It's no secret to anyone the winter has been grating. Overlong and intense it has a corrosive quality on the spirit. Most people have adapted to the cold but it is still unpleasant and constricting. I feel a bit forced to ground. Not as mobile because of the extremity of it. More lethargic because of its seeming endlessness.
But there are things that get me through- movies, books, Nicole, Schwa. One thought, a plan slowly taking shape, is a motorcycle ride to The Badlands. My sister is getting married Labor Day weekend and I might take the following week off. Leisurely trek through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the South Dakota flat lands. Spend a good couple days in the heat and silence. Refueling in the beautiful alien landscape I love.
"The Badlands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth." -Theodore Roosevelt
"After nightfall the face of the country seems to alter marvelously, and the clear moonlight only intensifies the change. The river gleams like running quicksilver, and the moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus...The Badlands seem to be stranger and wilder than ever, the silvery rays turning the country into a kind of grim fairyland." -Theodore Roosevelt
"The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain." -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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