Performer: Mother Love
Bone
Songwriters: Jeff Ament,
Bruce Fairweather, Greg Gilmore, Stone Gossard, Andy Wood
Original
Release:
Shine EP
Year: 1989
Definitive
Version:
None.
When
we last left our intrepid explorers in the summer of 1993, they just had their
minds blown by Crazy Horse. It was so awesome, in the original sense of the
word, that seeing Mt. Rushmore afterward was like seeing, say, Singles, which
introduced me to this two-part epic song, after Dances With Wolves. They’re art
of the same genre, but there’s no comparison.
Speaking
of Dances With Wolves, the next thing Scott and I did on what would be the
busiest day of our cross-country trek was stop at a particular tourist trap in
the Black Hills. This one I also knew about ahead of time.
It
was scenery from my all-time favorite movie (at the time). A few of the
buildings that were used for Fort Hayes, the prairie border town where Kevin
Costner’s character gets sent off into the wild of South Dakota, had been moved
to this location just outside Rapid City. We stopped for the requisite pictures.
It wasn’t nearly as cool as I hoped it would be. Oh well, they can’t all be
Crazy Horse.
Speaking
of tourist traps, we next stopped at the Wall Drug Store as we continued our
trek East. Do you know about Wall Drug? If it isn’t the world’s largest
drugstore, it has to be the world’s most famous drugstore. (I noted with some
contempt afterward that it was the world’s largest drugstore that didn’t sell
baseball cards.)
But
saying Wall Drug is known for its size is like saying Singles is known for its
comedic storyline. In other words you’ve missed the point. Just as the point of
Singles was the music, the point of Wall Drug is the cheese and not the kind
that comes in huge wheels.
Wall
Drug is gloriously cheesy. The best part is its courtyard menagerie of
statuary, including the legendary jackalope of the Badlands. The photographic
chicanery began after I climbed up to ride the fabled beast. Then Scott and I
had to pose with every other form of statuary out there, including the replica
of Mt. Rushmore, a gorilla and a saloon babe on a bench.
My
favorite statuary isn’t even at Wall Drug but on the outskirts of Wall, S.D. I
mean, how many times in your life do you get to see an 80-foot dinosaur?
Wall
Drug was the comedic relief in what was otherwise a fairly serious day. After
Wall, we headed to our next destination nearby—The Badlands.
Badlands
National Park was my second-favorite stop of the trip, behind only Crazy Horse.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I mean, Glacier National Park was
cool, but I’d been to the Rockies and the Tetons before. Ultimately, you were
seeing snow-covered mountains. Aside from the statuary, the Black Hills were
not unlike part of the Smokies. They’re different, but similar enough to be
recognizable.
But
I’d never seen anything like the Badlands in South Dakota. How do you describe
it? I guess like frozen desert. The swales of rock that seemed to flow through
the open prairie resembled sand dunes that had turned to stone, with unnatural
rises and falls. Scott took one of my favorite pictures while there. It was of
me in the car, reading a Bill James book, seemingly oblivious to the
otherworldly countryside that commands the view through the car’s windows.
Scott
and I drove through the park and made dozens of stops to look and take pictures.
It seemed like every vista provided some new impossible-to-achieve formation of
rock. I’d provide another Singles analogy, but two is one too many for a single
post. Let’s just say it definitely is worth checking out.
The
Badlands in some ways marked the end of our vacation but certainly not the end
of our adventures. We didn’t have any more planned destinations, but we still
had one more day to go before we’d arrive in Chicago. Our time of meandering
was over. We had to put some serious miles on the car before days’ end, which
would be in Madison, near the Minnesota border.
It
had been quite a day in South Dakota.
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