By Tim Giago The title of this column sounds like one of those old “road movies” with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. And I suppose because of some of the adventures along the way, it would have been fodder for a Bob and Bing “road show.” But a funny thing did happen on the road to Rapid City: It was a mother of all blizzards! It all started when Professor Chuck Woodard of South Dakota State University in Brookings called and asked me to speak at the 25th anniversary of his Consider the Century lecture series that was his off spring. 25 years ago I was one of the featured speakers along with Lionel Bordeaux, the President of Sinte Gleska University at Rosebud. I could never let my old friend down so I accepted. In the meantime, back in the Black Hills, there were ominous signs that a mighty blizzard was working its way toward South Dakota. I thought, “Well, it’s only the first week of October and we never have major storms that early.” Wrong! The blizzard struck while my wife and I were in Brookings. We had intended to get there on Thursday, speak on Friday, and then head back home on Friday afternoon. The blizzard struck earlier than we thought it would. By Friday night all of the major highways, including Interstate 90, were closed. We spent an extra night in Brookings and took our son, two daughters and two granddaughters out for a very nice dinner. So the untimely delay gave us some quality time with family. Against everybody’s advice, we headed for Rapid City on Saturday morning. We kept calling 511 along the way for the latest weather updates and cursing the local radio and television stations for not keeping us abreast of the latest road closings. When we reached Chamberlain, a small community that sits right on the banks of the mighty Missouri River, we came to a halt. The latest report told us I-90 was still closed and not expected to open until Sunday afternoon. So there we were in Chamberlain. We contributed to the economy of that community by doing some shopping. We stopped at the local Alco Store and then at Al’s Oasis where my wife purchased a few items from their country store. Believe it or not she found some items of clothing in this small town that she just could not find in Rapid City. We spent the night and it was still dark out the next morning when we stopped in the hotel lobby of Lee’s Best Western and sampled the house breakfast. At the next table three young pheasant hunters were having their breakfast and praying for clear weather so they could get on with the hunt. We decided to take a chance and so about 9 a.m. on Sunday morning we took to the highway again making a beeline for Rapid City or so we thought. As we approached Murdo we noticed a line of semi-trucks numbering about 50 to a 100 all lined up on the side of the highway. We found a spot and joined them in their wait for the highway to open. One trucker said, “I wouldn’t go into Murdo if I were you because there are several hundred trucks and cars all waiting in town.” About an hour after we joined the wait a pilot car suddenly pulled in front of us and started to take down the barriers. We zipped on to Highway I-90 and headed for Wall. The road was clear and hardly a drop of snow showed until we started to approach Wall. There drifts as high as the underpasses began to show up and we again saw dozens of semis lined up along the highway. We squeaked on past the line of trucks and made it to a gas station where we filled up the car and got in line with the cars waiting for the highway to open. I told my wife I was going up front to talk to the Department of Transportation man with his yellow lights flashing on top of his pickup truck. As I was walking there I spotted a car with Sioux Falls license plates and I good-naturedly said, “Been waiting long?” The young man looked at me and said, “Not too long uncle.” Uncle? Wow, there stood my nephew Christopher who I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years. He had his wife and three sons along and they had been stranded for two days. We renewed our family ties and I gave the whole family a hug and started to walk back to my car when I spotted Rosaline Mesteth from Pine Ridge, and her son, also stranded there. As I was visiting her, the three guys we had breakfast with in Chamberlain walked up and shook hands. They said their ice chest with all of their food was stolen from their truck at the hotel in Chamberlain, but they were still ready to do some hunting. “But they missed my $50 dollar bottle of scotch,” one said. With that the gates opened and we were on the road to Rapid City. Once again the roads were clear and dry until we hit the Rapid City limits. We began to see entire trees lying in the roads and we began to fear what our neighborhood would be like. We soon found out as we tried to make it to our house. Tree branches were scattered all over our street and the people from the Black Hills Power Company were there with two trucks trying to restore power to the neighborhood. As we pulled on to our street we got high centered in the snow drifts and found ourselves stuck. Several of our kindly neighbors materialized with snow shovels in hand and dug us out so we could at least pull over and park safely. We had to wade through snow drifts knee deep in order to get into our front door, but once we got into the house we could only paraphrase Dorothy when she said, “There’s no place like home.” My wife summed it up with this observation; “We’re getting too old for this s**t!” (Tim Giago can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com) Copyright permission by Native Sun News
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