DAY 24 - CONTINUED

But that’s enough melancholy for one day. 

It was past three o’clock by the time we got back to the interstate.  As far as the map was concerned we had only gone about fifty miles since leaving Spearfish at nine o’clock this morning.  I’d set a goal at the beginning of the day of making it at least halfway through Minnesota before we stopped for the night.  That meant we had a long, loooong stretch of driving in store for the evening.  I suggested to Lauren that we skip our next stop at a place called Wall Drug and just barrel on forward, but she spent the next hour talking me out of that decision.  We had, after all, been seeing signs for the place from as far back as Montana. 

These weren’t your typical giant billboards mass produced in some print shop, hanging large and ugly over the freeway with funky graphics, sexy women, phone numbers, websites, directions, testimonials and other information that nobody actually reads.  For the most part, they were small, apparently hand-painted plywood signs scattered here and there, usually several hundred feet back from the road on private property and featuring basic and concise advertisements: Great Pancakes – Wall Drug; T-Rex – Wall Drug; and Free Ice Water – Wall Drug.  Now as we closed the final sixty miles on I-90 to the town of Wall, we were passing by these signs every quarter mile or so: Homemade Pie – Wall Drug; Coffee 5˘ – Wall Drug; Western Wear – Wall Drug; New Backyard – Wall Drug; As Seen on Good Morning America – Wall Drug; Free Coffee and Donut for Snowmobilers  – Wall Drug.  By the time we passed the gigantic hand-painted sign announcing the Wall Drug exit, I too was eager to see just what was so special about this drugstore that it required a thousand signs heralding its existence.  The thing is, I knew to expect these signs.  It’s actually the signs more than the store itself that made this place a success. 

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With the money his father left him when he died, Ted Hustead, a pharmacist (they called them druggists back then) bought a little drugstore in 1931 in the town of Wall, South Dakota – a tiny and destitute town in the middle of nowhere.  There were other places he and his wife Dorothy could have gone – bigger towns with better chances of success – but the Husteads were devout Catholics who wanted the option of attending mass every day, and there was a nice Catholic church in Wall with a priest they felt a connection to.  For months business was beyond terrible.  The population of the town was only 326, mostly poor farmers wiped out by Depression and drought.  Often Ted would see cars passing by on the highway outside town and wish they would just stop in and have a coffee, soda or a bite to eat.  Remember, this was a time when drugstores were more than just a place to pick up the weekly dose of Viagra. 

For five years things went on in much the same way; so much potential but no customers to fulfill it.  But the Husteads trusted in God, prayed often, leaned on their pastor for support, and did what they could to serve their small community.  Finally, one dastardly hot day in July of 1936, looking out at all the summer travelers driving across the prairie, Dorothy had an idea: “They’re thirsty.  They want water.  Ice… cold… water.”  South Dakota is in an area that the French called “Badlands” because it was so wide and dusty with very little in the way of trees or other shade giving objects.  During the time of the Hustead’s dire straits, there was no such thing as Poland Spring or automobile air conditioning.  Despite the fact that Wall Drug was in the middle of nowhere, or maybe because of it, Dorothy knew they had something these travelers needed: free ice water.  The only problem was the travelers themselves didn’t know that.  Her solution: put up signs informing them. 

The first signs were modeled after the classic Burma Shave highway campaigns, which often told a small story or poem spaced out over several billboards.  The Husteads’ prototype went like this: Get soda… Get root beer… Turn next corner… Just as near… To Highway 16 & 14… Free Ice Water… Wall Drug.  As Ted put it in an article he wrote for Guideposts magazine in 1982, “It wasn’t Wordsworth,” but by the time he and his son walked back to the store after putting up those first signs, people had already lined up for their ice water and Dorothy was running around trying to keep up.  All day long they chipped ice, poured water, gave directions and sold ice cream cones.  And from that very day, the Husteads’ drugstore in Wall has never lacked for customers.  It has grown from a single storefront to a block-sized establishment and world famous tourist trap. 

They put God first, they invested their money, they served their community, they worked hard, they used their skills, they employed their ingenuity, they identified a need, they capitalized on it responsibly, and even in the middle of nowhere they made a name and a fortune for themselves.  Now if that isn’t the most perfectly packaged American Dream story you’ve ever heard, well then… you can just shut up, because it is.

