Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Custer: the Other Stubborn, Arrogant George
By Bob Wire, 8-01-08
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| Any restaurant that gives you a paper hat is okay with Speaker! (But what is with the lil' gangbanger signs?) BELOW: Speaker wrote several songs on the trip. | |
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The sun settled on the horizon directly in front of me like a neon gumball, searing its image onto my corneas. With each raspy breath I sucked in another lungful of the scorching desert air as I continued to run along the rutted dirt road, trying to stay ahead of my pursuers. But they were younger and quicker, with reptilian resolve and a hunger that would not be denied. The pair of huge lizards trotted along the road behind me, tirelessly, their sickening forked tongues darting out, drawing ever closer…
“BOB! Bob! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare!” Barb slapped me across the face, and I shook my head, opening my eyes to see the dark highway in front of us, illuminated by our headlights.
“Wha…what? Where are we? Where’s the lizards?” I tried to clear the cobwebs out of my head, looking quickly into the rearview mirror.
“If you mean the kids, they’re both asleep in the back seat. And you really need to stay awake, honey. You ARE driving.”
It had been a long day eating up interstate miles, and we were nearing Douglas, Wyoming, about an hour east of Casper. We were road-weary, and looking forward to a well-earned motel room. Billboards boasted of several choices as we approached the first exit, so we decided on the Best Western and got off the freeway.
“Sorry, we got no rooms available,” said the desk clerk with a sympathetic grimace.
“Well, would you mind calling another hotel for me?” I asked, rubbing nonexistent desert sand out of my eyes. “We just need a double for one night.”
“No, I mean there aren’t any rooms available in Douglas. There’s a biker rally in Gillette, and you won’t find a room between here and Billings.”
I stared, incredulous. This person had to be shitting me. Nothing in Douglas? No rooms in Glenn Rock? Casper?
The clerk looked over my shoulder at our bug-splattered 4Runner, bristling with camping gear. “If you have camping equipment, you can camp for free at the campsite down by the river. It’s on the east end of town, past the McDonald’s, right next to the construction site.”
Awesome! Down by the river! Pitching our tent in the dark in a desolate prairie town full of drifters and bloodthirsty bikers! Yay! Right next to a construction site full of great places to dump a body! Boo-yah! I can’t wait to tell the lizards! I mean the kids!
“How about a KOA?” I asked the clerk. “Perhaps my friend Abe here could persuade you to make a couple of phone calls?” I waved a five-dollar bill between two fingers. The clerk narrowed his eyes, and his mouth flattened into a line. Confused, I looked down. I was waving a coupon for a tattoo parlor in Pigeon Forge. He told me there was a KOA less than two miles from the Best Western.
We drove to the KOA, found an open site, and set up camp by the halogen glow of the headlights. It was nearing midnight by that time, and most of the other campers had already bedded down. We were talking loudly, slamming truck doors, repeatedly zipping and unzipping the tent flap, and I was running the obnoxious electric air pumps to inflate our mattresses. I fully expected our fellow campers to creep over after we were asleep and push a couple of picnic tables over onto our tent.
But we woke up to a new, sunny day, and most of the campers had vanished. We were so exhausted from the previous night’s troubles that we’d slept right through the morning exodus. Stiff, sore and funky with road stench, I climbed out of the tent and fired up the Coleman stove for coffee and tea. The kids horked down a bowl of cereal and went off to investigate the mini golf course (a staple at most KOA’s). I enjoyed a hearty breakfast of grits riddled with slices of leftover grilled brats, and we broke camp.
We picked up a newspaper on the way out of Douglas, and Rusty read stories to us from the back seat. One item was of particular interest, announcing that the price of a barrel of oil had dropped ten dollars, and analysts thought the price would continue to decline, delivering some long-awaited relief at the gas pump. Wonderful, I thought, we managed to take our 5,000-mile road trip during the absolute peak of gas pricing. We’d paid as much as $4.19 a gallon, but no less than $3.89 the entire trip. We’d budgeted a cool grand for gas, but I think it’s going to wind up being even more.
We stopped in Sheridan for a fantastic lunch at a brew pub in a 100-year-old building. We wrote and mailed a few postcards, and were back on the road. Our destination for that day, our penultimate of the road trip, was Billings. If they didn’t have a hotel room in all of Billings, I thought, I would begin taking hostages.
Little Bighorn Battlefield was a must-see for the kids, and Barb hadn’t been there since she was a kid herself. We parked the truck, drifted through the visitors center, and the kids picked up their junior ranger booklets. We went down to the basement, uh, I mean, the media room, and watched a boring 17-minute film that illustrated in painfully minute computer-graphic detail the movements and clashes of the various military companies leading up to the climactic clash that killed Gen. Custer and his men. The film looked as if it had been produced by a geometry teacher, with the graphics done by the folks who made “Tron.”
If you’ve never been, you might be surprised by the tenor of this National Monument. Between the isolated setting on a wind-swept expanse of gentle hills, and the fact that dozens of men are laid to rest here, there’s a somber, oppressive vibe that permeates the place. It’s the same feeling I got when I visited the Pearl Harbor Memorial years ago. This is a graveyard. It’s the final resting place for so many people who died fighting for what they believed was right.
Now, of course, with the perspective of time, we can see how much of our nation’s history is based on genocide and ethnic cleansing. I mean, terrorism? Illegal aliens? Hell, we practically invented it. Barb, Rusty, Speaker and I wandered around the site, reading the interpretive installations and getting a feel for the terrible clash that killed so many U.S. soldiers and catalyzed the Indian Reservation movement into high gear. I could tell the other tourists were subdued as well, their patriotic pride grappling with the flawed arrogance of “manifest destiny.”
I was reading one of the information panels that described the addition of the Indian memorial, when a guy walked out of its circular walls with his family after taking in the Indian history and quotations on the inner walls.
He was whistling.
Like he was walking out of a Denny’s after stuffing himself with a Grand Slam. What a shitwrap. The guy next to me shook his head, took his wife by the arm and moved on down the path. Wow. Some people wouldn’t get it if they were hit over the head with a fucking tomahawk.
We gathered back at the visitors center and, for the first time on the trip, Rusty and Speaker declined to get their junior ranger badges. They were tired, of course, but they recognized the shameful arrogance and misguided sense of appropriation that led to the near-destruction of the Native American culture in the name of national growth. In every museum, every national park we’d visited, they’d seen little mention of the impact of the Westward Expansion on the Indian people. But thanks to a thoroughly modern education in Missoula that includes frequent study of regional Indian culture, they have a keen sense of how the western part of this nation was largely founded on a massive, immoral land grab.
So it was with a mixture of depression, guilt and reverential awe that we trudged back toward the parking lot, torn with conflict between pride in country and shame in how it was all achieved. Barb felt the need to have some solitary reflection, so she took a walk across the battlefield site to find some quietude. The kids and I browsed through the gift shop, and checked out the cool little museum.
About ten minutes later, as Barb sat on a knoll of sun-browned grass, looking out over the valley where so many men had lost their lives fighting valiantly for their own way of life, a car horn alarm started to go off in the parking lot. It went on for several minutes, shattering the air of reverie at the site. Perfect. Where’s my tomahawk?
[Boy, Bob really seems to like that word ‘penultimate.’ Next: grab your Maglite, we’re going spelunking.]
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Comments
I am prepared to offer you $3.13 for that tattoo coupon.