Transit of Mordor

From Whitehall we barreled east on Interstate 90 across Montana today, Jeanne taking the helm for the first few hours and her daughter, who did yeoman work at the wheel, for the rest of the way, including side trips to the Little Big Horn battle site (where monuments erected in different eras variously explained that US troops were "clearing the area of hostile Indians" and that the other side were "defending the Cheyenne way of life." You pays yer wampum and you takes yer choice, sez I) and Devil's Tower, the impressive basaltic column not far from the South Dakota Border. This evening we bed down, to the accompaniment of distant flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder, in Keystone SD in what would be the shadow of Mount Rushmore were it still daylight.

A good portion of the day we spent traversing the Land of Mordor, formerly known as Wyoming until we rechristened it this morning in recognition of kindly, avuncular, nakedly sinister Dick Cheney, its favorite son. Throughout the afternoon the weather grew increasingly fraught, its baneful aspect being augmented at one point by what appeared to be clouds of dark, oily smoke rolling and roiling across the highway in front of us, black against the grey thunderheads. This proved in the event to be not smoke but thick clouds of coal dust from...an open pit mine? Impossible to tell, but the particulates lent an appropriately stygian element to an already infernal landscape.

The weather was worrisome, but it actually struck ahead of us. As we left the main route for the side trip to Devil's Tower we passed through the Mordorian hamlet of Moorcroft, which looked as though it been thrashed to within an inch of its existence (trees down; foliage and debris littering the streets) minutes earlier. The damage was impressive enough that we wondered if it hadn't been caused by a small tornado, although online investigations conducted from the car suggest that it was rather a violent, very fast-moving thunderstorm. It never laid a glove, or a hailstone, on our little expedition, and although the sky continued to glower at us intermittently throughout the remaining miles to our destination, everyone is now safely bedded down. Tomorrow: on to Omaha!

Above: At the Little Big Horn cemetery, early collateral damage in the war against junk email.