pictures: south dakota to chicago

Attempting to cook breakfast in high winds. In the background, our teepee.


In the foreground, the model of the finished Crazy Horse memorial. In the background, actual progress to date. (See that little spot of sky that will eventually be between Crazy Horse's arm and his horse's mane? You could put a 10-story building in there.)


Looking presidential.


Badlands sunset.


Adorable Badlands critters.


Clark Griswold Awards I: Wall Drug.


Clark Griswold Awards II: The Corn Palace, in transition from its 2008 to 2009 version.


Clark Griswold Awards III: The Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN. We're between his legs, to give you a sense of scale.



The crew at Monoma Terrace, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in downtown Madison. We got an impromptu tour from a talkative Gambian (not to be confused with Zambian) man who worked at the parking garage. Seeing my Alaska license plate he announced, somewhat improbably, that Sarah Palin is his "shining star." To my chagrin, in the days since then I've realized he has lots of company.


Me with the Chicago Powers clan by "the bean" in Millennium Park.

pictures-- alaska to montana

Danvers, Massachusetts / Mile 5,883 -- Sorry for the delay in getting these posted. Here's the just a teeny sampling of pictures from the first leg of the trip (more to come later-- unfortunately it's a little tedious uploading these to blogspot and getting them to stay put):

Feeding fry bread to Obama at the Alaska State Fair, Palmer


This is more or less what the Alcan looked like for the last two hours before the Canadian border.

The border: I am in Canada, Sam is in the U.S., Elise is in some kind of legal black hole.

Roadsize hazards in the Yukon: buffalo!

Liard River Hotsprings, BC, in all of their stinky glory

The Athabasca Glacier, which is along the road connecting Jasper and Banff National Parks

Lake Louise, Banff. The picture really doesn't do justice to the freaky blueness of the water. But I love how it looks like me, Elise, and the boat were photoshopped in.

I still like my "leaning piles of tiramisu" analogy. Left, pretty Banff scenery + me being a jackass. Right, a delicious dessert.

Our final morning in Banff.

The Continental Divide in Glacier National Park (Montana).

Along Going-to-the-Sun Rd. in Glacier. If you have a magnifying glass, you can see my car in the lower left.

Cheyenne graves at Little Bighorn (added in 1992 if I'm not mistaken).

the magical mystery tour's hard day's night in suburban chicago

Niagara Falls, Ontario / Mile 5,273 -- It has been an eventful few days, so I’m going to breeze over a lot… several Midwestern states may get short shrift. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan: sorry, guys.

But I did want to report on our weekend in Chicago, which, as expected, was one of the major highlights of the Great American Road Trip. We stayed in the suburb of Highland Park with my Uncle Kevin, Aunt Robin, and cousins Rachel (10) and Aaron (6). Kevin and I have managed to cross paths several times in the last year with weddings and football games and such, but I don’t get to see the rest of the family very often. Rachel and Aaron are adorable and precocious kids and great fun to be around. I viewed the Chicago leg as family time and didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what we might do, but we did check off a fair number of sights within the Windy City, including an night at a couple of jazz clubs, a walk around Millennium Park, and a trip to the top of the Sears Tower.

On our second and final night we enjoyed an evening of refined suburban debauchery. Just steps from Kevin and Robin’s house is an outdoor concert venue known as the Ravinia, where almost every night during the summer the locals spread blankets out on the lawn and enjoy food, booze, and live music. On Saturday, a Beatles cover band called American English provided an eerily perfect imitation of the Fab Four, and in period dress and hairdos to boot. Along with a bunch of Kevin and Robin’s friends, we ate, drank, and danced the night away. At one point Elise expressed amazement that Kevin and I come from the same stock, and she remarked that I have an “inappropriately funny” family, a comment that I took with tremendous pride.

