The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  Because we were near Mount Rushmore (and as a fan of the movie North by Northwest), Leslie insisted that we visit. I expected to hate it, and I did. Keystone, near the entrance to the monument, looked as if it had been designed by a Disneyland imagineer, and the highway was a gallery of trashy billboards. PAN FOR BLACK HILLS GOLD! SEE THE CONATA MYSTERY! REPTILE JUNGLE! OLD MACDONALD’S FARM—SEE THE PIG RACES! If the Black Hills had been sacred to the Lakota, that part of them had been thoroughly desanctified. Inside the gate, tourists swarmed, gawking at the massive faces carved out of a mountain.

  For the sake of balance, we then went to the Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948 by the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowksi and still a work in progress. For twenty dollars, we got to see, from a distance, the colossal torso of the Sioux chief astride a colossal horse, its head more than twenty stories high, its eye as wide as a passenger car is long. Another eleven dollars would have bought us a ticket on a tour bus to the construction site. Instead we headed out past the gift shop and snack shop and the Laughing Water Restaurant onto U.S. 385. Beyond the claptrap, the scenery was grand and unspoiled, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the road for long. The two-lane teemed with bikers roaring up to Sturgis. They weren’t the badasses of old, but middle-age dentists and accountants riding with their middle-age mamas, all garbed to look like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

  Deadwood was an Old West theme park, retailing its fame on the HBO series, its violent, gold-rush past, and its two most celebrated residents, Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. What it is to Old West mythology, Sturgis is to the motorcycle subculture. Seven hundred thousand bikers rumble in from all over the world to the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to party, race, and show off their machines for a week. The old post office has been converted into the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum & Hall of Fame. Every store peddles leather biker wear and accessories; the bars have names evoking the thunder of 1,000-cc engines: the Full Throttle Saloon, the Loud American Roadhouse.

  Bike Week was a month away when we passed through, and the town was quiet enough to hold church services on the main street.

  I don’t need a big vocabulary to tell you where you we camped that night, twenty miles up the road from Sturgis: it was in Spearfish, in Spearfish Canyon, through which flows Spearfish Creek, so-called because the Indians found it ideal for, well, you can guess. A local diner, however, appealed to the meat eater, serving up buffalo burgers and Leslie’s new favorite beer, Buffalo Sweat stout.

  Spearfish was where I met Whitey Wenzel, a biker’s biker, in his man cave, a garage with enough tools to equip a dozen mechanics, an air bench—a pneumatic lift used to work on motorcycles—and two customized Hondas, both under canvas shrouds. His hand clamped down on mine, a row of teeth precisely aligned showed beneath his mustache, light blue eyes sparked like an electric bug killer in August as he sat down and gave me an oral history of the Sturgis Rally.

  “Go back to 1938, Pappy Hoel, he had the Indian motorcycle franchise in downtown Sturgis. Him and his buddies racin’ around down there, the old racetrack, maybe an eighth-mile circle, and that’s how it got started. It got to be a club thing. They were called the Jackpine Gypsies.”

  “And somehow the word spread?”

  “I don’t know when stuff got sanctioned, the sixties probably, when it got more organized. But it was always their little deal. People would come and stay in Pappy Hoel’s backyard, tentin’ and campin’, y’know, and then baboom, baboom, baboom. Seventy years, dude!”

  “You raced…”

  “Top-fuel Harleys.”

  “What?”

  He let out a laugh that was a little bit cackle, a little bit whoop. “Don’t know what that means, do yuh? Nitro bikes. Drag racers…”

  And Whitey was off. I’d run into a few talkers on the trip, I was to run into more, but he was world-class, sentences colliding, careening off on tangents, every one an exclamation delivered at maximum volume, as if I were deaf, though it could have been that he’d had to shout so much over the explosions of those nitromethane-fueled dragsters that yelling had become his natural mode of speech.

