Chasing America and Identity: My Road Trip to Nebraska and South Dakota (Part 6)
Finale: freedom and fate
This is the last part of a six-part series. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
From Custer I drove 100 miles east to Badlands National Park, my last stop. The abundance of words from the day before gave way to complete, utter, deafening silence. I settled into unison, and drove quietly through the Highway 240 portion cutting across the park, stopping at viewpoints and for two short, easy hikes.
I marveled at the multilayered rocks, buttes and pinnacles, experienced unprecedented closeness with bighorn sheep, and suffered biting cold with much gratitude for the bag of hand warmers that my outdoorsy boyfriend had left in his car. I contemplated the momentum of standing amid natural formations that I’d only previously stared at from the 30,000-foot altitude of a coast-to-coast flight.
For the night, I had booked a gorgeous wooden cabin with a view of the prairie — the nicest and priciest accommodation of the weekend — in Wall, South Dakota. Besides its adjacency to Badlands National Park, Wall is most famous for its namesake drugstore, Wall Drug, whose eccentric advertising billboards line hundreds of miles of Interstate 90 leading to town. Wall Drug’s unique marketing campaign was the brainchild of its founder, Ted Hustead, who wanted his store’s billboards to be placed everywhere in the world — or outside of it, for that matter. When he learned of plans to get the man on the moon, Hustead reportedly tried to contact NASA to get a Wall Drug billboard there too, I read in his 1999 obituary when I paid a visit to the store the morning of my last day on the road.
The miscellaneous merchandising sold on Wall Drug’s sweeping premises bore little interest to me compared to a narrow hallway of Hustead’s family pictures across the aisle from a tiny religious chapel (yes, Wall Drug comes with a chapel). In many of the pictures, Hustead folks pose with a wide gamut of Republican politicians up and down the ballot, from South Dakota representatives and governors to President George W. Bush. In others, Hustead offspring Willie and Lane, looking no older than a dozen years in the fall of 2006, kneel next to dead deer, wide smiles on their faces and hunting rifles in hand.
On the night I spent in Wall, after an underwhelming dinner of burger and fries served to me by a Ukrainian refugee at Badlands Bar — the first and last foreign accent I heard on the trip compelled me to ask where she was from — I drove slowly and aimlessly around town, just to look at “real America,” as they say, one last time before returning home. The streets were quiet and empty under the dim light of sparse road lamps. Four grain mills stood imposingly at the northern edge of town, two blocks from the single-story Courant newspaper building.
The Courant’s latest headline, at time of writing, is “A Momentous Day For South Dakota Beef.” “On May 4, 2023, I witnessed what I consider to be a significant, historical event for all South Dakotans,” journalist Elizabeth Meighen writes. “The South Dakota cattle industry […] received a figurative and literal stamp of approval as the first South Dakota beef qualified for interstate shipment.” The first meat processing plant to receive approval was Wall’s very own, which I drove by that night. Meighen goes on to quote Lieutenant Governor Larry Rhoden’s speech at the event: “American meat supply is a matter of national security because if we don’t control our own meat supply, we don’t control our own destiny.” Rhodes also noted that “the farmers and ranchers in the state of South Dakota help feed the world.” There is perhaps no more vital reason to ensure the livelihood of local news outlets like The Courant than its coverage of issues that readers perceive as pertaining to their destiny and impact in the world.
Thoughts of this destiny manifested for me as I drove past Wall’s humble white vinyl houses that night. From the car, I peeked into one window whose curtains were open. Careful not to intrude on the residents’ privacy, I glimpsed modest furnishings. I thought about the individual American human stories unfolding out of these homes. Entire American lives, in all their complexity: the joys, the pains, the milestones, the jobs, the weddings, the Fourth of July barbecues and Thanksgiving dinners, homeownership and retirement, Super Bowl and World Series, health insurance and Veterans Administration, beliefs of freedom, faith in the military, love for the nation. Knowing that these lives with no name and no face will continue chasing their destiny parallel to mine, and never intersecting, was mystifying. My meditative drive around the hood was the closest we’ll ever come to each other. Yet I harbor some hopes that one day, running through an airport, our destinies will fleetingly cross.
It was me and America, on the lengthy stretch of empty highway close to the South Dakota-Wyoming border where I found myself on my journey back home. I covered the distance between Wall and Boulder in a single eight-hour drive spanning more than 450 miles, or 700 more heroic-sounding kilometers. It was cold and windy, like I had experienced for most of the weekend. Gray but non-menacing clouds coated the blue sky into the distance. I almost resented the lone sound of the Subaru’s cooling engine. I looked as far as the eye could see on both ends of the highway for approaching vehicles, and saw none. The idea that I could jump and stand on the yellow line in the middle of an American highway felt exhilarating, in the way that do opportunities unlikely to return in life. It was scary, too — how quickly could a giant truck reasonably materialize? Then I did it, and there I was standing alone, in complete silence, on the very middle of a movie-like United States highway, the “nothing,” as the coasts call it, around me feeling like it’s absolutely everything in that precise instant of risk, excitement and wonder.
