Just Words, Cross Country Edition: Transition

Like three impatient children standing in front of an unlit Christmas tree, Mike, Brian, and I stand in a darkened Minnesota rest-stop parking lot and exchange pleasantries not too far from something grand. What surprises await near our feet will have to wait as it's 3:30 in the morning and the Mississippi River of literature and lore laps inside the gift wrap of darkness, forcing Mike and Brian back to their dreams and me back to driving lonely interstate 90.

Sunrise opens a box of coal-black bugs and then vanishes like an irreverent parent, leaving in its departure a most deceitful fog twelve times thicker than Santa's beard. As visibility decreases to less than an elf's foot, I persevere for two more hours before pulling into another rest-stop, where Shane, who says he feels good, takes over. At this point, the windshield and front grille are decorated with dead bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugzzzzzz...

***

I wake to infinite plains and soft hills and to a sky that seems to be a national park unto itself: a monumental, cloud-quartered chess board in the midst of a four-way civil war for the most beautiful section of cerulean to loom over the infinite plains and soft hills of South Dakota, where the mundane doesn't make one insane.

Something approaches on the right – an erection at once austere and extravagant: a metallic human figure leading a metallic dinosaur by a leash. We pull into the nearest town, 1880 Town, to get a better look, but we don't get any closer because it's wire-fenced inside an infinite plain. The town itself is a motley of relics; of restorations; of replicas; of references to “Dances with Wolves”; of recordings by John Barry; of travelers dressed as Western settlers of old; of portraits of Native Americans looking, ironically, both reserved and stately.

The definition of the structure becomes plain: In the frontier west, the past is presented.