Note: I’m discontinuing the “Shoulder report” section for this blog. After 3,300 miles I’ve come to believe that most roads are rideable. This is especially true for the unpopulated, interior regions of the west and for the cozy midwest, which begins in central South Dakota. Here in MN and WI, counties pave roads every one mile in every cardinal direction, on a grid system. You can go wherever you want, however you want to.
Condition reports were very important to me as a newbie because they provided a sense of comfort. The reality is, 95% of your days on a bike are chill. Find food on Google Maps, look at shoulder width on Google Street View and use iOverlander and WarmShowers for camping and housing. I still remember every sketchy stretch I forded this summer, and at the end of my trip, I’ll make a list to send into the ether via bike blogs and the bike touring subreddit. These roads were on ACA routes, so it’s not like those guarantee safety to begin with.
***
No one ever said riding a bicycle across South Dakota would be easy.
That was my mantra for perhaps four days. I lost sense of time. Most of all of these days were very difficult. When the state line finally appeared, announcing that I was finally entering Minnesota, I clattered down a steep embankment to the base of the sign and hugged one of its posts.
The weather never cooperated with me in South Dakota. I hardly ever received the mythical tailwinds that supposedly blow from the northwest. Rather, the wind blew from the southeast for a week. After I left the Black Hills, the skies once again became white and depthless on account of the wildfire smoke billowing from the West. And that reliable weather phenomenon, the heat wave, returned. When I left Pierre, the wind-scoured plains bounding the Missouri were so bathed in humidity and heat that, by closing my eyes, I felt like I was in Tampa.
Yet I have a strange relationship with South Dakota. The land and its people were not nearly as cruel as they could have been.
It’s a land of contradictions. A state infamous for desolation and emptiness that contains many natural wonders in its western portion. The white people here are shorthand to liberals for the worst of American backwardness, yet they are largely working-class and obsessed with the climate and the deepening drought. As a culture they have refuted the vaccine rollout, albeit under the guise of health reasons, as they claim that the federal approval process was rushed and that they’ll accept shots when the FDA grants full approval. Topographically, the western and central portions of the state are excruciatingly hilly. The wind is supposed to blow from the northwest, yet it blew from the south/south-east for a week straight, unrelenting, soulless.
An old hat eyed me suspiciously in a convenience store when I talked about my trip, concerned as he was that I was a freeloader living off of pandemic-era stimulus checks. But when I turned to leave he handed me a cucumber from the cooler he’d picked that morning from his own garden. South Dakota contains a slew of indigenous reservations, but I didn’t travel through them in my effort to ride as due east as was humanly possible; as such, almost every single person I interacted with here was white.
Cattle country no longer; I’m in the breadbasket now. In diners and restaurants in gas stations I learned that field corn is ochre and grows in bulkier stocks than sweet-corn, which is green and spindly. The latter is canned and the former is industrially processed for its myriad uses in foods. The enormous fields of sunflowers are also grown to be processed into oil; sunflowers grown for their seeds are generally planted in North Dakota. This year, because of the drought and heat, farmers expected their sorghum and corn to suffer. That’s not the case so far, but the wheat yields are expected to be poor.
In Huron, a moderately-sized town beneath a gargantuan soybean elevator, I sat down in a modest Thai restaurant. The green curry was the best I’ve ever had. I learned that’s thanks to an influx of Karen refugees, from Myanmar. Many of this community work in a turkey processing plant just east of town. I pedaled past it the next morning, in the humid gloom of a blood-red sun. Hispanic workers also toil in a nearby Jack Links plant producing cheap tubes of meat wrapped in plastic.
As I approached Minnesota, I finally left the empty, rural West. The twangy, country dialects of cattle country are gone, replaced by the unmistakeable, vaguely German accent from “Fargo.”
There are towns every five miles now, on a grid of perfectly-paved, quiet roads threading the corn fields. I rode 105 miles between Brookings, SD and Montevideo. Then I rode an easy 85 miles with a host and savored a rare tailwind. The roads are almost completely flat and stretch into the horizon until Lake Michigan, as far as I can tell. I don’t have to plan anymore for food or water or shelter. It’s a liberating feeling.
I feel very proud to have made it this far.
Character study
One night, my host sent me his address and let me settle in before he came home from work. When I reached the house in the supreme heat of the afternoon, I doubled-check to make sure I’d slogged to the right place. The home, virtually a mansion, towered above a corner lot in a historic district. A century-old three-story wonder, freshly painted yellow and white trim. Latticework adorned the crest of the roof above a third-story porch. I sat on the veranda, which wrapped around the home. Kitty-corner stood a classical, stone building guarded by ribbed columns: the county prison.
The house was impressive — from the outside.
