I loosed Minerva and watched her trot around the perimeter of the sodium glow. Periodically a semi chugged along the freeway, its running lights tiny and dim. Placards were obscured by shadows and could’ve pronounced warnings or curses, could’ve said anything in any language. Against the black backdrop it reminded me of a crypt or monument to travelers and pioneers lost down through the years. A metal building with a canted roof sat low and sleek in the center island, most of its windows dark. I parked the Chevy under one of the lamp posts that burned at either end of the lot. Snow dusted the asphalt and picnic tables of the deserted rest area. Most of the patrons entering or leaving the dining room were local people and took no notice of the photographic display…(we) walked outside under a turquoise sky…I looked back over my shoulder at the stone rigidity of the hotel and its scrolled-iron colonnade…and I wondered if cattle and railroad barons had hosted champagne dinners in the hotel dining room, or if cowboys off the Goodnight-Loving Trail had knocked back busthead whiskey in the saloon and shot holes in the ceiling with their six shooters…But I think it was all of the above, truly the West.Night descended on Interstate-90 as I crossed over into the Badlands. Another photograph showed him after the trapdoor had collapsed under his feet. The hotel was three stories, built of quarried stone, anchored in the hardpan like a fortress against the wind, …On the wall of the small lobby was a framed photograph of the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum being fitted with a noose on a freshly carpentered scaffold. We walked…to a nineteenth-century hotel named the Eklund and had dinner in a dining room paneled with hand-carved mahogany. “…(we) drove back to Texas through the northern tip of New Mexico and stopped for the night at Clayton, a short distance from the Texas state line.
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