Biking Around Belle, Turtle Sundaes, and Mammatus Clouds

Mammatus Clouds Over Belle Fourche, South Dakota.  Photograph by Robert Clements

Biking around Belle Fourche reminds me of the freedom I drank in as as an eleven-year old tomboy with braids and cut-up knees, banging along on my one-speed blue bicycle.  I had no helmet, I rode anywhere by myself, and the uglification known as Spandex was but a stretch away in someone's imagination somewhere.  If anyone was to ask me what my favorite gift of all time was, I would have to say that bike.  My father wheeled it into the house as a complete surprise on my birthday and I can still recall my speechless state of wonder at its introduction into my life.

Now I ride a Schwinn crossover with about 24 speeds and I am, as I keep telling myself, in Belle Fourche, South Dakota.  (A side note:  Trying to make Betty in India, who was helping me with student loan changes, understand the spelling of Fourche versus the pronounciation [Foosh] was a trip in itself.  We worked it out, but it wasn't pretty.)  Anyway, Belle has several concrete connecting walking and biking paths known as the River Walk, so called because some of the paths parallel the Belle Fourche River.

Thursday night, I took the Schwinn out onto the streets.  Noticed the thunderheads hovering over the town and took note.  (Last blog - know your wind direction and act accordingly).  I took off anyway, on a thigh-calf pumping exercise that turned into sheer joy, ears stopped up with Randy Newman's Dixie Flyer sandwiched between Diesel's Sausalito Summer Nights and Patti Scialfa's Spanish Dancer.   I rode for about 45 minutes, and managed to avoid getting doused.  I parked the bike and checked with Bob re: the weather.  Coming our way or not?  Not sure.  I clipped a leash onto the dog's collar and stepped out, went down an alley, and watched the Christmas tree in Christmas Tree Park bend in half as a cold, possibly hail-laden wind plowed into the town.  Rua and I hurried back into the gallery, to find Bob gathering his photographic equipment with a gleam in his eye.

"Truck?  Storm?"  Yes.  Out we went, into the wind, with the dog and the camera equipment, and we drove to the top of a hill, and parked between radio towers and transformer stations, to watch the storm, which wasn't as bad as it could have been, at least where we were.  Somewhere Else was pounded, but not Right Here.   Again, that symphony of a sky, playing Night on Bald Mountain with lightning as cymbals crashing behind blackberry clouds, and occasionally snaking out to strike some unfortunate place at ground.  We sat and watched and wowed for a while, and Bob took some shots, then I suggested that perhaps ice cream might be a great addition.  The Dairy Queen was two blocks away - every place is two blocks away in Belle - and so we drove to the drive through and ordered turtle sundaes.

This always amuses us, because there is little else going on in tiny little Belle Fourche.  Tearing it up at the Dairy Queen keeps us off the streets.  Evidently, at least here in Belle, turtle sundaes come in a waffle-dish, and do not exist outside of those parameters.  (Turtle sundaes are vanilla ice cream with caramel and chocolate sauce, with pecans.)  We seem to confuse the drive-in clerk every time we order one.  "In a waffle dish?" the voice crackled.  "No, in a plastic dish", Bob said.  Pause.  "Chocolate or Hot Fudge?"  Bob looked to me as the key decision maker in our duo.  "Hot fudge," I said with a shrug.  Many of my decisions are made with a shrug.  Bob ordered hot fudge.  The sundaes were made, without the waffle dish - hopefully the corporate angst was minimal - and we drove away from the window and parked near the Dairy Queen.

Dangling directly over the truck were several groupings of Mammatus clouds.  Mammatus clouds, so called because they are shaped like breasts, are indicators that something wicked this way may be coming, probably in about a half hour or any second.  But we sat and ate our turtle sundaes and shot photos of these beauties and Bob commented on how he'd never seen them so well-developed and ponderous.  As time went on, they began to double up, looking more like Rocky Mountain oysters.  They paraded across the sky like a rowdy Mardi-Gras parade and headed for Hoover.  We finished our sundaes and drove home, pumped up with sugar and sauce and electricity, warmly alive in a Thursday night small-town summer night kind of way.

"What would have happened," Bob said later, "If we had ordered both chocolate and hot fudge?" 

The Adventure Continues...