  “My first year was 1976. That’s what we come out to do was to race bikes on the drag strip. There were seventeen thousand people, ten thousand in city park, and it just exploded! We were some of the instigators … Fire burnouts! Dump a little gas on the road, light it on your tire, get your back wheel on it, smoke it, and then spin it all the way out. Fire burnouts! We were doin’ them middle of the week, hootin’ it up, and well, it got outta hand, everybody racin’ and ba-ba-ba. And there’s a little knoll up above city park, and all these outlaw bikers up on the knoll. Well, the city brought out the water truck and watered down the road to slow the whole thing down, and the outlaws shot the water truck full of holes! Boom! It was over, the last time everybody stayed in city park. I was layin’ under a trailer with three, four buddies while the gunshots went overhead. The next morning they brought in all the cops, the National Guard, dogs, and more firehoses, and cleared the whole park out, and that was the last time … This is all common knowledge. Now last couple summers here—”

  “Let me interrupt a—”

  “Hey! Lemme finish this story! Last couple summers I ran into a guy out here, and we got to talkin’ about Sturgis and ya ya ya, I said it’s my thirty-second year blah blah blah, and is this your first year, and he told me, no, he was here in ’76 … He starts talkin’ about these guys doin’ fire burnouts and the water truck comin’ and shootin’ it full of holes and the … ba-ba-badaboom … and it all blew up kaboom! Worst time he ever had, and he ain’t been back since. And all I could think of was, it was the best time I ever had! And I been goin’ back ever since, haven’t missed one! I called buddies and told ’em about this guy had a bad time, and everybody, ‘What, is he fuckin’ crazy? The best time.’ Y’know, how many? Girlfriends? How many these years I’ve been comin’ to Sturgis? I come home after bein’ away ten days, two weeks, house is empty, furniture’s gone, the whole works…”

  I managed to squeeze in a question: “How many girlfriends?”

  “Half a dozen that period of years. Been single my whole life. I been blessed never bein’ married. And jobs! Oh, you ain’t goin’ to Sturgis, you’re workin’ for me now, oh, yeah, we’ll see how all that pans out!”

  For the next hour, I spoke perhaps a dozen words while Whitey barreled along, telling me about growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, cutting school to build motorcycles with his two brothers, and working in his father’s concrete business, and how he was the alcoholic son of an alcoholic son of an alcoholic, and had learned how to fight by pulling his mean-drunk father off his mother. “‘C’mon, old man, you wanna beat up on somebody, let’s see what you’ve got.’ I was probably fifteen, sixteen years old.”

  Whitey had been sober since 1993, but before that, he bellowed, “I drank professionally … Now listen to this! Our drink of choice was Cuervo. Night I quit drinkin’, we were dumpin’ the tequila shots on the bar and then snortin’ ’em through a cocaine straw! That’s how they do it in Mexico.”

  He’d learned how in Mexico, on a wild ride with his racing buddies in 1986. “Took ten days to get down, eleven to get back. We ended up twelve hundred miles into Mexico on fuckin’ motorcycles. Had to put ’em on flat cars crossin’ Copper Canyon, sittin’ in the club car drinkin’ with the fuckin’ Mexicans.”

  Biff. Bang. Boom. His voice pummeled me. I felt like Joe Frazier’s sparring partner.

  “Gotta show you somethin’. One of my original motorcycles. Built it in the eighties.” He took the cover off one of the bikes, a long gray-and-black machine that looked, standing still, like it was doing a hundred. “Seventy-nine CBX Honda engine. Chassis, I built, and the body, the exhaust, the rear wheel, all that’s custom work. Motor is six cylinder, twenty-four valves, four cam shafts, four drive chains, six carburetors. Got a lock-up clutch, and you gotta follow to the back of it now.”

  He brought me around to the rear fender. On it was a
sticker: WFO—WIDE FUCKIN’ OPEN.

  “That’s my philosophy on this bike.” He whooped. “Let’s see whatchya got. Wide fuckin’ open separates people real quick! Now this one is all hot rod, too.” He unveiled the other motorcycle, a gorgeous assembly of ebony black metal and chrome polished to a blinding finish. “Ninety-six ST-Eleven Hundred. A rocketship! This is a hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour bike, and I can prove it. A lotta these guys talk big speed about their motorcycles, especially the Harley guys. This’ll smoke a Harley. Read on the back.”

  Two words printed in big letters on a plate: SEE YA.

  Then he got onto the changes in Sturgis since the WFO days of fire burnouts and gunshots on Main Street.

  “In them days the cops come through city park and they’d see half a dozen bikers sittin’ around, they’d say, ‘Go on home, rally’s over.’ Cops don’t do that anymore. Hang around, spend some more money! Stay till October! Seven hundred and forty thousand bikes last year. Look at this number.” He pulled out a newspaper clipping from a drawer. “Last year, eight hundred and seventeen million economic impact on the state! This is all common knowledge. Eight hundred and seventeen million fuckin’ dollars into the state! Of course that’s why they want us to stay.”

