Veblen, South Dakota (arrival)

I almost don’t want to title this blog “Veblen, SD”.  It is the town I grew up in (except for that month in 1984) and just one blog with that name seemed painfully inadequate.  Still, as I’ve been documenting the journey taken back then, each destination was mentioned in the title.  So, rather than change it now, I’ll press on.

My mom wanted to get an early start in Big Springs, Nebraska.  I’ve never been much of an early riser, and even in 1984 I was tough to wake up.  My mom was able to get me up and at ‘em, and back to the eatery by the hotel where we had supper.  I’m pretty sure I had some kind of cereal there, and my mind tells me it was either Special K or Rice Krispies.  I’m not sure what my mom ate, but I’m guessing it consisted mostly of a cigarette and black coffee.  I don’t remember much of what she ate on the trip at all, and that probably isn’t too surprising.  What kids make a note of what their parents eat?  I was so very tired, and I didn’t want to be up and at ‘em at 5:30 AM.  My mom was eager to get going, and she told me I could sleep in the truck as we drove East.  So, I arranged the seat-belt in such a way that I could get some sleep.  I must have slept most of the morning, but it wasn’t a restful sleep.  What seemed like every few seconds, a semi truck shot past us.  My mom isn’t exactly a slow driver, but she’s no lead-foot either.  For a few hours, I would sleep and occasionally open my eyes to watch a truck fly by, and usually gone before I could see what it was carrying or what was written on the side.  It was on that drive that I think I most wanted to be a truck driver.  They seemed to be moving so much faster than we were, and they had someplace to go that may have been totally new to them.  This drive was nothing new to me, as the rest of the way was already road I knew.  My wife hates the fact I’m always looking for new ways to go places, or that sometimes I want to take a bit of a scenic route.  She’s all about getting from point to point quickly, where I like to see things I’ve never seen before on the drive.  That might be the topic for another blog another day.

I gave up trying to sleep around 9 AM or so, and not too long after that we rolled into North Platte.  I double checked the map, and told my mom what road we needed to get on to head North to South Dakota.  The drive North was a lot more scenic than the previous several hours on the Interstate.  I remember quite a few more trees popping up, and some twists in the road.  My mom’s mood had changed slightly as well.  Rather than being worn down and pensive, she seemed happier and more focused on the destination.  Once we crossed into South Dakota, my navigation had its first challenge.

We drove North to Interstate 90, and then we had to drive Eastward again.  My mom was suddenly annoyed with me, as she thought we were much closer to Pierre than I had let on.  I insisted this is exactly the way my brother had taken us, and that Pierre wasn’t that close to Nebraska (the town is practically in the middle of the state).  This back and forth went on for a few miles, until we hit the Pierre exit.  She thought that Pierre was going to be right off the exit, but we still had 30 miles of driving before then.  She was mad at me, but I insisted on pleading my case.  Eventually, she dropped it and said something to the effect of “well I just misunderstood you” or something like that.  30 miles of grassland and a few hills later, we pulled into Pierre, South Dakota once again, and I talked her into stopping at the Red Owl Superstore.

The Red Owl Superstore is one of my favorite places of all time to go to.  Some of my first memories of wide aisles of toys, Charles Schulz books on the shelf, and elevator rides were at the Red Owl Superstore in Pierre.  It seemed to have everything that Stavig’s in Sisseton didn’t, and it had an elevator, which gave me that big city feeling.  Every trip to Pierre when my brother lived there wound up at the Red Owl Superstore at some point.  I still have my die-cast Millennium Falcon that my parents bought me, along with a few Peanuts books.  The store is still there, but since Red Owl faded away it has become a store called Dakotamart.  I’ve been there a few times, and it’s mostly the same.  It doesn’t seem as impressive or magical anymore, but it still demands I go to it every time I’m in Pierre.