Unfortunately, Samantha had to bail in Chicago—something about having to work on Monday, I didn’t really understand—so now it’s down to me and Elise. After getting our state-visitation cards punched in Indiana (at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore) and Michigan (old town Lansing and riverwalk), we arrived tonight at Niagara Falls, the first place on our route since Glennallen, AK that I have already been to. The falls were not part of the original plan, but Elise had never been and wanted to see them, so here we are. Tomorrow night we descend on Williams College and crash with my brother, and then Tuesday the Great American Road Trip finally comes to an end.

the clark w. griswold jr. awards for excellence in roadside attractions

La Crosse, Wisconsin / Mile 4,382 -- Just so you know that our trip hasn’t consisted entirely dour and depressing stuff, here’s a few of my favorite screwball attractions from the last couple of days, all of them worthy of National Lampoon’s Vacation.

• Wall Drug. The Paris Hilton of roadside attractions, Wall Drug is famous for being famous. At one point it really was just a drug store. Its notoriety began when the owners, struggling with lousy business during the Great Depression, starting giving out free ice water to passing motorists. Since then it has grown into a tourist monstrosity, with dozens of stores and restaurants, mechanical dinosaurs, fountains, photography exhibits, and a player-piano-type contraption with all the instruments of a bluegrass band. Its notoriety rests mostly on the Wall Drug billboards that litter I-90 in both directions. (I saw one as far back as Montana.) The amateurish billboards advertise Wall Drug’s offerings of cowboy goods, 5-cent coffee, free donuts for Vietnam vets, and often just the glory of Wall Drug itself. The place is incredibly tacky, but you have to give it props for marketing genius. If it’s not in every business school textbook in the country, it should be.
• The Corn Palace. Erected to the greater glory of corn, the Corn Palace is a multi-purpose civic center in Mitchell, South Dakota, that has been decorated every year since 1905 with murals made almost entirely of corn. Each year, the murals follow a different theme, and the corn artists are currently transitioning to 2009’s theme of great American attractions. (Naturally, the place of honor belongs to the Corn Palace. Mount Rushmore comes in second.) How dominant is the Corn Palace in this community of 15,000? On the front wall of Mitchell’s City Hall, located right next door Corn Palace, is a large billboard advertising the hours of the Corn Palace—presumably so that it wouldn’t need to take up precious space on the palace itself.
• The Jolly Green Giant. As was the case in Wyoming, we did not spend a night in Minnesota and had no planned stops there. Since I-90 passes through a fairly uninspiring band far south of the Twin Cities, we were hard-up for a roadside attraction that would allow us to claim to be visitors to the Gopher State. Luckily, the travel gods arranged for us to get low on gas right around the wonderfully named town of Blue Earth, home to a 54-foot likeness of the Jolly Green Giant. We took some pictures with His Jolliness, and we also found an exhibit commemorating the completion of I-90. Much like the transcontinental railroad, I-90 was built from two directions at once, meeting on a gold-painted stretch in Blue Earth that was meant to evoke the golden spike. I was shocked to learn how recently the interstate was completed: 1978. We further burnished our Minnesota-visiting credentials by once again reading the state’s history from Lonely Planet, listening to A Prairie Home Companion from Samantha’s iPod, and listening to John McCain’s acceptance speech live from St. Paul.

"the red man has great heroes too"

Interior, South Dakota / Mile 3,709 -- This leg of our road trip was supposed to be mostly about great scenery and gigantic presidential heads, but for me the real show-stealer has been the heartbreaking history of the Native American people in this region. I don't think I was completely prepared for the emotional impact of that history. Perhaps it's because in Alaska, the Native community has fared well in comparison with the lower 48. Don't get me wrong, the Alaska Native community has serious problems to contend with, and the list is largely the same as in the rest of the country: poverty and unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and the loss of language and culture among the youth. But due to a number of factors -- geography, Alaska's relatively late annexation by the white man, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act -- Natives are numerous, relatively prosperous, and a force to be reckoned with in Alaska. That's a very far cry from the status of Native people in South Dakota.

