After my second rodeo, I drove nine hours east through the rest of Montana, arriving in Custer, South Dakota by way of the Little Bighorn battlegrounds. The town is named for the man who led his troops into the legendary massacre that would become known as his own last stand. We spent an afternoon roaming the Great Plains with a herd of American bison before camping under the shadow of Mount Rushmore. We continued east on a stretch of I-90 littered with highway attractions — a skeleton man walked a skeleton dinosaur in the midst of an open prairie, a giant bull’s head promoted a macabre sculpture garden and perhaps a return to Paganism. Billboards advertising free ice water besieged the hundreds of arid miles leading to Wall Drug, a 76,000-square-foot tourist trap with its own gravitational force. An 80-foot brontosaurus welcomed us to the event horizon after which we tumbled into the black hole of gift shops and fried food stands. My search for water resulted in the purchase of a tee shirt commemorating the 2021 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally: a flaming skeleton in a headdress riding his motorcycle on the back of a bald eagle serves as a tribute to one of the country’s biggest annual super-spreader event. From there the attractions only became more patriotic. We stopped at