I slowly opened the door and stepped into an entryway filled with boxes of old shoes, magazines, hiking boots. In the lobby, through the third front door, it became clear the mansion was the domain of a hoarder. Large plastic tables filled the family room, upon which were piled books upon books, boxes of knick-knacks, a small Fender amplifier and a discarded electric piano. Cellos lined the wood paneled-wall in burgundy and black cases. In the dining room the table was similarly buried, topped by a dried-out case of watercolor paint and several in-progress landscape paintings of the prairie, as if the artist got up to make a sandwich and dropped dead in the kitchen, never to return. The sink was chock-full of dirty dishes, the cabinets open, the counter struggling to breathe under foodstuffs. Above the dining-room table a piece of printer paper was tacked to the wall, containing a daily affirmation to “stop smoking pot” and “live life.” At the end, the mantra was dedicated in part to “Jenny Cat.” She appeared while I stood amongst the heaps and chomped on her dry food.
I plopped down next to the air conditioner and took it all in. I was fascinated. I wondered who would walk through the door and claim the space. The air conditioner hummed. Curiously, in the disorder of the place, a wire bookshelf was meticulously ordered with old magazines on mental health and travel. I read an article about a college professor who survived a psychotic break.
I didn’t have to wait long for the owner to appear. The screen door clattered and he blustered in, and I stood to shake his hand. A wiry man perhaps in his late 30s, he stood there, vibrating with nerves, in a white cotton button-down caked in Jenny-Cat’s hair, an old tie dangling above slacks and floppy shoes. His hair was missing from the balded crown of his head — he’d parted to the sides. He laughed nervously and set down his cello.
He is a music teacher in a nearby school district. I sat down at the dining room table and he stood, explaining his job, stacked items from the cluttered chair onto the table’s heap. He sat down and gestured to the room around him.
“I’m sorry about all this. I really am trying to get it all together, but I can never seem to…” he gestured wildly, at a loss for words, “get my life in order. I have some friends who come over every few months and organize for me. And then, I’m such a mess, it just goes right back to this.”
“It’s a beautiful home,” I said, honestly. “How old is it?”
“It was built in 1910. “ He smiled uncomfortably and wiped his sweating brow.
“Wow,” I said, grinning, attempting to put him at ease. Why was he so nervous?
“Before we bought it, a family lived here. There must have been a bunch of kids because they all wrote their names in marker on the post in the basement. Then they moved out. After that it was an antique store. To everyone in town it’s still that — Aunt Rose’s Antiques.”
“You bought this house?”
Nervous laughter again. “My parents did. They come every once in a while to try and clean things up. We had it painted last year.”
He sat, sweating, as if in confession. I asked him if I could throw some things in the laundry; he encouraged me to and followed me down musty stairs in to the basement, where the scrawled names of now-grown children shouted from a support beam. The floor was not visible in the laundry-room on account of the mountain of discarded clothing.
“I should clean this up,” he said, watching the unmoving pile, “but I figure I have so many clothes, I don’t need to do laundry anymore.”
I laughed, crouching over his washing machine, and turned to him. He was serious, and stood pensive with folded arms in a reverie.
We walked upstairs and talked for a while. A booger made its way through his naval cavity and partially out of his nostril. Every time he laughed nervously it bounced around and threatened to take flight. We sat for an hour at the dining room table, trading stories.
He’s still finding his place in the world. He’s single, although he was sort of seeing someone recently who would help him attempt to organize his mansion. Cello was his passion and provided a glimpse of purpose in life for him in his 20s, when he attended a music conservancy in San Francisco. But a professional career never came together for him. And then he couldn’t acquire a music teaching license because of “personal differences” with a nearby accreditation program, so he moved to the Cayman Islands, where he taught in a private school that didn’t require credentials.
“It’s two worlds there — the Caribbean, sort of, beach paradise, and then a poor country. I was someone there who was…confused,” he said. “I got taken advantage of a lot. I never seemed to know where I was.”
We decided to eat out that night. Suddenly, at the restaurant, his face flushed crimson. He balled up his fist to his mouth and squinted, his eyes watery. He was choking.
“Are you OK?” I asked, freaked out.
He nodded and then tried to speak, but no sound came out. He gestured, his veins popping from his neck, that he’d be back in a second. And he hurried to the bathroom and locked the door.
For five minutes I convinced myself that this man had died, in utter silence, on the cold linoleum floor of the bathroom. As a testament to my uselessness, I sat in my chair and waited, craning my neck every 20 seconds to see whether he would come out alive. Finally, a great hack emanated through the restaurant. Confused diners glanced at the bathroom door and then kept on eating.
When he walked out, he had some food bits on his chin. He grinned and placed himself in his seat.
“That always happens to me,” he said seriously, with a self-effacing smile. “It seems like every time I eat rice I forget to chew it and it sticks together in my throat.”
I watched him, incredulous.
We had beer that night on his porch and sat there as night fell. The crickets hummed around a great cottonwood tree near the sidewalk.
He said he doesn’t know his neighbors, although he’s lived in the unmistakable yellow home for years. Once, a neighbor recognized him in public and waved to him.
“So she must know who I am,” he said.
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