About ten miles from Mount Rushmore stands the world's biggest sculpture, a massive and massively unfinished statue of Crazy Horse that is being carved painstakingly into the Black Hills. Currently, only Crazy Horse's face is finished; the head of his horse is the next step. The statue is so huge that each of Crazy Horse's pupils is 5 feet in diameter, and the hole in the mountain that will eventually be the space between the man's arm and the horse's back could hide a ten-story building. The four heads of Mt. Rushmore could into the single head of Crazy Horse. I'm sorry to say that we never actively planned to visit the Crazy Horse monument, but I am glad that we did, and I might have placed a higher priority on visiting if I had known that I am part of the memorial's intended audience.

You might think that the Crazy Horse statue is in some ways a response to Mt. Rushmore, and you would be right. Construction began in 1948, seven years after Mt. Rushmore was completed. The Sioux chief Standing Bear, who commissioned the work, told the sculptor, "my fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too." Crazy Horse, a warrior chief, was never defeated in battle, never consented to live on an Indian reservation, never signed a meaningless treaty, and most likely was never photographed. (His likeness is a composite made from oral descriptions from elders who as young men saw him in the flesh.) The sculptor, a Boston-born Polish American named Korczak Ziolkowski, also had a compelling story. He began work on the monument with rickety equipment and only mountain goats to keep him company. Since his death in 1982, his wife and seven of his ten children have carried on the work. Korczak reminds me a lot of Rodney Clark, a dear soul with whom I worked in Alaska, and who possessed a lot of the same qualities: grand ambition, wild-eyed optimism, involvement of his entire family, and the willingness to adopt other people's causes as his own.

I think the Crazy Horse monument captures the pride of Native Americans very well, but it's a sad pride, a pride rooted more in the past than the present. It also seems fitting somehow that the monument is unfinished and doesn't seem likely to be finished in my lifetime. Naturally, the monument and everything else we have been seeing inspired some pretty intense discussion among the three of us, particularly as we puzzled over what the appropriate response of a 21st-century white person to all of this might look like. We've all spent the last few years in "helping" professions of one kind or another, so our discussion about Native issues fit in with the larger questions we share about the appropriateness of the kinds of "helping" that we have been doing--and whether "helping" is even the right approach to the world at all, or if we should aspire only to not be part of the problem.

We did visit Mount Rushmore too, and despite the complications to one's American pride that this part of the country can bring, I enjoyed that monument as well. It helps to remind myself that human history has been about 95 percent barbarism, and the American experiment -- however many glaring imperfections it has had in practice -- is a rare flash of light in that darkness. The dead white guys on the mountain were far from perfect, but as Standing Bear implicitly acknowledged, they're "great heroes" too.

dispatches from big sky country

Missoula, Montana / Mile 2,753 –

An unexpected visitor: “Shawn, there’s something circling our tent! It sounds like something big!” Samantha’s voice woke me in the predawn gloom on our last morning in Banff. I tend to treat animal-outside-the-tent worries with skepticism, whether they’re coming from a tentmate or, more commonly, my own overactive imagination. But there was definitely something going on outside, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. There was a padding sound, first on one side of the tent, then a moment later on the other side. The parts of our tent seemed to be rubbing against each other in a strange way. Finally, Elise—who you'd think would be least likely to figure this one out—realized what was going on. On the last morning of August, a thick, wet snow was piling up on the ground, weighing down our tent fly and periodically falling in big sloppy chunks to the ground. After two years in Africa, Elise said that she couldn’t wait to see and touch snow, and she got her wish.

