We were finally on our way to South Dakota and took shifts on the long ride. I fell asleep in the back bed and woke to some bumps in the road. Leaving the lakes and wide fields green with knee high corn of Minnesota, we crossed the Missouri River into South Dakota. The bridge over Missouri opened up like a gateway into South Dakota and the Great Plains. Hills of green and yellow grasses rolled and stretched out to eternity beneath an enormous silver sky, with only the silhouettes of ponies and a few trees on the horizon. It felt like flying—with the bus gears disengaged we coasted down hills in all that space, the wind whipping through open windows.

We made our way toward the Badlands and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Then, boom! Worried that we lost something I looked out the back hoping not to see a rolling metal barrel or anything careening down from the roof. Nothing. We pulled over to find we had blown another tire in the rear.

We drove cautiously to the next truck stop, got directions to “Ron’s place”. Ron, we heard, had some schools buses and the rare sized tire we needed. We took the Pukwana exit and tried following Ron’s directions of a few lefts and rights with no street names. “Head east, then you’ll turn off north. Go north for 2.4 miles and turn south.” I overshot the 2.4 miles, assuming he would have mentioned if it was just a small dirt road cutting through farmland. I took the next left down a wider dirt road and found a farmer on his tractor who told us we went too far but we could drive down the tractor road to get to Ron’s.

After navigating between fields of wheat, we finally reached Ron’s and sifted through his forty or soused tires in his barn for a couple good ones. “Two of ‘em for $120.” Ron wanted to help with the headlights which had stopped working the night before. A slight man, wearing a racing cap with a ‘Budweiser’ logo on the side, Ron knew buses. He had a fleet of his own school buses parked in front of the garage.

While Ron switched the tires, Brian, Paasch and I took the bikes off the roof and headed down the road. We climbed some hay bails, scared some cows into a stampede while trying feed them grass, and failed to coax a bull to chase after us.

Ron had changed our tire, fixed our head lights and given us a spare for the roof. We cleaned up with the hose and chatted with a bit.

“We race lawnmowers in Pukwana every other Saturday. It draws quite a crowd, more than the number of people that live in Pukwana,” he said laughing. “They get fifteen of those mowers on the dirt track going 45mph and that’s something to see. My brother races. This is one of his mowers, though it ain’t working right now.”

“How long has Pukwana been doing lawn mower races,” I asked.

“Only about three years, but it is getting really big.”

After filling our water vessels we said thanks and goodbye to Ron and his mother Cheryl, two delightful people that had made our day. They wished us good luck on our journey and we set off to reach the badlands by nightfall.

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