This is an excerpt from my second novel (unpublished) Somewhere Between Love & Confusion. The main characters of the story, Max and Kate, are newlyweds on a cross-country journey after Max loses his high-paying dot.com job. Max is lost and in desperate search for self. Kate is just in a desperate search for Max. I thought it was funny book. Publishers thought that women readers don't care about the guys point of view. So the book has never been read by anybody other than my wife, mother and a slew of people who rejected it. However, I'm publishing this excerpt because a Twitter post yesterday reminded me about Wall Drug in South Dakota and part of this chapter takes place in that store. Hope you enjoy!
“What’s got you so chipper?” I asked.
Excerpt from Somewhere Between Love & Confusion
By: Daniel James Palmer
“What’s got you so chipper?” I asked.
“It’s shopping day!” Kate beamed. “We’re going to Wall Drug.”
I panicked at the thought.
“What about our hike?” I pleaded.
“We had a deal remember?” Kate said. “We’d go to Wall Drug, stock up on some provisions for camping, and then we’ll head over to the Badlands right after. Besides, I need my South Dakota floaty pen. Maybe we can get our joke at Wall Drug as well.”
We quickly packed up our room, and, as had become our routine, we struggled to fit everything into our car.
“We’re going to have to eat whatever provisions we buy in order to fit them in here,” I mused. Kate didn’t find me amusing.
Our over abundance of stuff had become an unyielding, powerful obsession for Kate ever since Ohio. Each morning when we went to pack the car, she was faced with the unpleasant reminder of our most egregious planning error. That said, when we pulled into the town center of Wall, South Dakota, the ever-observant Kate spied a small wooden sign for the Wall Post Office, she banged a hard left into an open space right out in front.
“Kate what are we doing here?” I asked.
“Shipping,” she said with a grin.
She climbed out of the car and opened the back. Kate started pulling out every bag we brought. She laid them out in neat rows on the street by the open hatchback. She unzipped each bag and, to my horror, she started to pull out all of our clothes, arranging them into little piles.
“Kate, what are you doing now?”
“You can’t decide what to keep and what to ship back if you don’t know what you have,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“So let’s figure out what you want to keep and what you want to ship home. I’ll make a pile of your stuff and a pile of my stuff. Then we’ll know how to split everything up.”
Just as she said that, an elderly couple strolled passed and looked at our belongings strewn about the road. They looked at me, next at Kate, and then back at all our stuff divided into neat little piles on the street and sidewalk. They gave me an ominously disapproving stare.
“They’re so young,” I overheard the woman say to her husband.
“Stick it out kids,” the man said. “It’s worth it in the end.”
“What is?” I asked him.
“Marriage,” he replied as his wife shooed him along with a forcible nudge.
“Katie, they think we’re getting a divorce!” I said with alarm. “It’s not what you think, sir!” I shouted back to them. They continued walking away, never once looking back. “We’re not getting a divorce, we’re just lousy packers!” I yelled again.
Other people out on the town that morning stared as well, and one guy actually stepped over my socks and underwear on his way into the post office.
“Katie, people think we’re splitting up, this is really embarrassing,” I said.
“Since when do you care what other people think?” Kate said mockingly. She pulled the Night Bag out of the back seat and dumped its contents onto the street, tapping me with a playful punch in the arm. She was like a woman freed from bondage. Her newfound lightness gave her a giddy sense of relief that was downright playful.
“Are you selling that?” asked a young man in a Grateful Dead t-shirt, pointing to my video camera.
“This isn’t a yard sale!” I snapped. I picked up my camera and threw it into the back of the car. By the time we finished sorting and sifting through all our stuff, we had downsized four sweaters, two extra pairs pajamas, three pairs of pants, all our books, (except for Road Trip USA), as well as some “just in case” rain gear. Everything fit neatly into two boxes which I carried into the post office. The woman working behind the counter carefully weighed the contents of my packages and charged me $23.64 for the shipping. Kate had called New York and made arrangements for a neighbor to receive our packages.
“I’m sorry,” said postal worker as she rang up the charges.
“For what?” I asked.
“I mean about you and your wife, splitting up and all.”
I let out a deep sigh and thanked her for her well wishes. I felt people’s stares as I collected my change and heard them murmuring softly amongst themselves as I left. When I got outside I grabbed Kate and kissed her passionately on the street. She was taken aback at first, but quickly locked her lips against mine and fell securely into my embrace.
“Let’s see what they have to say about that,” I said with pride.
Kate laughed and we walked off together to Wall Drug for some shopping. It was almost noon. For a minute I had completely forgotten about my hike.
With all the signs and advertisements that dotted the highway along I-90, each touting the marvels of Wall Drug, I expected the shopping experience to be as awe inspiring as the Taj Mahal. To my dismay, Wall Drug turned out to be (surprise, surprise), a giant tourist trap. I was a helpless fly caught in its paper. Wall Drug was an endless mall of stores all selling the same sort of stuff: t-shirts, stickers, souvenir pennies, lighters, refrigerator magnets of different states, and yes, probably a thousand floaty pens. There were other more kitschy attractions there as well. My favorite was a somewhat realistic looking and terrifyingly noisy Tyrannosaurus Rex, activated with the simple deposit of a few quarters. I was amazed at the overall hustle and bustle of the shopping complex, but it took only a minute or so for me to realize that the average age of a Wall Drug shopper on a Monday afternoon was deceased.
