Road Trip - Part II

I stopped for the night at Rapid City, South Dakota and fell asleep in the passenger side of my truck. I woke up early the next morning and stumbled into the local Denny’s for a lumberjack breakfast.

Having my fill of greasy food, I pulled up the road map and saw that I was only thirty miles from Deadwood. I plugged the city into my GPS and got back on the road.

The hills surrounding the town of Deadwood.  So now you know where the name came from.

I knew one thing for sure before I arrived in the town.  That it’d be a tourist trap.  I saw countless of roadside ads for casinos and stores promising riches and fun in the “historic town of Deadwood”.  I wasn’t all that interested in seeing the tourist stuff. 

I hoped I could maybe find some historic fragments of the actual town.  To walk the actual steps of people in a different life, a century ago.  To look upon the same hills and up at the same sky.

As much as I would have loved to stomp around the very same buildings that the historical characters of Deadwood did themselves, those buildings no longer exist, because Deadwood was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt anew at various times over it’s life due to flash flooding and fires.  

But there still remained a few links to the past, one of them being the graveyard set up on the slope of a nearby hill which played a prominent role in the TV series - it was where Wild Bill Hickock was buried.  I would find out when I arrived at Deadwood that this cemetery did exist, and it was called the Mount Moriah Cemetery.  As I drove up the hill, I became a bit excited about the thought of possibly seeing the same simple white headboard that was hand painted by Hickock’s companions.

But alas, it was not to be.  The headboard itself did not survive the ravages of time.  The grave of Wild Bill has been rebuilt as a large bronze memorial to serve the millions of visitors that come to see it every year. I felt disappointed in a small way, but I guess its just the way it is.

Subsequent research on the Mount Moriah Cemetery also shows that it was not even the original cemetery that Wild Bill was buried at.  It was another cemetery, Ingelside Cemetery - that was the original site, but the residents of that cemetery were dug up and moved to Mount Moriah when the growth of the town required the land to be claimed for the living.

Ah, c’est la vie!

With the droves of tourists who come to see the grave of Wild Bill, comes lots of improtu memorials and artifacts left at the gravesite.  I thought it was kind of tacky.  Pennies, business cards, empty bottles of whiskey, and all that.  Can’t a man lie in peace without people dumping their pocket change on him?

I was lucky enough to have arrived at the cemetery very early in the morning before the tour buses started coming in.  I walked away from Wild Bill’s grave and explored the rest of the cemetery, virtually having the entire place to myself.

Many gravestones had lambs on them.  I then noticed that they all marked the graves of children who had died much too early in their lives. 

To have carried a baby to term, only to have it taken away the next day.  So quickly that it has no name, only known by its surname.  I can only stand and wonder.

If you were to leave the cemetery and walk a good quarter mile up the hill, you will come upon an small ridge in the hillside and find the burial site of Deadwood’s most famous resident, Seth Bullock and his wife. In an unfortunate statement of the times, one can’t help but notice power lines traversing through the woods and a cell phone tower standing vigil over the gravesite ensuring the highest quality - “can you hear me?”

The lone chinese resident of the cemetery.  All of the other chinese people buried here in Deadwood were later dug up and returned to their home country.  Why did this one stay here?

When the cemetery started to fill up with tourists, I slipped away and drove out of town.  I could have returned to I-80 but I decided to go south and take a winding, scenic road out of the Black Hills and into Wyoming.  I stopped for lunch at a small picnic spot along a small creek.  I pulled off my shoes and waded into the creek.  

By the gods! The water was icy COLD!   My feet went numb in seconds and I made a break for the creekside and elected to sun myself by the creek instead.

After leaving the Black Hills I found myself in the wide-open hills of Wyoming.  I drove for hours down a single-lane highway just watching the hills and mountains roll by.

Somewhere along that highway, I looked out my side to see a sight that had me slamming on the brakes and pulling over on the shoulder to reach for my camera.  I hopped out of the truck and crossed the highway to see a group of horses standing watch over young foal that had apparently collapsed under the heat of the sun.

The sun continued to beat down on all of us, as I stood there wondering about the mortality of life.  How fragile that thread which holds us all up.  

I turned to walk back to my truck and put it in gear.  I took one final look back the horses and saw that the foal had struggled back to his feet.  One of the adult horses reached out to nuzzle and prod the foal as to offer support.  

I smiled a bit and drove away.

After many miles across Wyoming, storm clouds breached the skies and dumped rain all night long.  I took a night at a truck-stop and woke up early to more rain.  I kept on driving through the mountains and soon found myself at the wide open salt-flats of Bonneville, and the skies suddenly cleared up. 

And before I knew it, I was in Nevada.  I was almost done with my trip.

My last rest-stop in Nevada before I crossed into California.  

By the time I had crossed into California, night had fallen, and I kept driving all the way into San Francisco. 

I have come to realize that taking road trips with a deadline (such as work the next day) is not conductive for stopping to taking photographs at all the interesting points along the way.    There just isn’t time.  

So I guess another road trip, with no deadline is in order, soon.  :)