The Road Headed West by Leon McCarron

Author:Leon McCarron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

A CHANGE IN SCENERY

Aside from RVs, the road to the Badlands was characterised by many enormous signs advertising the nationally famous ‘Wall Drug’. Wall Drug is little more than a glorified shopping mall which houses a pharmacy and a few other gift shops and restaurants. There is nothing particularly noticeable or impressive about it, aside from the aura that surrounds it – it is a phenomenon so wonderfully and uniquely American that it is enough to bring a smile to the face of even the most cynical critic.

Its reputation and status as a tourist attraction stems from when it first opened in 1931. The wife of the then owner, pharmacist Ted Hustead, came up with the idea of giving their small-time pharmacy’s slow trade a boost by advertising free ice water to travellers passing through. The timing was perfect as the Mount Rushmore sculptures had just been unveiled, and the small town of Wall where the Hudsteads had their store was en route. Business boomed. Since then it’s become something of a novelty and grown into the mall it is today. During the hot summer months in South Dakota, Wall Drug gives out up to twenty thousand free cups of water a day and, according to the New York Times, draws over two million visitors a year. Much of this is due to the wonderfully bizarre and excessive advertising campaign. Billboards line almost every major road in South Dakota, spilling over into neighbouring states for good measure.

Having been caught out by the Mitchell Corn Palace, I was quite happy to give Wall Drug a miss. The billboards and – the pièce de résistance – an 80-foot plastic dinosaur branded with the Wall Drug name, which we had seen by the roadside earlier that day, were enough for me. At a small diner, a rancher on his way home from the west coast told us that after Ted Hustead’s death, the governor of South Dakota described him as ‘a guy that figured out that free ice water could turn you into a phenomenal success in the middle of a semi-arid desert way out in the middle of someplace’. Put that way, that’s something to be proud of. Perhaps a classic example of the American spirit, and the ability of this country to produce and endorse the utterly bizarre in an endearing and rousing manner.

A few miles before the real hills of the Badlands we encountered a sizeable tailback, stemming from the small collection of buildings by the roadside that constituted the official entrance to the park. We freewheeled past the idling traffic, drawing looks of consternation from sweaty, frustrated drivers and hopelessly bored kids who bounced around in back seats. Most vehicles, inevitably, were RVs. Squeezing onto the furthest extreme of the hard shoulder to get past one particularly fat model, a voice from the passenger seat high above our heads called out.

‘Hey sh*theads! Who says you get to jump the queue? Wait in turn like the rest of us!’

A middle-aged and slightly balding man with a red face leaned out from the driver seat.

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