Even so, I was worried that Wall Drug would disappoint me.  Things that start out that wholesome never last long in this country.  Greed too often makes even the best-intentioned people sell out to corporate names, slot machines and overall tackiness just to earn another quick buck.  As we turned off the well-publicized exit and made our way through the town of Wall (which is still very tiny even today), I was anticipating a grotesque and touristy mall / casino connected to a lame amusement park with big name box stores selling the same old crap you could find anywhere else in the country.  It’s just the way things happen in America. 

In fact, Wall Drug turned out to be a worthy and virtuous oasis in the middle of a brand hungry consumer wasteland, and Lauren and I loved everything about it.  Even the hordes and hordes of signs disrupting the otherwise pristine landscape, and seemingly employing all the worst habits of any other logo smearing corporation out there, didn’t bother me.  Possibly because they all looked hand painted.  Possibly because they were actually rather pleasant to look at, unlike the generic and repetitive eyesores populating roads everywhere else in the country.  Perhaps because after several days in Montana and Wyoming, the flat unchanging landscape was starting to get to me and I was welcoming a bit of distraction for my velocitized eye.  But the biggest reason was much more intangible.  Out here, and for this specific family business, the signs just… fit.

We parked right in front of the store, which occupies an entire city block (I use that term loosely) on Main Street, Wall.  The other side of the street also had an array of shops, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were or what they sold.  While Wall Drug may not have sold out to commercialism, it has thoroughly embraced the devils of roadside kitsch and tack.  And God bless it for that.  The long exterior called to mind a Hollywood backdrop.  Viewed directly from the front, it gave the illusion of an old west city street with its wooden exterior, wooden sidewalks, deep wooden awnings and hand-carved wooden signs.  But step to the side even a little bit and the illusion gave way to the fact that all that wood was literally a façade covering a plain cinderblock building.  Inside, the illusion continued.  The walls were wood, the shelves were wood, the support beams were tree trunks, the whole place even smelled like wood.  There was original artwork on the walls, mostly depicting western and Native American scenes, a few wooden Indians placed here and there, and burned into the wood trim around the store were the names and brand symbols of every single cattle farmer in the state of South Dakota. 

They had a café, a book store, a leather store, a fudge store, a clothing store, a video arcade and a gift shop selling the most gloriously tacky items you have ever seen: straw cowboy hats, plastic tom toms, stuffed jakalopes, bobble head buffalos, Frisbees that look like cow patties, coffee mugs featuring the literal “backsides” of the Mount Rushmore presidents…  Stuck into the mix of shops like an afterthought was a teeny tiny little drugstore selling aspirin and gum and other innocent items, just so you didn’t forget where this big tourist monster came from. 

Out back was the famous Wall Drug Backyard, a playground full of good, clean kid-friendly fun: mini-merry-go-rounds, giant plastic animals you climbed onto for pictures, a couple life-sized robotic dinosaurs, and nickelodeon booths where you dropped in a quarter and watched a fifteen-foot gorilla sing and play the piano.

The whole place was absolutely cheesy and stupid and ridiculous and Lauren and I had a great time.  This was probably helped along by the fact that it was early April, far from the tourist-choked dog days of summer when Wall Drug typically hosts upwards of twenty thousand visitors a day.  Aside from Lauren and myself there were only a couple dozen other people, most of them quiet old folks without kids.  We perused the shops, ate lunch, drank coffee (which still sells for five cents a cup), played in the backyard and, of course, got our free glass of ice water – because you just have to.  The “glass” was actually a yellow plastic cup, of which there were stacks and stacks of next to numerous strategically placed spigots.  The “ice water” actually ranged from lukewarm at the inside spigots to downright hot and disgusting from the spigots in the backyard.  But that was okay. 

Realizing we hadn’t bought much in the way of gifts for people back home, we loaded up on everything from t-shirts to mugs to one of the aforementioned cow pie Frisbees for Lauren’s brother’s new dog.  With every purchase, the gift shop was giving customers a free Wall Drug sign (of course) or bumper sticker.  We opted for the latter, which I stuck on my Geo Metro a few weeks after returning home, officially beginning the bumper sticker frenzy that has since turned the back of my little car into a red light library on wheels. I also picked up two shotglasses featuring Mount Rushmore and the Wall Drug logo respectively. 