Anyway, back in September of 1984 I was in the Red Owl superstore, and I was looking for a new Star Wars figure.  I was all about Star Wars action figures then, but I should have seen the end of that hobby coming fast.  Jedi had been out for a year, and it wasn’t the same since most of the bad guys were dead, and the rebels had won.  I didn’t find any Star Wars figures, but I found something better.  Something I didn’t know I wanted, but I knew I wanted it when i saw it.  There, on the shelf, were Optimus Prime and Megatron.  I’d seen a few commercials for this new Transformers line here and there, but I’d never seen them in a store, and they looked so freakin’ cool it hurt.  I wanted both, but I couldn’t have both.  It turned out that at twenty dollars a robot, my mom didn’t have the resources to buy me either.  I was usually a pro at twisting my mom’s arm into buying me toys, but she just didn’t have the money.  I remember going back and looking at her, but her tired face kept telling me no, even though I knew deep down she wanted to say yes.  I wonder if she was thinking about the past month of uprooting ourselves only to try to replant ourselves back in Veblen after giving up on New Mexico.  Maybe I’m just assigning what I’d like to think she was thinking at the time.  I think a more realistic thought in her mind was “hurry up, I want to go home.”  So, Optimus Prime and Megatron would have to wait to come home with me.  I’ll never know what became of the two in Pierre, but I found mine in Wahpeton, North Dakota and Sisseton, South Dakota.  My mom was willing to buy me an action figure, since she had about five dollars to spare.  There were no Star Wars figures in stock, but there was one action figure of equal size left.  All alone, on the shelf by my mom, was Cobra Commander from the G.I. Joe line, in all his original chrome dome glory.  Anyone who knows me knows that while a big Transformer fan, I’m more a G.I. Joe fan.  I started my G.I. Joe collection about a year or so later, thanks to WGN showing “The Revenge of Cobra” and my luck in finding a Zartan figure.  I decided that I’d rather go home with nothing if I couldn’t get Optimus or Megatron, so Cobra Commander didn’t find a home that day.  I eventually found several Cobra Commanders for my collection, but no original ones until I got a lucky bid in on eBay about six years ago.

Looking back now, it is a bit odd that on my way back home, I had a chance to prematurely embrace the two toy and cartoon lines that I would be a fan of to this day, and that my enjoyment in making up stories for them would allow me to eventually make up stories for role playing games, which led me to making some of my best friends, which led me to come out of my shell more, which led me to take chances…which in a way led me to meeting my wife.  Maybe that’s taking it a bit too far, but for the sake of making that trip to the Red Owl Superstore overly important, I’ll say it isn’t.

The drive from Pierre to Veblen was a total blur.  My mom and I were ready to put an end to this month long experiment.  I wanted to get back to my friends in school, and I’m sure my mom wanted to get back to her boyfriend (and soon my step-dad).  Our house was being looked after by a dear old friend, and I was already dealing with the fact I’d never see my cat again.  We took her out to a farm because she couldn’t go with us, and she’d ran off sometime between us leaving and my mom deciding to come back.  Part of me wondered if anything in Veblen had changed, but nothing in Veblen ever changed back then.  We rolled into our old driveway, keyed into our old house, and decided to unpack the next day.  Just like that, we were back and like we had never left.  It was almost more like a vacation than a move, but it was no vacation.  It was an experience I’ll never forget, but one I didn’t think about much for a long time.

Now that I’ve recounted the journey to and from Farmington, New Mexico, there’s the matter of what to do with this blog.  I’ll work on that for the epilogue, as I hope to do one more blog about going back to school, and how things did change in the following weeks, months and years.  Plus, I’m hoping to find time to reread everything I’ve posted in the last few months, and figure out how to bring this story to a proper close.

Big Springs, Nebraska

This part of the journey has been tough for me to write about, but not because of anything that happened that day.  Rather, I’ve been putting it off because of my mind now.  Specifically, I don’t remember the exact road we took to go north to Big Springs, Nebraska.  I remember so much of the trip vividly, but this is the one big gap I have.  What do I remember?

I remember waking up to a very, very chilly morning in Alamosa.  The cars all had a bit of frost coating their windows.  It wasn’t something I expected to see while it was still technically summer.  We wandered over to the restaurant at the hotel and had some breakfast.  I seem to remember not liking a lot of the breakfast offerings, but I’ve never been the biggest fan of breakfasty food.  I think I settled for cereal, or maybe it was pancakes and sausage?

After breakfast we were back on the road heading East, putting the Rockies firmly in the rear view mirror by midday.  I remember it being very sunny that day, no matter where we were.  I remember buying some postcards at a small town gas station of some various scenes in Colorado.  I don’t remember what town it was, or if it was even a town at all.  It might have been a gas station without a town.  Some of my favorite gas stations aren’t in towns, so it is entirely possible. 

