Serve windy with vintage Winehouse.

There's a long line at the rental at O'Hare. The guy in front of me does some mental calculation out loud and figures we'll be at the desk within 34 minutes. He's got big bulging eyes and an Eddie Murphy grin, manages to throw in an exclamation mark every few words. It feels good to be next to American optimism at its best.
-You're from Rome!? I've never been to Europe..! You come to visit Chicago?
-No, we're heading for Wisconsin, I answer, leaving out the final destination. We'll catch Chicago on the way back.
-Oh! Going fishing in Wisconsin! Great fishing up there!
He starts knocking off lakes and fish species. It never occurred to me to fly from Rome to go fishing in Wisconsin over Memorial Day Weekend. No wonder there's a line. It's going to be a crawl to Wisconsin on the toll way.
-You'll find less traffic after Madison, he reassures me.
For a while he listens earnestly to a gentleman who asserts it's impossible to translate Yiddish into English. After taking note of a few Jewish authors, he gets back to me.
-I want to tell you the most beautiful place on earth..! You've got to go..! I've been everywhere..! No, I've travelled. Haven't been to Europe- so you got me there... But I've been to the Everglades..! Yosemite..! Martha's Vineyard..! He closes in with an intense friendly bulging eye gaze, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda teeth shimmering white. -Charlevoix, he whispers intensely. Michigan. Michigan is the most beautiful state in the Union..! I mean the sunsets..! The fish..! There's no place like it on earth..! You gotta go..! Can't miss it..! Serious!
I make a mental note that I've got to see Charlevoix before I die.
34 minutes and I'm at the desk (Told ya!) and in no time we're crawling north in bumper to bumper traffic. We hit La Crosse at 11 PM, sleep off some jet lag and head West.

Now I don't want to knock Interstate 90. I've taken it often enough to know what to expect. But if you've taken a detour through Rockford, Illinois at 5 PM on Memorial Day weekend it's hard to bump off the mood that sets in. I 90 is like cruise control, hang your paw on the wheel and park your brain in dreamwake drive. There are a few curves after crossing the Mississippi into Minnesota, and then another at Chamberlain, SD over the Missouri some 435 miles down the road.

Daughter is pissed because she's figured her CD's have been censured.  The Taurus doesn't have a plug for her iPod, so we load up on CD's in LaCrosse.
-How in the hell can you  blurp out a word without missing a beat? She complains. She's listening to Winehouse to see if  any "fucks" are missing. It never occurred to us that large chains such as Wal-Mart only carry sanitized, wholesome all-American entertainment without warning their clients that they are buying censored CD's. I promise we'll find adult CD's up in Casper. Something with PG all over it so you know it's unexpurgated, like sold under the counter in a back alley by a greasy Jimmy with gardeners' delight blackheads constellating his sternum. Even if they're gentrified in Casper they can't be like those breadbasket Taliban down in the lowlands. Wal-Mart is definitely off our list even if they sell 501's at $7 a pair.

We pull into Mitchell around 10 PM, sort of rest over and pick up the Corn Palace on the way out. There's no action in town except at Subway's. There's the classic American Graffiti patrol car inching around with its lights off. Teenagers hunched down in dad's old car. I don't know what the hell they use out here to get high but fat ass is the least common denominator. Cops rotate out of their cars, a hand on the door for support and a paper thin moustache for character. Rebel kids waddle around with monotonous stagnation in their voices and eyes. You can feel their existential plight by the way they jerk open the soft drinks' cooler door.  Daughter and I divide a 12 inch rye bun with something in it. A glass of water without the damned ice, please.

Then we head back to the junction Budget 8 where the air conditioner homogenizes the smell of wallpaper and carpet, permeated with a decade of sweaty socks enough to make your skin sticky. We manage to hit all the red lights, idling all by ourselves. Sort of helps give the stoplights a sense of direction in life. Inspector Callaghan could be lurking behind some billboard, seat springs shot under his ass.