Banff recap: With or without a layer of snow, Banff is gorgeous. The mountains around the devastatingly quaint Banff town are striped with ancient layers of sediment, and in different places the magma beneath the Earth’s crust has pushed them up in odd angles, so that they look like jagged, leaning piles of tiramisu. On our first day, we went paddling on Lake Louise, which is an impossibly bright turquoise color thanks to the glacial silt in the water. Lake Louise is world famous, but there were also a number of unexpectedly interesting sights. One was an area of land that is still scarred from a 1992 fire that was set intentionally by the Canadian park service. Since Banff became Canada’s first national park, naturally occurring forest fires have been beaten back out of understandable concern for life, property, and nature. The problem is that fires are an important part of a forest ecosystem, so taking them away has produced a lot of blandly uniform climax forest and caused the decline of species that thrive at other stages of forest succession, such as moose. So now Parks Canada intervenes by setting fires intentionally, when conditions are right to keep the fire in control and minimize unwanted side effects. It was just an interesting reminder that even what we think of as “wilderness” almost often bears the marks of its neighboring human society. Banff’s forests are no less a product of human intervention than another forest that has been clear cut by loggers.

Crossing the border II: Is it a job requirement for border control officers to be assholes? Or is that just part of their training?

Glaciers, under destruction: We spent our afternoon today in Montana’s Glacier National Park, and thanks to some very uncooperative weather, we only saw one glacier through a layer of fog. Before long, however, people will count themselves lucky to see even that much. According to the (U.S.) National Park Service, Glacier is projected to lose all of its glaciers by 2030. I have seen evidence of retreating glaciers firsthand in Alaska, but nothing quite so depressing as the thought that the national park that is named for glaciers will lose them all before my 50th birthday. The park is using the receding glaciers pretty aggressively as an educational opportunity, which I think is the best outcome that can be hoped for at this point.

with obama in canada

Jasper, Alberta / Mile 1,959 – I am sitting in a bar in Jasper town, slightly delirious from fatigue after a grueling 30-hour, 1,200-mile push from Whitehorse. Miraculously, your three weary travelers are still friends after so much quality time in my little Honda Accord; I believe the fact that no eyes have been gouged out is a testament to the character of everyone involved. (Don't worry, Mom, I didn't do all the driving myself-- Samantha and I took turns, and Elise would have helped too except for the fact that a theft in Zambia robbed her of her license.) We were treated to a menagerie of critters that included fox, lynx, elk, deer, a porcupine, and several herds of buffalo, some of which wandered onto the highway. Along the way I discovered many new techniques for remaining alert during a monotonous nighttime drive. One of the best tips I can offer is to put your iPod in random mode, because nothing will keep your brain alert than not knowing if you're going to hear Vivaldi or Modest Mouse next. I also conjugated Spanish verbs, recalled the handful of poems I have memorized, and reconstructed my daily class schedule for every year from sixth grade until senior year at Williams. Your results may vary.

Over the last two days, we drove the Alcan all the way to its over-hyped origin in Dawson Creek, B.C., and then crossed into Alberta en route to the first of two magnificent national parks. We stopped for a picnic in a kitschy "forest" of random road signs from around the world, and we took a relaxing soak in the warm, stinky waters of Liard River Hot Springs. Among the many roadside attractions we passed, only the hot springs, in my humble opinion, is worth its salt. (Calcium sulfide, to be precise.)

During many of those blank miles, Barack Obama was on my mind-- and not for the reason that you'd think, as the news coverage of the Democratic convention up here is basically nil. Before leaving Anchorage, Samantha and I bought an audiobook of Dreams from My Father, with Obama himself doing the reading. We popped the CD in during the long and desolate stretch where the Alcan weaves back and forth between the Yukon and British Columbia, where a lone trash can merits a roadside pullout and signs for two kilometers in either direction.

Dreams from My Father, for those not familiar with the book, is Obama's memoir of his struggle for identity, written long before his political career took off. The book is a far more candid and real glimpse into the character of a presidential candidate than we can probably ever hope for again. Nobody who knows me would doubt that I'm rooting for Obama in November, but listening to Dreams has made me really, really, really want him to be President. Above all, I was struck by his ability to sympathize with, and manage the dialogue between, all of the wildly different characters in his life story--black and white, American and foreign, rich and poor. His is the very antithesis of the with-us-or-against-us attitude that has so completely squandered America's moral leadership and the world's good will toward us over the last eight years. It seems easy to dismiss Obama as a smooth-talking peddler of empty bromides about change and bringing people together. But give the man a microphone for a few hours and listen to him talk about his life, and it is not hard to imagine him calming the passions of belligerent world leaders or presiding over a vigorous debate in a Cabinet of the best and brightest. There's more to say, but it's long past time for me to go to bed... more from Banff in a couple of days.

dispatches from the Yukon (Territory?)

