(Friday, October 11, 2013) We found out the night before Chris and were to leave for our Black Hills vacation that the government shutdown had closed all the national parks and monuments. We would be unable to visit Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Monument, two of the large caves and several other federally managed sites. Plus, snow was predicted for Friday. We didn’t know what to do, but I wasn’t really worried about weather: it snowed in June when my family camped in Custer State Park back in the 60s.
That evening I did a meditation on the tarot. I drew the five of swords, which in my deck is called “hurricane.” The card was reversed. Reversed readings, according to the text, “show a clearing of confusion, controversy and struggle.”
In the next day’s meditation I drew the Magician. That seemed a good omen. We headed west on Wednesday.
Our first day in the Hills (Thursday, October 3) was absolutely perfect. We drove to Rushmore and were able to see the presidents from several vantage points, in spite of the park being closed. An inquisitive mountain goat and her two kids stood at the edge of the road as we came around one of the turns. We drove through Needles and Custer. Pronghorn antelope and a small herd of buffalo grazed right next to the road along the Custer Wildlife Loop. The bison were so close I could have patted their noses from the car window. Their rooted, peaceful energy connected to my heart chakra like a lightning bolt and I started to weep.
We got back to Big Sky Lodge in time to watch the local news, which was the first we heard anything about the oncoming storm. Twenty-four inches of snow and 40-mile-an-hour winds were predicted for Rapid City, beginning early the next morning. “The snow will blow horizontal,” said the local weatherman.
It was too late to leave town but we should have gone out to get groceries. The danger wasn’t registering with us at all.
The storm began with “thunder snow” that was so loud it kept Chris awake through the night. Winds howled at a steady 40 mph, with gusts to 70, for two days straight. It felt like a hurricane made of snow.
Friday we holed up in our room, cracked open our books, and tried to ignore the sights and sounds of the storm. I had brought Leonora Carrington’s surrealist tale called “The Hearing Trumpet,” about an expatriate Englishwoman living in Mexico. Her family puts her in a home for the aged and demented, run by a doctor modeled roughly on George Gurdjieff. The style of the book is similar to Magical Realism, in the spirit of Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but with tongue firmly in cheek.
Fortunately we only lost power for a couple of hours, on Friday and Saturday both. At the peak of the storm 25,000 of Rapid City’s 70,000 residents were without electricity. The hospital was closed, the city and university were closed, and the police were ticketing anyone caught on the roads. Interstate 90 from western Wyoming to Wall, South Dakota was shut down.
Saturday morning arrived and we were very hungry. An older gentleman from Santa Fe and I both grabbed shovels that the motel manager had lined up along the sidewalk before the snow began. We cleared a path to the kitchen. The owner of Big Sky Lodge had not yet been able to make it to the office, even though he lived just down the road. Free continental breakfasts were included in the room fee, so I filled my pockets with bagels, peanut butter, muffins and apples.
We read our books and watched cable TV. All the buzz on The Weather Channel was about Tropical Storm Karen, heading for New Orleans. They weren’t that interested in Winter Storm Atlas, or the tornadoes ripping apart Iowa and Nebraska. The local radar on channel KOTA showed what they called a “snow comet,” a hook-shaped cloud formation that swirled in a stationary pattern above the Hills, dropping 23 inches of snow on Rapid City and 48 inches on Lead. Turning the Black Hills into the White Hills.
By Saturday afternoon the storm started to die down. I went outside and shoveled a path to the car. It was heart-attack snow, heavier than anything I’d ever lifted. And it was blue. No plow appeared in our parking lot, so we grabbed more bagels and peanut butter from the kitchen and returned to our books.
By this point I was nearly finished reading “The Hearing Trumpet.” A prescient plot twist seemed to me to be a reflection of the Magician card I had drawn the morning we began our journey: in Carrington’s book, an atomic war causes a pole shift and a nuclear winter descends upon the earth. Mexico slides to the far northern hemisphere, to Lapland’s old geographical coordinates. The story felt eerily close to the manifestation of global warming outside my window.
By Sunday afternoon the temperature hit 50 and an old snowplow cleared the motel lot. Interstate 90 reopened at 3 pm. Side streets were still not plowed and many gas stations were out of gas, but we managed to fill our tank and head out of town.
Thanks for the the whole story. What an nature adventure.