Gone are the days when you could slide into a skid around the obelisk in St. Peter's Square at three in the morning. Stumble out of the car with a bottle of good red and weave around trying to find the centers of Bernini's colonnades, all the while indulging in some serious consensual groping.

We've been on the franchise circuit all along. That's I 90 for you. I'm seriously in the mood for a local diner, a joint run by Ernie, Marion, Edna or Jeff, or just a damned coffee shop, but there's no luck on a Sunday morning in Mitchell. The World's Best Coffehouse is closed. I look forlornly at the overturned chairs on the tables. I need to sit on a stool and watch the action on the hot plate. Bacon and eggs, easy over. Grease. Pour me another coffee. The America I knew. None of that Starbucks shit. I'm too damned set in my ways to walk into a plush franchised Seattle friendliness outfit in my workaday trousers and say, -Ya, I'd like a Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino and a pecan bearclaw. What's that? Tall. No, no whipped cream. That'll be fine. You to! Have a nice day.
Sit on a couch with a mini-cube lounge table a yard out of reach. Feel I'm doing something for the world by stirring eco-solidarity sugar into whatever all those words meant.
-You aren't going to get sour milk and buckwheat pancakes with chokecherry jam at Starbucks, I grumble as I burn my palette with something called a "Mocha Espresso" which isn't even remotely small enough for my taste. "Can you imagine, you come home after wiping out Falluja and ask for a Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino? Fucking baby-talk."

So it's I 90 again. Lowland prairies with a clutter of high poles topped with franchise logos at every junction. I'm sorely tempted to take a left for Rosebud at Murdo but I know getting off I 90 at Wall is worth the wait. You drive down into the Badlands with the Pine Ridge Reservation as a backdrop.

Whenever I'm in this neck of the world, which is not often, I pay my respects at Wounded Knee. Must have been thirty years ago the roads were full of pot holes and deep parallel cuts. Never figured it out if it was a gang war or some sort of statement. I figured the reservation Oglala would drive cars without tires, it appeared to me, only to further destroy the patchwork tarmac. Actually they'd drive with slashed tires, chunks of tire whacking the chassis and the road in some berserk drum rift until it all flew off. Half the cars in Kyle were without tires, not that there were that many. Wounded Knee was nothing more than a boarded up mission and a cemetery. We would walk up the gullies where Indians fled, pursued and gunned down miles from the camp.

At the junction of 18 and 27 there's the hollow frame of another landmark. I can't recall what happened there but it reminds me of one I'd like to see again, supposedly the point where Crazy Horse's remains were last seen, consigned to his father. But no, I think it's further down towards Rosebud. I never had much of an opinion on where his body was taken. Some had it up here near Wounded Knee Creek, others on a cliff near Manderson. Still others place it down on Beaver Creek near Chadron- one of the choices Crazy Horse wanted for his agency. As far as distance goes, the latter made more sense. But that wasn't what mattered. It was stretching your eyes over the landscape and remembering what had happened.

It was not a good day to die for Crazy Horse. Undefeated in battle he was driven to negotiate by a scorched earth policy, the indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo and the gradual defection of other Indian bands. The summer of 1877 holds the intrigue of a Shakespearian tragedy. There is the interpreter Grouard who maliciously misrepresents Crazy Horse's rare words to Three Stars. There are the friendlies, the loafers, the ambitious ones who seek to further their aims by fabricating false charges against Crazy Horse. There is the attitude of Crazy Horse, a man known since childhood as the Strange One, who sees the world through his nation's traditions and his solemn vows, incapable of dissimulation and trickery outside the battlefield, silent.

It was the bad voices and the confirmation bias borne of Crazy Horse's strange behaviour, that drove the Washington bureaucracy to issue an arrest warrant.

A new order is always based on a crime, all the more so if the crime is shameful. The killing of Crazy Horse in a garrison skirmish by hapless actors may have been executed with a white man's bayonet, but the blade had been sharpened by the pettiness and deceit, even the lack of vision, of many of his people. His killing would be the founding crime of a new order to which he would have remained estranged had he lived.

[CON'T]