During this stretch I crossed my 3,000-mile mark and battled exhaustion. I almost ran over a prairie dog. I turned 26. With Lauren, I watched twin thunderstorms collide over the Badlands in a spectacular display of light and sound. We scrabbled deep into the labyrinth of painted hills and parched arroyos and sat in a sliver of shade against popcorn rock. Together we braved a foray into Wall Drug, the king of the tourist traps. After several days we reluctantly parted ways. She drove to Dallas, and I pointed my bike east.
I proceeded to exit the Badlands on a dirt road where deep silence replaced the hum of I90, where I startled antelope, pheasants, grouse and deer. The land became fields of sunflowers, wheat, sorghum, millet, corn, cattle and the occasional buffalo. In Philip, a proprietor with neck and knuckle tats generously let me check into a motel room hours early. The room was surprisingly plush and clean and I slept almost for the entire day. When my alarm chimed, I looked through the window into the night and saddled up. By 8 a.m. I sat at a bar in a gas station gorging on bacon, hashbrowns, eggs and coffee, with 25 miles under my belt. The highway rose and fell for sixty miles, and, to my amazement, the air became powerfully humid. I crossed into Central Time and battled a crosswind until I coasted into a valley and crossed the Missouri River. A family hosted me there in the state capital, Pierre, in their immaculate home overlooking the river. I’ve since ridden 50 miles in extreme wind through unending fields to Highmore, SD.
Shoulder report
The roads are great. South Dakota is hilly and windy. The traffic is light. Pick a road – any road. It seems not to matter. Hopefully the wind is blowing in the right direction. I’m not sure if this is a personal problem, but nutrition has proved to be a big problem in small-town Wyoming and South Dakota. I’m eating absolute garbage. I’m not picky – bike touring burns that out of you – but I do need a modicum of fruits and vegetables. Even in many grocery stores, there are none to be found. This problem is related to my exhaustion, which I detail below.
Encounters
I have no shortage of folksy anecdotes about small-town South Dakotans. A man in a gas station reached into the ice cream cooler and gifted me a refrigerated cucumber, fresh from his garden. A cross-eyed woman patted me on the back and suggested I stay in her hamlet “for three or four days” to wait out the heatwave. I walked into a gas station – my only opportunity for food for the rest of the day and, sweating profusely at 8 a.m., I watched a man in a booth take a bite from a pancake. Happy beyond belief, I asked the clerk if they were serving breakfast. “You tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you whether I feel like cooking it for you,” she said. I told her, and I guess she felt like cooking.
Body update
On my birthday I woke up and felt like shit. Lauren and I had plans to wander around all day in the Badlands but, after I ate breakfast, I confessed that I just didn’t have the energy to do that. I opted to lay on her yoga pad in the meager grass, underneath a cottonwood tree, watching the clouds cast the weird, scoured spires in alternates of shade and blazing sun. A bird shit on me.
When this adventure is over, and I’m sitting on a leather sectional in an air-conditioned home eating ribs and drinking as many cold beers as I goddam feel like, and someone asks me what the hardest part of my trip was, I’ll answer: eastern Wyoming and South Dakota. The adversity is in the infamous wind of this continental corridor, spanning the U.S. from North Dakota to West Texas. It’s hilly and windy, hilly and windy. There’s no escape. And it’s extremely hot – 98 degrees at the time of writing. This may seem obvious to you, reader: it is difficult to ride a bike across Wyoming and South Dakota. I am personally surprised that it’s such a challenge because I’m feeling strong and experienced but, more likely, I’m just an idiot. To borrow a phrase from No Country for Old Men: this land is hard on people. This year, it’s especially harsh; a hot drought has dried out the region, like the mountain West, threatening crop yields and water levels. It’s almost as if we missed the boat on climate policy. Typically, the wind blows through South Dakota from the northwest, which would benefit me tremendously. Instead it’s blowing hard from the southeast on account of the current heat wave.
As such I’ve become worn down. I think I’m fighting a cold. A good nights’ rest still goes a long way but, by 5:30 a.m. or earlier the next morning, I am intractably waking up to ride a bicycle through a maelstrom.
Thankfully, the end of the heat is in sight. I’m four or five days from Minneapolis where the weather is looking cooler and wetter. I have faith that the Great Lakes region will offer me a final respite from this sauna of a summer as August slips into September. I’ll probably end my trip about a month from now. Another note on this: I believe firmly that, even on the hardest day of bike touring, it’s easier than getting up in the morning to work a job you hate. Touring is epic to the point of life-changing, and there is a magic interwoven into each day. But it is basically a long vacation for privileged people. I don’t have any illusions about that.
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