces readers to Gerard Baker, appointed in 2004 as Mount Rushmore's first Native American superintendent. Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian, has, writes Perrottet, "begun to expand programs and lectures at the monument to include the Indian perspective. Until recently, visitors learned about Rushmore as a patriotic symbol, as a work of art or as a geological formation, but nothing about its pre-white history -- or why it raises such bitterness among many Native Americans."

The mountain that holds the monumental heads is, and has always been, sacred ground to the Lakota Sioux and other Indian nations, and it, like the rest of the Black Hills, was stolen by the U.S. government after prospectors under the command of George Armstrong Custer found gold. Perrottet quotes Baker: " 'I'm not going to concentrate on that. But there is a huge need for Anglo-Americans to understand the Black Hills before the arrival of the white men. We need to talk about the first 150 years of America and what that means. ' "

I took my kids to Rushmore on our post-9/11 cross-country road trip, and I did what I could to have them understand what had happened in the high, forested landscape they stood in. In Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, I wrote:


We were up and out in the morning (after a two-dollar, all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast in the KOA’s Big White Tent) before most of the other 499 sites’ inhabitants, and we had Rushmore’s giant presidential heads and adjacent giant parking lot almost to ourselves.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee had, many years ago, changed my view of pieces of our history, history I’d learned in school in the days before honesty became part of the policy.

In my mind, Mount Rushmore was appallingly insensitive, a monument to manifest destiny cut into the sacred hills of people on the receiving end of the dark side of continental expansion, an inescapably huge reminder of white men’s domination and theft of the Sioux land it towered above. I respected Gutzon Borglum’s artistic accomplishment. And, I respected the presidents portrayed.

It was the act of chiseling them permanently in that particular landscape that bristled me. As we drove toward Rushmore, I asked the kids to consider the land around us and try to understand that these hills, this high, curving earth, these stone pinnacles pointing like fingers into the sky, this forest, these deer by the side of the road, were and are revered by the tribes that had called this place home before white men found gold and killed them or pushed them out. Before the Black Hills became theme parks and fake gold mines and go-kart tracks and wild west shootouts staged for tourists, they were Sioux identity and heritage, and still are. I wanted Dana and Adam to enjoy seeing Mount Rushmore, but I didn’t want them looking at it in a naïve and uninformed vacuum. The rampant kitsch of the Black Hills is dangerous, and I didn’t want my kids to be so seduced or anesthetized by it that they gave no thought to the people whose homeland this had been or, indeed, to the beauty and essence of the land itself...

We stood in the wind at the end of a great walkway lined with flags and plaques of all the states of the union and gazed up at four granite men who’d helped create or preserve or defend America and its ideals at some turbulent or pivotal point in its still-young life. I wondered what they thought as they looked down over us now...

By the time crowds and traffic had begun to thicken around Rushmore, portending a sloth-paced touristic sludge by early afternoon, we were far away, first on spectacular Needles Scenic Byway, then on Iron Mountain Road toward Keystone, catching glimpses of the monumental heads across the valley, the stone portraits framed by the orange and pink spires and rock arches and narrow stone tunnels of these thin, twisting ribbons of high forest road.


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