Whiteclay part 6

The rest of the drive was eternal. There was the Osborne Expressway through the west end of Grand Island, with its strip malls and box stores, painted to look like they were in Arizona for some reason. The "mall" in North Platte has the same bullshit adobe look, must be some sort of marketing dogma.

The turn onto Highway 2, which covers the majority of the distance from Lincoln to the ridge. Cairo, the town of Egyptian street-names thought up by someone who clearly didn't know much about Egypt. The main intersection is Highway 2 and "Thebe" street.

You might have heard about the friendliness of rural Nebraskans. This, is a God-damned lie. You might have heard of the "two-fingered wave." It's an old anecdote of travelogue writers and hack on-the road reporters . It works like this; while driving past someone going the other way on a country road, you raise the middle and index fingers of your left hand (Be sure to keep them together or else you'll accidentally give the peace sign, and make sure not to give the "New York wave" LOL) about ninety degrees counter-clockwise towards the driver passing by in the other lane, up and down, real quick. Add casual nod or faint grin as desired. That's the country wave. You can look up a diagram yourself if you feel the need to.

You might have heard that country people are so gosh-darn friendly that you have to be prepared to constantly flick your left middle and index fingers in response to their greetings. This is a black falsehood. Dan and Paul gave the two-finger to almost everyone we drove passed between Grand Island and Broken Bow. Barely a third waved back. The truckers would uniformly blow their horns at our request but this was hardly compensation. No, what we encountered in the Nebraska wilderness was not promiscuous friendliness but rather thinly veiled contempt and cold courtesy. The distant icy stares of the Rushvillians, the curt businesslike manner of the gas station clerks at Bow, Thedford, Hyannis. These people clearly didn't want us to be there. Just because we openly mocked their intellectual inferiority, they treated us like dirt.

Farmland gave way to hills, towns grew further and further apart from each other, it got dark, and we still had a long ways to go.

The magazine rack at a big green C-station in Thedford had twelve different mags dedicated to hunting and none to news.

We drove, I was at the wheel, consciously darting my eyes about to keep from slipping into the oblivion of the highway. Why was I out so late last night? The sour-bloodedness of hangover was gone but I was still lethargic. And it was up to me to drive another a hundred and fifty miles with nothing but three small villages to break the monotony. The Sandhills are beautiful during the day. At night they are the most anti-human excuse for a landscape one could possibly imagine.

"There is only the highway, and that's all there's ever going to be. You people have been dead for quite some time I'm afraid. You had better get used to each other's company."

What do the nights here do to the people? The ones who live in the villages, or on the ranches, surrounded by black. The winter nights, the blizzards, stuck for days with only your immediate family for company. (Oh fuck no) Just you and the same handful of people you'll see every day while you live and die here, surrounded by the nihilism blanket of night.

Nihilism,nihilism,nihilMcNihlynihilism. It's only going to keep coming up. Get used to it.

At Hyannis I bought some manner of liquid stimulant that I had never seen or heard of before. It was in a pill-style bottle, and I thought that's exactly what it was. But what it was was about two ounces of some Red Bull like-substance. The town had a motel/bar (A saloon!) that was closed at nine P.M. Surely this was an aberration. Surely there was no other place in the continental U.S. that was so out of time.

The formula worked. I was wide awake now and able to drive the final hundred miles. The trees and shadows shimmied a bit like they will when one is artificially stimulated, not nearly as much as when one is on coke, but the effect was there.

In Gordon we ate shrink-wrapped sandwiches and it was a fucking revelation. If you, dear reader, are ever reduced to getting your meals from a gas station (and don't assume you won't be) don't be shy about hording the condiments. Mustard, mayonnaise, salsa. all plastic wrapped in air-tight packages, safer than your own refrigerator. Gas station condiments are free for a reason, you know. They're the difference between a welfare meal and a real meal. Feel free to slip yourself a few mustard sacks even if you're not buying any food. I won't tell if you won't. Long live the revolution.

After that it was back out into the night ant towards our actual destination. Rushville, the right turn at the edge of Rushville pointing towards Pine Ridge S.D., Nebraska 87, the most dangerous road in America. the odd church in the middle of the blanket, the construction zone left abandoned for the night, and we were there.

From five miles away, Whiteclay looks like a single fluorescent light beneath the scattered yellow ones of Pine Ridge. At the south end of the hamlet stands a Lakota-themed Christian mission. There were no services going on that day or the next day or the day after that. On this first trip we saw two glum, dead silent gentlemen drinking Hurricane on the porch, same thing we saw there the next day and the day after that.

Whiteclay grocery, which to their credit really is a grocery store. They sell more liquor than food of course, but so does Russ's Market in Lincoln. Arrowhead Inn, which, much to my personal chagrin is not an inn but just another dram shop. I have no idea why they call themselves an inn. People know how the money is made in Whiteclay. Nobody's going to think any more of you if you call your cirrhosis factory an inn.

Still, the name fooled Travelocity, which told me that the place was a hotel, so I was fooled too. I had told my companions that we would be spending the night here. We all had sweet visions of what kind of place this was, the screams in the night, the fifty year-old hookers walking on one broken leg. It was humiliating, letting the homies down like that.

State-Line liquor. Pure, honest, a straight line and a goal. This is where we would go, this is where we would interact with the,... residents. Here is where we would purchase, the Hurricane.

In the gravel parking lot, we were accosted by a Native (our first interaction with a Lakota, and also our lamest one.) who called himself Lewis. He asked us what we doing here, getting beer we said. Where were we from? Lincoln. Did we want any weed? No, not right now, balling on a budget you know.

He didn't seem to believe us. He said he would be glad to get us some skunk if we just got in his car with him. (Don't be racist/don't be stupid) Two or three times he repeated his offer, and who could blame him?

Why the fuck else would we be there?