{"id":521,"date":"2008-06-25T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T20:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/25\/wisconsin-to-south-dakota\/"},"modified":"2008-06-25T12:07:27","modified_gmt":"2008-06-25T20:07:27","slug":"wisconsin-to-south-dakota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/25\/wisconsin-to-south-dakota\/","title":{"rendered":"Wisconsin to South Dakota"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were out West just now, visiting daughter Georgia <\/a>and her family in Madison, Wisconsin, and daughter Isabel <\/a>and family in Pinedale, Wyoming, driving overland between the two through Minnesota and South Dakota.<\/p>\n

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Madison is very lush. Even the weeds look like special garden plantings.<\/p>\n

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Georgia told me take this picture, through a window in her garage.<\/p>\n

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Downtown Madison has nice buildings and interesting alleys, not to mention two big lakes.<\/p>\n

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Sylvia made a nice Warhol-like drawing for our granddaughter, who glued on the sequins. Sequins have come a long way.<\/p>\n

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Minnesota was suitably vast and Midwestern.<\/p>\n

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We stopped in a tiny town called Blue Earth, Minnesota, just because it seemed like a nice town name. Earlier in the day we\u2019d hit a Wal-Mart to pick up some food. The Wal-Mart trademarked slogan now is kind of ominous, a single word: Always<\/b>.
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Blue Earth had a hippie store with dried fruit and this weird single-tree park.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019re in this endless ocean of rolling grasslands, and get eager for a roadside attraction, such as the Corn Palace <\/a>in Mitchell, SD. The murals are freshly tessellated from sawed-in-half corn cobs every year. They were corny.<\/p>\n

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The Mitchell high-school team is the Kernels!<\/p>\n

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The clouds were amazing in the prairies, feathery, vast, spaced out from horizon to horizon like cauliflowers in a field.<\/p>\n

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1880 Town <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/a>is a popular thing for retirees. Sort of reminds me of the pheezers in my novel Software<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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I dug the peeling wallpaper in the hotel with the mannequin upstairs. <\/p>\n

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The RV Work-Camper\u2019s wife told us that most of the buildings were kept up, but that the man who\u2019d donated the hotel insisted it be kept as is till he died because he\u2019d spent a night there in the 1910s. He\u2019s 94 and he visits the hotel every day. Maybe he’s in love with the mannequin. Twilight Zone episode…<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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We hit the Badlands of South Dakota <\/a>next. They aren\u2019t all that big, but they\u2019re pretty great. <\/p>\n

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What made it wild was that most of the time there was this enormous thunder cloud hovering over us.<\/p>\n

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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…<\/p>\n

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Suckling on the breast of Mother Earth.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t that great if you really want to pass someone. If they could make a high-mileage turbo PT Cruiser, it would be irresistible.<\/p>\n

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Gotta hit Mount Rushmore.<\/a> 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 <\/a>(Danish name). <\/p>\n

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We stopped in Lead, SD, (pronounced leed) to check out the enormous pit-like \u201cOpen Cut\u201d\u009d gold mine, now unused. For the sake of good public relations, the Lead Homestake Mining company doesn\u2019t actually have a photo of the open cut on their website<\/a>! 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}