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We spent nearly two hours inside Wall Drug and probably could have stayed longer.  The place was just so homey and inviting and full of wholesomely ludicrous things that didn’t suck.  We felt the same pang of absence we’d felt almost three weeks earlier leaving Cawker City, but we had a good three or four hundred miles to cover before this day was over, so we reluctantly tore ourselves away and headed back to the interstate. 

It was Tuesday night and 24 was on, but there was no way we could stop to watch it tonight.  It was already past five o’clock and we’d soon be crossing out of Mountain Standard Time, losing an additional hour.  Combine that with the fact that every show comes on even one hour earlier in Central Time Zone and it meant we’d be able to get about two hours worth of driving in before having to stop and find a motel.  No way we could do that now.  We had two days to get to Ann Arbor, four days to get home.  We had to keep driving.

So for the next seven hours, that’s exactly what we did.  We drove.  It was an almost perfectly straight shot across South Dakota and Minnesota on I-90, something that went from rather boring and monotonous in the daytime to dangerously boring and monotonous as night fell.  There was nothing, and I mean nothing, to break up the straight, unending road ahead of us.  No mountains, no trees, no more signs for Wall Drug, and only a few irregularly spaced farming communities.  With no cities on the horizon providing residual light, it was impossible to even see where we were headed, just the same dull gray circle of road lit by the Mazda’s headlights for hours and hours.  I locked in the cruise control, afraid that, with nothing visual or concrete to give me any sense of speed, I’d find myself creeping up into the triple digits.  But that only served to lull me to sleep even more, without even the thought process of controlling my ankle and foot to occupy my mind.  We pulled off in some no name interstate town and ate dinner at a Taco Bell just to be out of the car for a few minutes.  While we were there we stopped at three different stores, a WalMart, a Big K and a gas station gift shop, looking for some new comedy CD’s to provide any kind of mental stimulation for the hours ahead of us.  Finding nothing, we pressed on.  We were too road weary to keep a conversation going, so I did the only thing I could think of and began fiddling with the radio nonstop, looking for songs that would rev me up.

That song we’d heard for the first time driving into Nashville, “Redneck Woman”, was just starting to explode across country radio.  We’d been hearing it fairly consistently over the last couple days, and always cranked it up whenever it came on.  As the hours and miles clicked by, and my driving attention began to falter, that song became a godsend with its rowdy yee-haw tune, fun lyrics that we were just starting to learn, and a rousing chorus that ended with the exclamation, “Hell Yeah!”  Even Lauren, who hates it when I make the radio loud, couldn’t help but wail along with this Gretchen Wilson chick as we tore across the South Dakota prairie.

We drove and drove until almost one in the morning, finally pulling off the interstate in Blue Earth, Minnesota, right smack dab in the middle of state (Well in the east-west middle anyway.  It’s only about ten miles from the Iowa state line.).  Following signs for the Super 8 in town, I blinked and rubbed my eyes several times, suddenly certain I was hallucinating.  The town was pitch black this time of night save for a very conspicuous glowing patch of green.  “What the… seriously, what the hell is that?” I asked Lauren several times.  It appeared to be very tall, whatever it was, and in the shape of a man.  I knew Minnesota had several large Paul Bunyan statues, but I’d never heard of any that glowed bright green.  After however many hours of the type of driving that could seriously make a man go crazy, I legitimately thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. 

“No seriously, what the hell is that; the freakin’ Jolly Green Giant?”

Despite the fact that I was ready to fall asleep right there behind the wheel, we drove the extra mile or so down the road toward that glowing green mass and saw that actually, yes, it was the freakin’ Jolly Green Giant.  “Wha… why… why… WHY?” was all I could exclaim looking up at this thing standing tall and glowing brightly atop a small hill for no apparent reason that I could detect.  But without the brain capacity to consider it much farther, I turned the car back, went into the Super 8 and asked for my one-person room.  Lauren and I brought in only the bare essentials, just what we would need to get into the room and go to sleep, which basically meant Lauren’s bathroom bag so she could take out her contacts.  Not even bothering with toothbrushes or pajamas, we stripped down to the underwear and t-shirts we were wearing, flopped into bed and were asleep almost immediately. 

ONTO DAY 25