“Kate, we are the youngest people here by about a hundred years,” I said. I could not disguise my exasperation as Kate tried on cowboy hats.
“Just relax,” she said. “Do you like this one?”
“I’m relaxed,” I replied defensively. “I’m just wondering when we’re going to do something that’s physically challenging enough so I don’t have to feel like I’m hanging out at a casting call for Cocoon III.”
“Ok, let’s just grab some lunch then we’ll go over to the market, stock up on supplies and then we’ll go to the Badlands for the hike. Besides, I’ve already bought my floaty pen.”
She held her new pen up and proudly inverted it so I could watch a beefy bison float its way across a plastic prairie. I had a dreadful premonition that it was going to be the only wild animal I would see this entire trip.
I picked up a pamphlet detailing the history of Wall Drug as we wandered into the cafeteria area for lunch. Kate ordered a veggie burger and I got a chicken sandwich, which I drowned in Miracle Whip. For me, Miracle Whip was a long lost condiment from my youth. Perhaps I got a little over enthusiastic. Kate ate peacefully, still basking in the glow of an apparent victory over our on-going luggage dilemma, while I read the history of the Wall Drug Store.
According to the pamphlet, Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the only drug store in Wall, South Dakota in 1931. He started out with just $3,000 from his father’s savings and the idea of running his own business. Ted, a recent graduate from Pharmacy School, went off in search of a pharmacy to buy, in the hopes that he could start a sustainable family business. A deeply religious man, Ted wanted his store to be in a small town and near a church, so he and his family could attend Mass everyday. They bought the Wall Drug store, a dump of a store in a tiny little town. Their families were far from supportive of the decision.
“It’s in the middle of nowhere,” they warned.
Ted and Dorothy were convinced that Wall Drug held the key to their future and they gritted it out, saving every penny they could, supporting each other with love and words of encouragement along the way, and both agreed that the risk of a life in poverty was worth taking if it meant pursuing their dream. Business was terrible. The depression had wiped most farmers clean of their savings. They lived in the back of the store—Ted, Dorothy and their little son Billy, all of them crammed into a tiny one room apartment without much facility for cooking.
The years passed and business had not improved. Dorothy remained optimistic about the future, noting that Mount Rushmore would be opening soon, sure to bring with it a flood of tourists to the area.
She was right, in a way. Traffic had picked up, but nobody was stopping at Wall. Then one evening Dorothy set off for bed only to return to the store a few hours later. She had had a restless sleep on account of all the cars passing outside her window driving along route 16A. It was then Dorothy got a brilliant idea and excitedly padded downstairs to tell Ted. It was the traffic that had inspired her. She thought about all the people driving by and how nobody was stopping at Wall. She wondered what it would take to “lure” them to Wall Drug. To lure a traveler, you needed something that a hot and tired traveler would want—ice water. To make the offer even more tempting, you could tease them with billboard signs spaced out along the highway, building their anticipation. As the jalopies drove past, dust filled and overheated, the motorists would read: "Get a soda . . . Get a root beer . . . turn next corner . . . Just as near . . . To Highway 16 & 14. . . Free Ice Water. . . Wall Drug."
Since Kate and I were here on account of those signs, (or newer versions of them), it was safe to assume that Dorothy’s idea worked splendidly. The fact that Wall Drug was the size of a New York City block was another giveaway that her marketing plan turned out to be a phenomenal success. I read the entire pamphlet to Kate who seemed unimpressed.
“I wish we could come up with an idea like Ted and Dorothy,” I said, using their names as if they were long time friends of ours. “He had only $3,000 dollars and look at what they did. I had millions in a dotcom and we went totally bust.”
“Well, maybe somebody should have thought about using road signs to get people to come to your Web site,” Kate said with a smile.
“Kate, that isn’t funny. I mean it. Let’s brainstorm ideas for businesses we can buy or start from scratch and turn into a huge, mega-successful operation like this one. Ready?”
“Kate, that isn’t funny. I mean it. Let’s brainstorm ideas for businesses we can buy or start from scratch and turn into a huge, mega-successful operation like this one. Ready?”
“Brainstorm when? Now? No! I want to eat my veggie burger in peace if you don’t mind?”
“Ok, after?”
“How about we just go hiking? My goodness, you can’t even read a pamphlet without sending yourself into a tizzy.”
“I’m just saying we could be like Dorothy and Ted.”
“How about for today, just for one day, we’ll be like Max and Kate going on a hike, ok?”
I relented, took a big bite of my battered chicken sandwich bathed in Miracle Whip and started silently brainstorming ideas for businesses we could buy. By the time we finished eating, I had only one idea on my list—a drug store.
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