  But not all the changes were to his liking. He stood and swung over to his “Wall of Fame”—photographs of him on the bikes he’d built over the years—and whipped out one more bumper sticker. It read: IT USED TO BE ABOUT MOTORCYCLES. NOW IT’S A FUCKIN’ FASHION SHOW.

  “The nineties, Harley-Davidson,” he said, for the first time at a normal decibel level. “Every fifty-five-year-old man had to have a brand-new Harley with the shiny pants and the belt buckle and the hat and the kerchief and the new new new, the new pickup and the new trailer, everything new. Well, they’re just wannabes.”

  A wannabe is something Whitey is not; nor is he a usetabe. He still rides, at sixty-three. He’d taken over his father’s concrete business in Minnesota but cashed out eighteen years ago, knocked around, and settled in Spearfish with his bikes and trailer and tools.

  “I love my lifestyle … This is the dream! Livin’ the fuckin’ dream! Look at this…”

  From his workbench he picked up a yard sign reading WHITEYVILLE.

  “So we’re in the town of Whiteyville.”

  “The planet, dude!” he said, hooting. “Whiteyworld. It’s all good in Whiteyworld.”

  * * *

  We took a hike into the wilds, six miles round-trip, to work off breakfast and give Sage and Sky some liberty.

  The trailhead was an eleven-mile drive down Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway, which I added to my list of favorite roads. It paralleled Spearfish Creek, tumbling through the canyon, a narrow, twisty corridor walled by palisades of yellowed rock streaked with black. The creek’s runs and riffles threw off crystalline glints in the sunlight, and the pools below the fast water, shouldering up to the steep banks, were the color of burned butter.

  The trail, an old miner’s route, followed Iron Creek, a tributary of the Spearfish scarcely wider than a ditch. Granite cliffs shot up a hundred feet or more, pine and spruce clutching the crags above. I’d read that the Black Hills were formed by volcanic uplift at the end of the Cretaceous Period 125 million years ago. Erosion eventually exposed much older formations, dating back two billion years. On that timescale, the Ice Age was last Saturday. As I gripped a rock to pull myself up a rise in the trail, it occurred to me that I may have touched a remnant of the earth’s adolescence, when the only living things were single-celled organisms. Thoughts like that help me to not take myself too seriously.

  About a mile in, we saw a plastic-covered sign tacked to a tree beside the creek. It was a placer-mining claim, filed by a Wyoming couple.

  Gold!

  The discovery of it in 1874, by an expedition under the command of George Armstrong Custer, brought on the Black Hills gold rush. Thousands of white prospectors poured in, in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that promised the Black Hills would belong to the Lakota for as long as the grass grew and the rivers flowed. The invasion led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and to the defeat of the Lakota a year later, after which the U.S. government decided that the grass would grow and the rivers flow no longer and seized the Black Hills. There was just too much money there to leave them to savages. By 1880, the gold mines were yielding four million dollars a year. This is not all ancient history. The Homestake Mine, founded in 1876 by George Hearst, father of William Randolph, remained in operation until 2002 and took out forty million ounces of gold worth half a billion dollars. Nor is it ancient history to the Lakota. In a 1980 case, United States v. the Sioux Nation of Indians, the Supreme Court ruled that the taking of the Black Hills had been illegal and offered the Lakota compensation of $106 million. The tribe refused the settlement, and although the fund, invested in an interest-bearing account, is now worth more than $700 million, they still refuse. They want the Black Hills back.

  Which isn’t likely to happen soon. When gold topped eight hundred dollars an ounce in the eighties, a new rush came to the Black Hills, then faded when the price fell. But now, I thought, looking at the placer claims, maybe a third rush was in the offing. Gold had hit a new high: fifteen hundred an ounce.

  We hiked on. Blue flax and violet Venus’s looking glass decorated the stream side. Cow’s parsnip made white bouquets—the Indians used the mashed flowers as insect repellent. The dogs were in their glory. Dashing unfettered through rough country is in a setter’s blood. Sage seemed to recapture some of her youth, sprinting off into the woods not to be seen for five or ten minutes, and when she returned to check in, she would look back at us and—we swear—smile.