My world this morning has narrowed to sitting on a small hill beside a twenty-foot long, five-foot wide pond down in a draw, in the middle of a grove of tall sturdy cottonwoods.  I am watching my dog chase frogs and jump for giant, prairie-grass fed grasshoppers.  Rua is an eight-year old Cairn terrier that looks like a Schnauzer, thanks to a surprising haircut.  To be fair, the groomer I called told me that she had never done a Cairn terrier, but I was desperate and dropped her off, anyway.  She looks downright odd, but she's happy and cool.  She trots along the mucky bottom of the shallow water from one bank to the other.  Her bushy tail slaps from side to side whenever something moves close by.  She has forgotten that I exist.  Sitting in this shade, listening to cicadas and birds battle it out in the tree crowns above makes me happy.  Rua and I have found a small, quiet place away from the big-sky sun that South Dakota foists upon all of its critters, two- and four-legged, in August.  And July.  And maybe September.  I don't know yet, but I will find out.  No one's talking about it.  They do talk about the upcoming winter.  They say, "Wait until winter."  I say, "I'm from Maine.  I know what winter is."  They shake their heads.  "No, you don't," they say.

I moved to this small town in western South Dakota in June.  I've been here about two months.  I moved here for love, at a stage in my life when I had put most thoughts of that away in a bureau drawer along with several wrinkled perfumed scarves I've acquired through the years.  (The purple one I bought in Chinatown, San Francisco, sometime in the 90s; the sky-blue scarf with the stars was given to me by three beloved friends who believe in me; the fuchsia scarf came from another friend who has become a sister of the heart; a peony-stamped navy-blue and pink scarf arrived tucked around a paper-thin china cup in an exquisite basket.)  All of my scarves have a story, as do all things worth keeping.  I tucked true love amongst them, and then I pulled it out when someone unexpected wrapped himself around my heart.

I lived in Maine, and so did Bob, for eighteen years.  He lived within ten miles of me, and we frequented Portland, Maine on a daily basis, but in separate parts of the city.  When we met, two things happened.  I thought, uh oh.  And I heard music.  I loved where I lived.  But Bob, a native South Dakotan and an artist, was headed back to Belle Fourche, a small town that can boast that it is the geographic center of the nation, if the coordinates for Alaska and Hawaii are included.  Belle has a sort of dusty, cattle-trodden, rakish past (the Sundance Kid once robbed a bank here).  Bob's gallery is located in Belle, and I visited it twice before deciding to join him here. Once, last summer during early July, and then again in February, when the winter must have been napping because it wasn't horrible.  Before I visited, Bob warned me that some people find western South Dakota's space and sky overwhelming, flat, even uninteresting.  I am not one of those people.  The landscape curves and dips and rises into the Black Hills, and takes in the surrounding buttes, gulches, and canyons.  The sky fills whatever space is left to fill.

Oh, that symphony of a prairie sky!  If I stand in one spot and turn 360 degrees, each part of the overhead has something different to offer the eye.  Thunderheads rear their cupcake clouds over the Black Hills, even as a Western sunset fades out in a blaze of glory.  a gentle blue sky sets north, while puffy, name-your-creature cotton balls dot the azure expanse to the south.  I've also seen black and boiling storms roiling at me with serious intent.  Weather here is not to be taken lightly.  Know your wind direction, and move accordingly.

August here is the kind of hot that hits your face when you open the oven door on a pan of cookies.  That's why I'm particularly grateful to have discovered this shadowy place with its little splash of water.  Sitting here watching Rua, who used to have a tree-sheltered backyard to lounge in, reminds me of childhood summers, when I had nothing to do but drink in perfumed fodder for my imagination.  That imagination is a powerful thing, and when it's working full tilt, I'm as fully me as Rua is chasing amphibians and bugs. 

I'm so homesick for my East and for my friends and family that I ache for them.  But I didn't come here bumping along a rutted dirt road like an anxious mail-order bride.  I came because I wanted to come.  Also, airplanes and rental cars can be had, if need be.  Right now, life is good.  I have a novel out in Germany that has been received well.  The title is Rubinrotes herz eisblaue see - Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea.  I'm in love with a fascinating man.  South Dakota is not a place I thought I would ever live, or even thought about that much, but I'm warming to its quirky weather and its good and Badlands.  As Bob says of us, "The adventure continues."