Whitehorse, Yukon / Mile 722 – A few thoughts from the road trip so far:

• The Team: A brief word of introduction about my driving companions. Samantha is a high school friend and a music therapist living in Massachusetts. Elise is a Williams friend who just returned from two years in Zambia with the Peace Corps. We have enjoyed teasing Elise about all of the technological progress that has taken place in the U.S. during her lengthy absence. (Actual quote from Elise: “What is youtube?”)
• Changing Seasons: While most of you are presumably still enjoying summer, fall has already arrived in the Alaskan Interior and in the Yukon. It has been a cool summer in the north, so the foliage may be turning a little earlier than normal, but it has been nice seeing a preview of fall colors… or at least a preview of yellow, because that’s the only color we really get.
• Strangest Sight: In Tok, Alaska, our route met up with the Alaska Highway (a.k.a. the Alcan), and we passed the burnt-out remnants of a Texaco station. The station was littered with old cars, charred scraps of metal, and other assorted junk. As we passed by, I noticed something even more out of place: a goat. Elise and Samantha didn’t seem to believe me, and I couldn’t really blame them for thinking that I was hallucinating, so we turned around and drove by the station again. Sure enough, there was not just one goat hanging out in the rubble, but two.
• Driving Hell: Having lived in Alaska for three summers—the season Alaskans sometimes wearily refer to as “construction”—I thought I was used to driving delays. But the hundred or so miles in both directions from the U.S.-Canadian border is in a category all its own. On the Alaskan side, we spent hours navigating slippery mud, brief stretches of pavement, and segments of alternating one-way traffic where road crews were ripping apart one side of the highway. On the Canadian side we bounded over a moonscape of frost heaves and potholes, and I pondered whether the disease or the cure is worse in road repair. On more than one occasion, Elise remarked that the roads were “just like Zambia!”
• Crossing the Border: The border is marked by a roadside stone obelisk, behind which you can see a perfectly straight band of cleared trees about 5 yards wide and stretching to the horizon. On either side of the obelisk there are interpretive displays about the Alcan and the surveying of the border. In a delicious bit of legal absurdity, the signs on the Canadian side are written in English and French, while those twenty feet away on the American side are in English only. We engaged in some obligatory border silliness of our own, including a photo with one of us in the U.S., one in Canada and one straddling the two countries. In addition to the shrubby and unfortified borderlands, an indication of the trust between the two countries—or, at least, Canada’s calmer approach to border security—is the fact that the Canadian immigration and customs station is a good 20 miles into the Yukon. We were fourth in line when we arrived at customs, but the RVs in front of us seemed to take eons, so we decided to pass the time by stuffing our faces with the produce in the cooler that we weren’t sure we would be allowed to keep. When it was finally our turn, the official gruffly asked us each of us individually if we’d ever had any DUIs in any state, ever, and then waved us along without any question about the produce.
• The Yukon: What is the Yukon? I have been trying to figure that out. I have always thought of this region of Canada as the Yukon Territory, but the T-word has been conspicuously absent from signs, newspapers, addresses, and everything else here. Now, it seems, it’s simply “Yukon.” Yet the guy at the bakery in Haines Junction—I love the fact that many of you will know exactly who I’m talking about—confirmed that Yukon is not a province and “does not have many of the powers of a province.” It’s as if the Yukon government and chamber of commerce decided at one point that the T-word sounds too undeveloped, too colonial, or too second-class. This clearly requires some more research… anyone know anything about the legal status of Yukon?