Hitting the Wall

July 6

We found out today what Wall is named for. It isn’t the drug store, although you might expect so. All the way from Sioux Falls there are billboards every half mile or so making promises about Wall Drug—homemade donuts, 5-cent coffee, ice water, cowboy gear, old time photo ops, buffalo burgers. 

I believe there is an actual pharmacy there, too, so I’ll see if they can refill a prescription for me tomorrow.

Right now, I am confined to quarters by a tornado warning for this section of South Dakota.

We made it to Wall from Kadoka by taking a detour through the Badlands National Park.

We stopped at a scenic overlook on Interstate 90. It must have been 50 or 60 feet above the road, making it the highest point in sight. The similarity of the prairie and the open ocean is striking. The land isn’t perfectly flat; there is a gentle roll that repeats like waves in a light wind. 

And there is always a wind here in the summer. They call it 

a monsoon.

At I-90 exit 130, our route took a southerly course (never mind that the road is S.D. 240 West) toward the Badlands National Park.

Just before we got there, we had to stop, though, to see something that surprised me. There is a preserved homestead with the original sod house a short distance from the national park entrance.

It was built in 1909. I had read about sodbusters in sod houses, but thought they had all switched to wood or bricks by 1900. Not so. They were just getting started. 

The sod house at the Prairie Homestead Historic Site was built by Ed Brown and his wife, Alice, who registered for a tract of land under the Homestead Act. They came West from Nebraska in a Conestoga wagon. Ed lived at the farm till he died in 1920. Alice left in 1934 to live with a daughter. Others moved in after them. The place was occupied until 1949.

A granddaughter later restored the farm and turned it into the historic site, which is still privately owned.

The structure is made of improvised bricks, actually blocks of sod cut out of the ground. The roots of the prairie grass hold the soil together. The blocks are stacked to make very thick walls, which we were told are good insulation against the summer heat and the winter cold.

The inside walls are partly covered with boards. The upper half remains exposed sod, which is in surprisingly good shape.

The family added a small, one-room wood cabin that they bought and brought from another site.  

The residents now are chickens and goats with names like Chocolate and Billy the Kid.

The Badlands were once a seabed, then a jungle, and later a river valley covered with sediment and ash from distant volcanoes.

The result is intricately eroded soft rock formations that look like clay. You can see stripes on the cliffs marking the different geological layers.

The edge of the Badlands forms a wall the people used to have to cross carefully, if at all. The wind erodes it an inch or more a year, so it’s always moving. We passed one point on the park road where the edge has crept to a matter of feet from the pavement.

Today there are people climbing all over the rocks. It’s fun to stand on some of the prominent formations, but my sense of balance has always been questionable, so I have a hard time relaxing on narrow trails in high places.

I stayed mainly on the boardwalks. 

It was amazing. There were sections that looked like the weathered temples of Angkor Wat. Others looked like bizarre castles.

We got out of the car at almost every overlook. We got stuck in a traffic jam, which turned out to be a rubbernecking delay caused by bighorn sheep grazing at the side of the road. We saw a pronghorn lazing on a hilltop. Another, or maybe a deer, was grazing on a grassy slope. 

We made it to Wall around 3 or 4 o’clock. We were about to go to Wall Drug to refill the prescription when an alarm sounded. It lasted a long time. I asked about it, and the people in the office said it was a tornado alert. 

We were supposed to stay indoors, so that postponed drug store and dinner, too.

TV reports explained that there were severe thunderstorms, some with winds up to 60 mph and huge hailstones, to the north of Wall. No tornadoes had been reported, but conditions made them a possibility.

We got hit with heavy rain, and then it cleared. We went to the Badlands Saloon and Grille for buffalo burgers and a couple of beers—IPAs from Deschutes in Oregon and from Crow Creek Brewing in the Black Hills.

Then we went to Wall Drug. We were tired, so we didn’t explore the place, which is like a self-contained mall. The pharmacy was closed by the time we got there, so I’ll go again tomorrow.

I’m eager to have a pill bottle with Wall Drug’s name on it.

In short, no tornado, no hail, exotic animals, fanciful rocks, and primitive architecture. So far, so good.

Love to all.

Harry