Modern West

We left Wisconsin in sunshine and tears. An eagle bid us a solemn farewell as we crossed the Mississippi River. Through Minnesota, the skies turned hostile, and it slut on us. Rather than sleeting, it most definitely slut. Before the weather turned, however, I saw something odd on the side of the road. It looked like a prosthetic arm that had been run over by a car. Later, in South Dakota, I saw another oddity on the side of the road. It looked like a black plastic prosthetic leg that had been discarded on the shoulder. Who is throwing away perfectly good plastic body parts?
The first animals to greet us as we entered the west, besides the ever-present red-tails and sparrow hawks, were a herd of mule deer wandering along a fence line. We crossed over the Missouri River in Chamberlain/Oacoma, SD, while the front passed over, letting the setting sun bathe the gorgeous hills in mist and roses. The hills here are beautiful. They roll down to the river tumultuously, like lava flows drying in the sunlight and tumbling over one another. Lewis and Clark stopped here in 1806. Lewis wanted to find a female pronghorn to send home, so he chose seven of his best hunters and set out over the hills. He described the trees found on the banks, and a prairie dog town of two miles by three miles. When they topped the rise overlooking the prairie, Lewis recorded seeing herds of pronghorn, elk and bison as far as the eye could see. Bison alone he estimated at 2,000. This land still lends itself to the ghosts of its past. The cattle spot the hills like bison once did, and the same water laps at the shoreline that carried Lewis and Clark along two hundred years ago. The men in the restaurant wear cowboy hats. But from the window of my brand-new, name-brand hotel, I spot an old man in an orange vest, wheeling his bicycle and picking through the garbage cans behind the Shell station.