Note: "Shunpiking" refers to taking back roads instead of toll roads; literally, shunning the turnpike. This article was originally adapted for a shunpiking-enthusiast magazine.
____________________________________________________________________
The first time I shunpiked I had no idea what it was. All I knew was that I liked the jingle of change in my pocket rather than a toll basket, and preferred winding two-lanes freckled with shade to glaring halogen street lamps and the roar of eighteen wheelers.
A young girl, a stick shift and miles of solitary road can be a magnificent thing. Since that day, I have shunpiked solo through twenty-six of the United States, one more than my number of years. I can tell you what the mid-May sun looks like on the back of a cottony lamb in Maine. I could tell you how the fog clings to the trees at the bottom of Buffalo Canyon in the Ozarks. I have shunpiked enough to be able to say, "yes, there are steep hills in Kansas." But no experience so far could compare to a slow drive on a tawny August morning, heading west on farming service roads through South Dakota.
I had camped the night before in Palisades State Park on the outskirts of Garretson, in Minnehaha County. My small car was becoming used to main thoroughfares made of gravel and I had a healthy layer of dust to prove it. Pulling out of the park, the morning dew was just beginning to burn off the tall grass in the ditches. I headed due north on County Road 115, a farming service road that runs parallel to I-29; twenty miles of crisp, green landscape later, I turned left onto Route 34. 34 passes through the tiny stop-sign town of Colman before intersecting Route 81 in Madison. Madison is considered a large town in South Dakota because it has a McDonald's. Past Madison, 34 is the main link between the farming towns of Junius, Vilas, Fedora, Artesian and Woonsocket. It is not uncommon to pass muddy tractors meandering between fields on this road, inching along at 9 miles an hour. Just two miles past the Twin Lakes State Recreation Area, which is not near any lakes, Route 281 offers a due thoroughfare to the northern plainsland. I had initially planned to take 34 all the way to Pierre, but the scenery was so beautiful I took 281 to Route 14 to prolong the journey.
My main reason for neglecting the interstate, aside from the fact that I hate interstates, was my unfortunate timing. It was the first few days of August. For those who don't know what that means for South Dakota, it is the Sturgis Bike Rally.
I respect motorcycles and I respect the people who ride them. But 25,000 bikers descending on a patch of minuscule towns in the Black Hills for two weeks in the heat of summer is really too much. Bikes choke the pavement and clog parking lots, having contests to see whose engines is louder, smokier, faster. Belief that they own the road spills over into the gas station, the grocery store. Most come from hundreds of miles away and they opt for the turnpike - a quicker ride means more time to spend drinking at the rally. Not me. I probably would have taken Route 34 anyway, bike rally or no, but the hordes of leather-clad tar warriors definitely sealed the deal.
Back on the pristine honeycomb meadows north of the interstate, my heart quickened its pace as I crested the steep hill about six miles north on 281. I didn't know what I'd see, but it was the furthest I'd ever been from home. To some people it may have just been "The Midwest", but to me it was the height of exoticism. I held my breath and took my foot off the gas pedal, slowing down just to try to gobble up the whole view at once.
It was impossible. Miles of buttery plainsland spread out before me, shaped in golden mounds like a thousand loaves of bread rising slowly under the warmth of the summer sun. The thin wild hay blew in trademark waves across each hill, sometimes kicking up at a crazy angle like a child's stubborn cowlick. The hills rushed up to meet the sky, a shade of technicolour blue I'd never seen. A guttural sound, half-singing and half-choking, rose from me. I descended that hill with tears in my eyes, overjoyed at the sheer, unsullied beauty and saddened that I had no one to share it with. Alison Kraus' voice, sweet as sun-ripened cherries, wafted out my open windows and blew across the plains, becoming part of those amber waves of grain.
The landscape blissfully stayed the same all the way up 281, criss-crossed only by the winding Cain Creek on the edge of Beadle County, shining between the hills like a silver necklace. I hopped on Route 14 and headed west, taking note of just how many miles of open land were not staked by rusty barbed-wire fencing, as though they belonged to anyone who happened to be there. That day they belonged to me, and I shared them only with a dozen or so languid steer cattle, resting like molded chocolates against the butterscotch hills.
I sang at the top of my lungs, a cacophony aria with no recognizable words. I may as well have been the first person to set foot or tires to that part of the world. I was an adventurer. I was Sir Francis Drake. I was Merriweather Lewis. I was anyone I wanted to be on those tiny roads, surrounded by a landscape that is still more precious in my memory than some homes I've had. I never wanted to reach Pierre. I was a twenty-five year-old woman, a shunpiker, with pigtail braids and a dirty car who, for the first time, was witnessing Nature's alchemy as she turned grass to spun gold.
