Driving to Michigan with a Drugged Cat in the Truck – Part II

Where were we?

We had just left Hardin, Montana – Little Bighorn territory – meaning that we had escaped the wary and watchful eye of Cruel Wife’s grandmother behind us.  This part of the trip was different since all we had in terms of familial relations between us and Michigan was Silver d’Cat.

Silver was getting by in a stoic manner.  He wasn’t happy and really was about as stiff as if we’d spitted him on a long chunk of rebar, but he was a cat – how relaxed could 99.9% of cats be when driving for long distances away from anything remotely familiar?   He was mellowed out relatively speaking, when measured against his response to the beginning of the trip.  I firmly believe his little cat meows were saying “Fine, I’ll behave, just don’t pill me again.”

We were heading south on I-90 towards Wyoming when it hit me (as it has done many times since)… “Settlers killed indians for this? ” It was just one long expanse of pretty country, but what comes with that territory is extremely harsh winters, hot summers, no A/C, no CVS pharmacy, and no coffee shops.  How did they survive in those primitive conditions?  One wonders.  Staying in character, the Shadow People said nothing and shared nothing with me that was enlightening.

Another side note:  Cruel Wife wasn’t exactly pleased that I was experiencing these little “sensory enhancements”, i.e. The Shadow People, and I don’t think I was, either, but it was better than sneezing twelve times in a row (truly “A River Ran Through It” was occurring in my sinuses) and doing spontaneous four-wheel drive sessions.

We hung a huge left at Buffalo, Wyoming and beelined east, stopping for an extremely hot and windy break in Gilette – a roadside turnout where there was no one to hold our camera and take a picture.  The cat didn’t have opposable  thumbs and wasn’t interested in photography anyway.  It was much too hot that day so we walked around but never too far from the truck just to make sure the cat was resting peacefully.  He didn’t seem to mind it.

This was the part of the trip where I was watching the cat closely.  I checked his leash for signs of being chewed through and I could not find stockpiles of squirreled-away food, but I felt that he required close observation anyway.  I did not want to have to track a Himalayan through the wildlands of Wyoming.

Satisfied that all was as it should be we got in the truck and continued down the road.  Again, I said to myself “They killed indians for this?”

We consulted with the cat and then unanimously decided that we should swing north and go by the Devil’s Tower.  I distinctly remember being so excited to see it that I was about to pee myself (I don’t get out much).  We got closer and it kept getting bigger and bigger.  The cat wasn’t impressed but we were in awe of the sheer size of the thing.  Close Encounters of the Third kind did not do it justice even on the big screen.

Earnest Question:  What are Close Encounters of the First and Second Kind like?  Is this similar to dating?  I’ve never really understood the logic here.

It was shortly after this that Silver licked his paws clean of what he considered to be a total farce and meowed that from here on out we should not even bother to ask him what he thought about our route.  This made life simpler as you can imagine.

New Rule #6: Keep the cat out of trip planning.  It saves time and is far less annoying to not hear “Well, you can count me out, man” all the time.

Mount Rushmore was neat.  If you want to read all about it, go look it up or even better, go see it for yourself, but I just don’t have the energy to wax eloquent about it.  It was big.  How is that?  It was big.  Four big guys.  Four big stone guys.  There, my duty is fulfilled.

Let me be absolutely clear:  If you don’t drive across this country at least once, you will have no idea how freaking big it is.  We were seeing signs for Wall Drug(store) for many many miles before actually getting to Wall, SD.  I had no appreciation for how little we’d actually come.  Yes, we were about halfway, but we’d been driving for a long time over the last few days and… it just kept going and made the Energizer Bunny™ look like an amateur.  Soon we were driving through the northern part of the Badlands and it was kind of forbidding.  Forbidding is not a warm fluffy blanket – forbidding is a bed of nails, a bad section of town, the promise of splintered bones grating against each other, or the angry glare of a furious wife.

Wall Drug in Wall, SD.  How shall I describe it?  Shall I be gracious?  Shall I be caustic?   Dry and objective?   I think I shall break with tradition and tell the truth.

Wall Drug was a letdown.  After the string of signs for a hundred miles designed to work me up into a lather I expected everyone to have wings on, big pearly gates, and the sound of harps strumming from every corner.  Instead it was crowded, touristy, amazingly huge, and not even a teeny-tiny bit interesting to me.  I don’t care for crowded places.  Smells and the obnoxious people that went with them, most with a total lack of situational awareness, and lots of rude maladjusted kids running around wasn’t blowing up my skirt.  This was Wall Drug in all it’s gaudy and flashy glory.  Yah.  Hoo.  Cruel Wife liked it but my skin was crawling.  I’m sorry, I wish I could say nicer things about it.   Actually, I don’t.  It was what it was.

