Green Tortoise Trip, Day 8
from Alan's Travel Blog

Something needs to be addressed at this stage: aboard the Green Tortoise bus, both time and space take on an elasticity that only adds to the eccentricity and surreality of the experience.  As a result, of this, finding socks, books, headlamps and other small items is near impossible at times, and relating the events back after the fact and without any written log can become confusing.  I can’t tell if I’m doing this in exactly the right order or not.

I’m pretty certain our visit to the Cuny reservation was part of day 7, but I completely forgot about it when I wrote my previous blog post about Devil’s Tower, because that felt like a different day altogether.  Tortoise Space.

To describe just how special this visit was, you have to understand the circumstances.  This isn’t land open to the public, or even to your average visitor.  This is genuine, privately-owned Native American land.  The only reason we were welcome there was because one of the original Green Tortoise buses broke down just outside the reservation, and the locals who came to the driver’s aid appreciated the values and visions of the GT travel company.  Since then, the Cuny reservation cafe has been a stop on all the GT cross-country tours.

I already described how this trip has, to some small degree, made me feel more spiritual than I would back home.  Well, nothing would compare to this.  From the sheer, desolate isolation of the plains – no pit toilets, no hills, no trees, just us and the prairie grass (and the grasshoppers the size of your fist, and Eric communing with them, leaping through the air like the madman he is) – to the giant blast-hole we made our campfire in, a testament to the 70s when the US government used Native American land for munitions testing, this couldn’t have been a more magical and powerful place to have stopped for the night.

I can’t really explain what the night held – partly, because words wouldn’t do it justice, and partly because it just wouldn’t be right to have shared it.  It’s less a case of what-happens-on-the-reservation-stays-on-the-reservation, and more a case of if-you-weren’t-there-you-wouldn’t-get-it: when the campfire is just right, the setting is just right, the moon is full … people really become themselves.

And nobody takes pictures.

Sorry.

Of course I’m being melodramatic for entertainment’s sake.  It wasn’t exactly a night of depraved communion with nature, but it did feel to me like there was more to the energy of the night on the Cuny reservation than you could attribute to the beer, or the tequila, or the holiday atmosphere.  Something very magical happened here.

And this wasn’t the end of it.

Day 8 itself took us to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota.  Again, the isolation and desperation of this area gives it a strange and bizarre beauty.  Seeing these rocks, formed and sculpted into such beautiful and complex forms by nature over time, was a breathtaking experience that words and pictures can’t quite capture.

Entering into this trip, I’d have said that it was just a bunch of rocks – and I wouldn’t have been wrong, but walking amongst them felt like walking in a movie.  It felt so surreal, so removed from my usual reality, that it was hard to believe this was the same world as the one that produced the Iced Mochas, iPhones and Wireless Internet that I was used to.