  * * *

  Near Ethel was a trailer named Cyclone—so I should have known what was coming. First rain, then hail. Stones as big as ball bearings pelted me as I came out of the campground shower. I felt like an adulterer caught by the Taliban. In an earlier storm, we’d discovered that Fred’s hardtop had sprung leaks; the sealant in the roof rack bolts had cracked. The problem was worse now. The dogs and their bed and everything else inside was soaked. Once again, Ethel became a dog house. Leslie and I played Scrabble, shouting “twenty points!” above crashes of thunder, the hammering of hailstones and rain against Ethel’s metal hide.

  WELCOME TO BELLE FOURCHE THE GEO. CENTER OF THE U.S.

  The historical marker paid its respects to Lebanon, Kansas, but noted that with the admission of Hawaii and Alaska to the union in 1959, the navel of America had moved to South Dakota. Latitude, 44 degrees, 58 minutes north; longitude, 103 degrees, 46 minutes west.

  Belle Fourche means “beautiful fork.” It was so christened by French fur traders (they did get around), who maintained a post at the confluence of the Belle Fourche and Redwater Rivers. The locals pronounce it Bell-Foosh, which would have revolted those Frenchmen. The town is much larger than Lebanon, with more than five thousand people, and a lot more vibrant. The streets were jammed with cowboys when we got there, the day after the storm; the state high school rodeo championships were being held at the county fairgrounds.

  Leslie decided she needed a new pair of boots and popped into Pete’s Clothing & Western Wear. I picked out a shirt, my old one having succumbed to travel fatigue. Noticing that Pete’s didn’t have a dressing room, I asked the saleswoman if it would be all right if I took off my T-shirt to try the new shirt on.

  “Did you take a bath this Christmas?”

  I said I took one every Christmas and Easter.

  “Then you pass the test.”

  Like Lebanon’s claim as the center of the contiguous United States, Belle Fourche’s title as the other center is somewhat fictitious. The actual spot, said a marker, was twenty miles away. We went into Belle Fourche’s Museum and Visitor Center to ask directions and fell into a conversation with a volunteer, Mary Jane Steinbrecker, and the director, Rochelle Silva.

  I remarked that their town looked a good deal more prosperous than Lebanon, a
nd Steinbrecker confirmed the impression. It thrived on ranching; cattle drives still took place when herds were moved off the plains to summer pastures in the Black Hills. Some citizens were employed in the coal mines across the state line in Gillette, Wyoming, others in the bentonite plant nearby. She gave me a pamphlet: Bentonite—the Clay of 1000 Uses. A bit of an exaggeration. The pamphlet listed 126 products that used the mineral, from “abrasive wheels” to “Zelite water softeners.” Then Silva produced a map, showing the route to the “real” middle of the United States. She lamented that people thought of the Midwest as flyover country. If I wanted to know what held the nation together, I was in it; the Midwest and its rock-ribbed values were the glue.

  Fourteen miles north on U.S. 85, then west on old 85, a dirt road. Black specks in the distance marked a herd of Angus; the white specks were antelope. Otherwise, we saw grasslands rolling on and on and on without a tree in sight.

  “What is it with no trees anywhere?” Leslie said, as if their absence offended her. “We live in Arizona, a desert, and there are trees there.”

  MD answered: rainfall on the Great Plains insufficient to sustain trees; frequent fires seared the soil, preventing seeds from sprouting, but grasses survived because of their hardier root system.

  Mile upon mile of … space. And after eight of those dusty, jaw-rattling miles, we arrived at the actual, the genuine, accept-no-substitutes center of the United States. A crude, hand-painted sign, riddled with bullet holes, dangled from a barbed-wire fence: THE TRUE CENTER OF THE NATION. Fifty or so yards away, an American flag fluttered on a leaning pole. A plaque at its base noted the latitude and longitude. And that’s all there was to it, the second heart of the big two-hearted heartland.

  * * *

  THE CINNAMON BUN

  I am very discriminating about this pastry. Those sold in Humphreys Bakery, on Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard (now, sadly, out of business), were my gold standard. A Humphreys cinnamon bun first graced my mouth about fifteen years ago, after a morning of striped bass fishing, and I’d never found its equal anywhere. Throughout the journey, I sampled the offerings in diners and cafés every chance I got. Highlights of my survey: the buns served at the KOA Spearfish Diner in Spearfish, South Dakota, scored a six on a one-to-ten scale. Those baked at the Chicken Creek Café, in Chicken, Alaska, rang up an eight.