There’s a world people like to throw around a lot in the United States: freedom. It’s abused, and often rings hollow — evidence is endless of how women, people of color, the poor are systematically denied their share of freedom. Even when freedom is guaranteed aplenty, as in its definition relating to the small size of the government, an outside observer wonders how much limited intervention into citizens’ lives actually benefits the country. What does “freedom from the government” mean, for example, in the wake of another mass shooting? It engenders the next. On the day I found myself alone on the highway, the most recent mass shooting had taken place less than three hours earlier, at a grade school in Nashville, Tennessee. In the six weeks that have passed between then and the time of this writing, at least six more have occurred that grabbed media attention, according to a count by The New York Times.
What does “freedom from the government” mean for health care? It transfers the responsibility to provide for the wellness of Americans to employers, of all constituents of society — no wonder your job carries such an outsized importance, and losing it impacts American lives beyond just their income. What does “freedom from the government” mean for income inequality? It favors the rich and the corporations over the people who live in rural places like the ones I visited during my trip (these people are still the number one critics of “big government,” but that’s another story), because lower taxes will always mean less welfare money for the state to help those in need. And at any rate, the average Joe typically pays more taxes proportionate to his income than the wealthiest Americans, thanks to a tax system designed to reduce taxation on capital gains derived from investments.¹
Americans are right to say that freedom is not free. I wonder if, ironically, the biggest price for freedom is paid in rural states like Nebraska and South Dakota, by people like Mardi and Russ at the Westerner Motel, like Chris and Lori and Terry and Rodney and Abby and Tim at The Saloon, like the young college-aged servers at The Ridge, like Mike at Favorite Bar, like Susan at Our Place. If I went over the above talking points with these folks, some of them would probably bring me back to a more poetic definition of freedom in America: the freedom to be yourself and determine your destiny, which is the basic promise of the American Dream. I have issues with that as well — that version of freedom has a clear preference for money, white skin, and male anatomy (not just in the United States). Denying women basic reproductive rights infringes on their liberty to determine their own destiny. Racism and discrimination, undeniably still pervasive, undermine self-determination at its very core. And, of course, you may be white and male, but if you live in crippling poverty, it’s hard if not impossible to be the architect of your own destiny.
But what I experienced standing silent and solo on that highway at the border between Wyoming and South Dakota — I think it was freedom, in all its primal power and metaphorical meaning. I took a risky leap, not without fear, not before looking left and right to ensure no cars were approaching, and I was rewarded with an experience unlike anything else, and an expansive space of opportunity to embrace. In this space, I was myself without restraint. I was free.
That’s what America has meant in my life. However cliché, I needed to come into real contact with this metaphor at a time of personal and professional change after the loss of my job. My road trip through rural America accomplished this goal. It granted me a profound opportunity for introspection. It afforded me the literal and figurative space to be who I am. It reconnected me with my authentic calling for writing. It put me in touch with my destiny.
For that type of freedom, on this road trip, on that highway, and in my life, I owe America the world.
The Nerud family has planned ahead: They have purchased several contiguous plots at Chimney Rock Cemetery in Banyard, Nebraska, to accommodate various generations of Neruds and spouses once it’s their time to rest in peace. Chimney Rock Cemetery occupies a patch of land less than a mile from its namesake pointed rock formation, Chimney Rock, which served as a landmark for settlers and migrants heading west during the 19th century. I was directed to it by a man named Stephen, whom I met after my hike at Scotts Bluff National Monument. His wife Shirley, who “has left to be with the Lord more than 10 years ago,” he said, is buried there. I found her gravesite, which consists of a granite bench inviting visitors to sit and rest. Stephen’s name and date of birth are engraved on the bench too, missing only the future date of his passing.
For being a historical landmark, few people are buried at Chimney Rock Cemetery, and a lot of plots remain vacant. The Nerud family’s row caught my attention. The headstones are thick and dark; the family name is engraved in large letters. Frank T. Tom and Betty Ellen Nerud were born in 1928, and married twenty years later on June 16, 1948. They became the beloved parents of Dale, Linda, Myla, and Frank. Betty passed in 2009, Frank in 2010. Dale has already died; his gravesite stands on the right-hand side of his parents’, ready for his wife to join one day. Sadly, their grandson Frank “Dylan” Nerud has passed away as well, at age 21, less than two months before his grandmother. A quick Google search turned up a local newspaper article reporting the cause of death as an automobile accident. It also mentioned that the Nerud family owned a ranch in Banyard, and Dylan was very fond of it. In the headstone picture, Frank and Betty Nerud are elderly. Frank wears a white cowboy hat and white button-down. He stands bespectacled and slightly hunched behind Betty, who is a full head shorter than him and dons a red round-collar sweater, large studs, and short gray hair coiffed the way you would expect the hair of an older American woman to be coiffed. I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Driving on, I couldn’t shake the Neruds out of my head. I excused myself for intruding into their private story because, after all, it was their decision to purchase prominent gravesites near a nationally-famous historical landmark. Still, chancing upon the Neruds in such an eerie circumstance, and unbeknownst to them, carried some discomfort. Yet I kept thinking about their story and destiny as humans in America, and thus they helped me enter the corner of the country that I had driven hundreds of miles to see. Betty and Frank’s gravesite photo pictured two American lives the way I had always imagined them to look. And they owned a cattle ranch in Nebraska, for God’s sake.
The Neruds represented what I had been searching for. And I found it.
[1] “The nation’s wealthiest four hundred families have a total effective tax rate averaging about 16.6% of their income, essentially the same as 16.3% average paid by households with annual earnings as low as $50,000,” says Tim Wise in Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich, and Sacrificing the Future of America, City Lights Books, 2015, p. 66
