Interior, South Dakota

So There I Was…

In the front seat of a jolting pick-up truck bouncing through an immense expanse of South Dakota grasslands. Clint, the slightly hung-over rancher, was driving, one hand on the steering wheel, one on his plastic cup of powdered iced tea. A black calf the size of a Doberman stood shakily in the back seat. Clint had just lasso’d the calf, a stray wandering dangerously behind a small herd of cattle.

I’d arrived in Rapid City, SD twelve hours before on assignment to check out Badlands National Park, one of my selections for a summer story on five lesser-known national parks. Prior to becoming a salaried travel editor with a little company called Time Inc. as a backer, my travel experiences had trended toward the dirt-bag side. The central component to such travel is avoiding the costs of hotels and motels: $60-100 on a hotel room, or use that money for an extra three days of food and gas? I’ll take the extra time everyday.

So when the mandate came down at work to “spend your money like it’s yours” I took them literally. This national park trip would break single-season lows for expense reports.

Perhaps that explains how I ended up in Interior, SD’s Horseshoe Bar looking for something to eat and drink. I’d planned to eat at a tiny cowboy saloon in a tiny town that could hold only one tiny cowboy saloon, but everything in Scenic, SD was closed by the time I arrived. By 10pm I had a diminishing pack of Twizzlers and no water. The place I’d planned to camp, a beautiful bluff overlooking the South Unit of Badlands National Park, seemed a bit dicey with the thunderstorms seen forty miles away threatening to wash out the dirt access road. So I drove through the darkness to Interior and found a grassland lighthouse: three letters shining in bright, fluorescent yellow to spell B-A-R.

That’s where I met Clint. He wore tight, faded jeans, a glittering rodeo belt buckle, and a torn blue button-up cowboy shirt, the kind that sells for 25$ in hip vintage stores. His buddy and the only person in the place other than the bartender and me was Mitch, a Lakota Sioux Indian. Mitch and Clint grew up together, Clint as part of a ranching family and Mitch a member of the Lakota tribe on Pine Island Reservation.

At some point in these random travel encounters I get around to telling the folks that I’m a travel writer. This can have the hit-or-miss effect of opening the door to a myriad of article suggestions, usually centered on “the cutest little Victorian B&B with a fascinating history.”

Tonight Clint offers to show me his ranch, “to see some of the country.” He’s considered opening a horse ranch for tourists and wants my opinion. A half hour later I’m following him in our trucks out dirt roads to the trailer where we stand outside and sip whisky from a small bottle: “Here, you need some of this.” Overhead a domed, moonless ceiling of the thickest blanket of stars I’ve ever seen makes the night look silver. As my eyes adjust to the darkness I make out the soft shape of rolling hills covered in tall grasses. Clint’s long, dark trailer is in front of us as we stand by his diesel pick-up. After talk of property rights and life on a large-scale family ranch, Clint points me to my room then heads to the other end of the trailer to sleep on his sheet-less mattress in the master bedroom.

Morning comes bright in the grasslands. I wake up from my sleeping bag atop the bed and lie still for a few minutes remembering exactly where I am. It’s not that I’d had too much whisky the night before, it’s just that I hadn’t expected to wake up in a bright room of peeling wallpaper with miles of grasslands outside a trailer full of cowboy boots, hats, empty potato chip bags, and a nice man named Clint still asleep fifty feet away.

I wander out the squeaky screen door into the sunlight and sit at the warped, homemade wooden table nearly buried in the tall grasses that extend out over hills broken only by random clumps of juniper trees. Eventually the open door space fills with Clint, wearing the same shirt and squinting into the light.

“Damn, you’re up and at ‘em,” he says. “I’m lazier’n hell this morning. Drank too much last night.”

He goes back inside, pours himself some instant tea mix and comes back out.

“Wanna see some of the country?”

We hop into his truck, the two dogs on the flatbed in back, and head down a gulch and back up, taking the direct route to the edge of the gently rolling grassland plateau. Suddenly the sage and light green grasslands curl under like the lip of a wave seen from behind. Below the curl it’s like the skin has been peeled back from the landscape. Badlands fall out in sharp spires and gullies chiseled by the minimal rain that’s been falling out here for thousands of years. The soft clays and muds wash away easily, leaving slopes of cracked, crumbly grays, reds, pinks, and tans. The mad drip castle of a slope finally levels off into a lush green carpet at the valley floor. In the distance I see the southern edge of Badlands National Park’s North Unit. Between here and there, Clint and his family ranch thousands of acres, breeding cattle and bison and growing hay to feed them. My hamburger last week in Birmingham may have come from here.

As we drive toward the herd of cattle where we’ll eventually pick up the orphan calf, Clint tells me about the ups and downs of the ranching business and life. It’s all he’s known and all he will know, though he has dreams and ideas like the trail horse outfitter service for tourists. I realize I can visit national parks like Badlands and I always will, but I’ll never have the native knowledge of someone like Clint. All I can do is take a chance and go home with an honest drunk rancher offering to show me some of his country.

Clint drops me off at his trailer and drives away to take the calf to his mom’s house. She’s good at nursing them until they can be independent within a herd. I climb into my shiny truck and follow him out, taking a turn at the state road toward Badlands National Park where I’ll look for a story.