With mom at the wheel and my eyes on the scenery and map, we went East, until we went North.  This is the part that is tricky.  I have no idea when we veered North.  Since I started this blog (and oddly enough, bought a new atlas) I have been racking my brain trying to remember when we turned left.  I do know my mom hated Denver with venom she usually reserved for…I don’t even know what, so I’m thinking it was the option farthest from Denver that kept us in Colorado, and on course for the Interstate.  That leaves US-385 and Colorado 59, with Colorado 63 and 71 as long-shots.  The more I look at US-385 the more I think that’s the winner, but I’m not willing to totally give up on Colorado 59.  The towns on US-385 barely ring any bells, but I think I’d remember some of the names on Colorado 59.  Either way, we headed North most of the afternoon, and finally we reached the Interstate.  My mom doesn’t like Interstates very much, and she was in no mood to stay on one that night.  I really wanted to spend the night in North Platte, but that would have been a few hours away.  Instead, she saw a Best Western in Big Springs, Nebraska and that was that.  We pulled off the Interstate and soon we were eating at the hotel’s nearby eatery, which was a fine slinger of trucker-inspired cuisine.  They also had a Tron video game, which I did alright on, considering I had no idea what I was doing.  By the end of the night I was watching the rebroadcast of the finale of the first “V” miniseries and my mom was just resting and mentally preparing for the last leg of the journey back to Veblen. 

Looking back (or trying) lights up a few parallels in my own life today.  My wife and I had a semi-argument today about how much I’ve been looking for a new job.  She thought I was looking a lot, when in fact I’ve not looked all that much, or that hard.  With a baby on the way, now really isn’t the time to change locations anyway.  Even without the coming arrival of a newborn, I probably wouldn’t look too closely.  Sometimes I talk a good game about trying new things, being adventurous or whatever.  It’s rare I talk, and even rarer when I truly mean it.  I wanted to stay in North Platte that night because I remembered it, and I wanted to be someplace familiar with a breakfast I’d actually want to eat.  I didn’t know anything about Big Springs Nebraska.  Heck, I totally missed it on the way to Denver just thirty days prior to arriving.  I’ve tried to stray off the path life tries to send me on now and then, but sometimes the path is there for a reason. 

It also hits hard on just how my memory isn’t as good as everyone thinks.  I have a small reputation among my friends of having a great memory, and the fact I don’t remember the road we took on this one part of a journey taken twenty-four years ago really bothers me.  My memory isn’t really as good as everyone thinks.  Sometimes I’ll convince somebody of something, then do some research and realize I was slightly off (or totally off) on some kind of sports/entertainment/general trivia.  I’m also as guilty as anyone of occasionally embellishing a bit when spinning a yarn.  The sad thing is sometimes I don’t realize I’m embellishing until it’s pointed out, or I remember it later (for some reason).  It’s not just the road I don’t remember.  This leg of the journey really is lost in my mental archives.  I don’t remember the towns, the roads, the scenery or even anything my mom and I talked about.  Every other part of the trip has some real standout memories, but this part was just ordinary, unremarkable, and not worthy of remembering. 

Which is how I feel about my own life sometimes.  In college I wanted to take the world by storm by doing…something.  I wanted to be rich, famous, and make my last name something truly historic.  All these years later, and I’m ten years into being a radio DJ and half the time the listeners don’t even know who I am when I’m on the air.  Part of me yearns for the hunger, but part of me is satisfied in what I do have.  I have a job that is steady that I enjoy, a wife that loves me for who I am (something I couldn’t fathom just five years ago), and I have…stuff.  I seem to have a lot of stuff, and sometimes I think the stuff owns me rather than the other way around.  The problem is that the stuff is also my only lifeline to some memories.  My mind seems to be willing to let go of things that aren’t tethered to my brain by old letterhead, cards, letters, and other papers and mementos.  Without some of the stuff, those memories would float away, never to be seen again.

Just like US-385.

Denver, CO

Before I write about Denver, there’s the matter of North Platte, Nebraska.

