Come on, Big Boy, Ten Cents a Mile

photo by Annie Raines

On Sunday we drove west from Cleveland to Janesville, Wisconsin, 450 miles down the road.
We faced an important decision in Janesville: whether to stay on I-90 West through southern Minnesota and South Dakota, traveling through the Badlands and part of Wyoming, then north to Billings, or to follow I-94 northwest into Minneapolis and across North Dakota before cutting southwest to Billings. The northern route was 30 miles shorter, and perhaps flatter, but took us through Minneapolis and St. Paul, which would mean heavier traffic. The southern route avoided any big cities in Minnesota, but we would need to drive 473 miles to Sioux Falls in order to stay at a major chain hotel and find good food. I was also concerned about the view from the driver's seat. The southern route, I imagined, would be more interesting, with scenic mountains and historical sites, though we wouldn't have time to tour Mt. Rushmore. On the other hand, we would have to go through Sturgis, SD, which was under two weeks away from its annual Harley Davidson Rally and possibly already crowded with motorcycles. The northern route was by most accounts flat and featureless, and I pictured myself being bored and depressed as we drove across a stark plain. I took the Greyhound cross-country when I was a kid visiting the Grand Canyon with my parents, and I will never forget the soul-killing ride through central Nebraska, which bore a striking resemblance to eastern Nebraska and western Nebraska. I would lean against the window with the air conditioning blowing against my head, my nostrils dilating from the disinfectant aroma wafting out of the bus toilet a few rows behind me, and fall asleep staring out at browned fields so vast and unbroken I thought we had stopped moving altogether. There wasn’t a tree, shrub, cow or calf to jut out from the land and provide the merest sense of scale. I would fall asleep staring at this leathery landscape and awaken hours later to the same view. How would we ever make it to the Rockies this way?
My fear of encountering a grayer, northern version of the same thing in North Dakota was pushing me more to the southern route. I tried to find advice on the internet, typing in search terms like “cross country drive” “fastest route” “I-90” or “is better.” I found a very funny travel blog on eopinions.com about both routes that had us howling with laughter even as our worst fears were confirmed.
But in the end it came down to where there were still hotel rooms available. Like most northeasterners, I labor under the misapprehension that the farther west you go, the fewer people there are in any given place. However, this isn't true in the cities. There are lots of people in Sioux Falls, Bismarck, Butte and Billings, because there's nowhere else to go for hundreds of miles.
I was too tired to contemplate it further and slept on it until the next morning, delaying the decision until the car was packed and ready to go. One blind panic and a flurry of phone calls later, we were headed to Minneapolis and what we thought was the bleak landscape of North Dakota. We were surprised to see gold and green rolling hills, cows, horses, cornfields and hay bales, natural beauty that was at once both domesticated and far ranging. West of Bismarck, the farms gave way to grassy canyons and wind-worn pyramids of colorfully striped sandstone. It was one of the most beautiful drives we’ve ever taken, because there were no billboards, no mile-high signs for gas stations, no factories, no Bob's Big Boy, no tacky industrial buildings plunked down on the highwayside; just the harmony of the landscape as we whizzed through at over 90 miles per hour. (I shouldn’t have mentioned this as I know my mother will be reading it). We did burn a lot of gas at that speed, though, so I’ll probably take it slower for the rest of the drive.

3500 miles into our trip, we stopped in Medora, North Dakota. It sits an hour east of the Montana Line, nestled into the northern Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt State Park. It is also the home of the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. Whatever the town’s original purpose, it had been refurbished into a cute Old West tourist attraction at the State Park entrance. We found a fantastic bookstore there, full of history books about settlement and strife in the American West, framed prints by local artists and country music CDs by regional stars like the Larsen Brothers. We bought some books and postcards, then went around the corner to buy some stamps at the local post office. Across the street from the post office was a table flanked by two benches, and we sat there under a lovely old tree and wrote out several postcards. We hated to leave Medora.

The ride through eastern Montana was, admittedly, a little less breathtaking. Even though we were going fast enough to become airborne, the wait for the next mile marker seemed to go on forever. We finally made it to Billings, land of civilization and commerce, land of scary fast drivers, and The Only Game in Town.