Ok, moving right along, folks – nothing more to see here – keep moving.

Cruel Wife was getting pretty tired by this point.  It had been nine hours not counting stops from when we left Hardin, roughly.  Nine long hours in a Jeep (they don’t drive themselves, you have to constantly watch them as if they were rebellious teens) and our butts were developing bedsores.  The cat was getting pissy(er) than he had been and I was thinking I’d either give him Drixoral™ or another kitty downer but then thought better of it.  I took the Drixoral™ instead and I decided I wanted to press on after we ate some dinner and so we drove another three or four hours.  I was Captain Robo-Dex, master of the known universe, and a milepost-eating god.

I finally had to throw in the towel when we came to Mitchell, SD because my vision had slipped back and forth between double and treble (which is an important symptom, I’m told).  Everyone was happy to stop, and the cat even squealed and clapped his paws in sincere rejoicing.  We found a rather unremarkable hotel and crashed there for the night. I might be the only one but I find that hotels the world over (except for The Lennox in Boston) have this atmosphere of bone-weary exhaustion that isn’t all that much less pervasive than the mood at a funeral home.  Cheerier than a funeral home, granted, but a pervasive stillness always settles over the building.

I might not have mentioned this, but my large red toolbox came in with us at night, and it weighed whatever a quadruple hernia weighs.  Two or three suitcases, a cat carrier, a kitty litterbox, kitty food, the royal kitty water bowl, a kitty, a quad-hernia toolbox, and Cruel Wife’s Special Pillow came in and out with us when we stopped.  Going in and out of the hotel may not have risen to the level of an Augean Stables task but it was a real hassle and again my Shadow Folk were nowhere to be found.  Less than zero when you’re in a bind, those Shadow People.  The only thing that stayed in the truck was the recliner.

New Rule #7: Do not travel with a toolbox that weighs enough to give you quadruple hernias unless you like the idea of surgical procedures designed to keep your innards from falling out.

And we were off the next morning a few hours before the crack of noon.

South Dakota is a very nice place, full of nice people to be sure, but I was so glad to be over the state line.  It was a mental hurdle, a huge milestone to overcome.  We consulted our AAA map (provided by my employer) and saw that we had a long way to go still and that thought effectively catapulted my milestone off in the direction of the Badlands.

Minnesota was pretty uneventful up to the halfway point when we went through a dust-storm kind of thing where the sky and air all around us was tinted an eerie red color.  It wasn’t right and honestly it made us Northwesters a bit nervous.  The cat was already nervous so we didn’t see any noticeable change in his behavior.

We fell in love with Wisconsin though.  Crossed over the Mississippi River (God what a miserably long and redundant name that is) and came into LaCrosse.  We screamed by Sparta and did a power slide into I-94 on the way to Madison.  What was beautiful about Wisconsin?  Gosh, all of it.  For me the memorable features were parts of it that looked like certain sections of the Cascades in Oregon (Hwy 138 on the way to Diamond Lake from Roseburg, if you care) and it had hills and stuff that South Dakota was lacking in places.

We ended up in Madison that evening.  We had a hotel room all ready, I moved all of our stuff inside, and we decided to get some food.  Silver d’Cat demurred, meowing simply “You can count me out, man.”

In our travels through Madison we found the Red Pepper restaurant and had some General Tso’s that makes me weep to think of it even this day a decade and a half later.   I remember a crispy egg roll that was stuffed with love and manna.  And we experienced a hot and sour soup that defies description beyond saying that it too has made the remainder of my life seem as wispy and ephemeral as a fading daydream in comparison.

Perhaps it was because I was freaking starving.

Perhaps the trauma of the Chinese food in Montana was reaching through the heavily roped-off sections of our subconscious and we simply looked for healing there, without knowing what it was that we did. Perhaps the reality was that it wasn’t good food.  I honestly don’t know.  What I can find online says that it is permanently closed, which makes me a bit sad.

Outside this restaurant we got our first exposure to The Onion in printed form – it was in a little newspaper box next to the “alternate lifestyles” flyers.  I’ll try to post it if I can find it.  It is lying around here somewhere.  My favorite article ever is the that first one that I saw: “Doritos Celebrates it’s One Millionth Ingredient”.

We laughed and read The Onion that night at the hotel and skritched our sulky kitty until it was time to turn out the lights.  There was a big day ahead of us, and we had no idea how ill-prepared we were for the adrenaline-pumping experiences that were to come.