When we left Pierre at around 6 AM, it wasn’t even light yet, but the sun starting coming up around the time we were on I-90 heading west. I remember being fascinated by the “Heartranch talking billboard”. I remember begging my brother to let me tune the radio to some frequency in the 88 FM range to hear this “talking billboard”. As an 11 year old, this was a rather cool idea. It feels weird to talk about how much I liked it then, since I’ve used similar technology (short range FM transmitter) for local “talking houses” (and to a minor extent, my iPod radio adaptor). The billboard gave us the talk through about twice before the signal faded out. I don’t remember what my brother did with the radio after that. I think it was either oldies or country music from there on. The sun went from being a problem behind us to a problem to the left of us soon enough, as we exited the interstate and headed south into Nebraska. I remember this part of the drive being a bit like the part of South Dakota I’m from. More occasional rolling hills and not as flat as I’d heard. Right about lunchtime, we hit North Platte. I thought it was a rather big city at the time, and it seemed to have plenty of signs, businesses and a very colorful set of grain elevators, along with what seemed to be a lot of train activity. We broke away from McDonalds for the day, and the new meal plan was A&W. Thinking about this drive now, my brother and mom weren’t talking much. My mom seemed a bit sad, or maybe that’s me projecting. Or, maybe it’s me filling in the gaps in my memory from what I now know about the ordeal. It’s entirely possible it isn’t in my head.

After a burger and fries and a smooth root beer, it was back to the interstate. This is the part of the drive that seemed long. Granted, it was a long part of the drive, but Nebraska promptly seemed less interesting the farther we drove through it. There were simply miles and miles of more miles and miles. The radio couldn’t even pull in a signal after a while, AM or FM. I remember this part of the trip being a lot longer than it probably was, since after reviewing maps and figuring distance it probably only took about four or five hours to get through to Colorado. I remember complaining off and on through this part of the drive about how boring it was, but my brother kept telling me it would be a lot better when we got closer to Denver.

While a lot of the detail about the North Platte to the Nebraska border is lost in my mind, I still remember getting closer to Denver. After a while, the road started getting a bit more interesting, then I saw the clouds in the west hanging. A few miles later, I saw a mountain peak jut up from them, and I believe my exact words were “wow” or something else an 11 year old seeing the Rockies for the first time would say. The closer we got, the bigger the mountain got, and the more of it I could see. The towns, the signs, and everything else just melted away and I just sat there totally silent, watching these massive rocks rising get closer and closer. The mountains weren’t the only thing I would soon marvel at. Denver was instantly the biggest town I’d ever been in by a mile (the previous holder of that distinction at that age was Fargo, North Dakota). We wound our way around town and found the house we were crashing at. Once there, we took a break and soon I found myself at some Mexican restaurant. I have no idea what it was called, but I remember I wasn’t into Mexican food yet (taco day at the cafeteria in Veblen was an exception). I was happy to see my sister in law, niece and nephew again.

The good times didn’t exactly last. The house we were staying at had a natural gas stove, and that was a big red flag for my mom. I swear she can out-smell a bloodhound, and she was convinced the house’s gas line would spring a leak. She’s usually overly paranoid about that sort of thing, but this time her paranoia came in handy. The gas line actually did spring a leak. I remember being roused out of bed at 2 AM to the smell of rotten eggs and a mom in total freak out mode. My brother was in the kitchen fixing the leak in his t-shirt and underwear, and I found myself outside with my mom. I sat there as I heard her tell my brother that “the smell was too bad” and that “no one should sleep there”. He tried to convince her that the leak was fixed an it wasn’t a big deal, but she’d had enough. She called a cab to pick us up and take us to a hotel. Any hotel would have done. Our cabbie was a rather funny but mildly creepy guy who indulged my mom in her rants about the dangers of natural gas while taking the sharpest turns possible. Soon we were at a Motel 6 or a Super 8. I’m pretty sure there was a number involved. I was shortly back asleep and wondering what weird adventures waited ahead, and if I’d see my new home by the end of the next night.

There and back

So, while the wife and I were cleaning the hall upstairs, I found an old atlas. That was handy, because I keep forgetting the Nebraska town we spent the night in on the way back. So, I thought I’d post the stops on the way.

To New Mexico:

Veblen, SD to Pierre, SD

Pierre, SD to Denver, CO

Denver CO to Farmington, NM

To South Dakota:

Farmington, NM to Alamosa, CO

Alamosa CO to Big Springs, NE

Big Springs, NE to Veblen, SD.

My mom didn’t want to go through Denver again, so as a fifth grader I helped plan the trip home, and I was in charge of finding all the right roads. Thanks to Yahoo maps, I discovered my route was only 34 miles longer than my brother’s route to New Mexico. That was a neat and unexpected find, as I’d thought I added a lot more in bypassing Denver (besides me thinking my route was much more scenic in Colorado).

So, that’s what I was thinking about today. It sounds like we won’t be making the trip this year, and with a child on the way it probably won’t happen for a few years. Still, someday, someway, I’ll make this journey again. Farmington isn’t going anywhere.