Starvation, the Presidents & a Ranger (or how I got pulled over again)

Driving to Mount Rushmore, we kept our eyes peeled for somewhere to grab a quick breakfast. I can only assume the lack of food options in Newcastle has to do with the deer’s hostile takeover of the city. I’d gotten little sleep after my hours of sickness. I clutched the mini-Gatorade bottle in my hand tightly as I drove, hoping at every turn that the next block could put food in my recovering-stomach. As we turned into the park, we agreed to find a gift shop and scour it for sustenance before seeing the mountain. The woods wrapped around the road, flashing glimpses of scenic passes and rivers. I knew it was beautiful but all I could think about was the kind of food the gift shop might carry. I dreamed of eating a Presidential candy bar or cookies in the shape of each man’s head. Maybe they’d have Roosevelt’s Trail Mix or Honest Abe’s Cheese Crackers. I would’ve paid any amount for cheese crackers at that point, honest or not.

Perhaps it was thoughts like these that led me to ignore the speed limit, which I only saw was 25 mph as I came down a hill and noticed a car with lights on top of it. As I kept driving, I saw the car pull behind us. Can a park ranger pull me over, I wondered? It was another couple minutes before we reached a line of cars waiting to pay the entrance fee and we had yet to be pulled over, despite passing many available areas to the side of the road. Yet as we chose our line of cars, the Rangers pulled directly behind us. “Is he gonna wait until we pay and then pull me over?” I asked Lindsay. She shrugged her shoulders and looked back towards them. We continued to an array of parking garages, all full of cars moving in and out. I turned into one and pulled down the narrow lane. Suddenly, lights turned on behind me. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Where am I even supposed to go to?” I turned the wheel slightly to the right, lacking the ability to actually pull over but wanting them to know I didn’t intend to start a low-speed-garage-chase. The male ranger came to the passenger side and took my license as the female ranger shined a flashlight in the backseat behind me. “Are a lot of people paying to see Mount Rushmore really attempting to smuggle drugs?” I complained to Lindsay, once they’d gone back to their car. “Give me a break. Park Rangers. Shining your flashlight in my car because I was doing 35 in your stupid woods. Is she solving a lot of big cases with her stupid flashlight?!” The longer we waited, the angrier I got. The first two times I was pulled over, I took it in stride. But this time I was sick, I was hungry and frankly, they were park rangers. We waited a long time and people began to stop and stare. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw them laughing to each other. I looked at Lindsay with rage in my eyes, “I just want you to know that if he hands me a ticket, I’m not going to be nice about it. I want to warn you that I’ll treat the ticket as my pass to tell him what I think about how he handled this. I’m going to be one of those people and I just want to give you a heads up that it’s going to happen… And I’m looking forward to it.” I started to run a cost-benefit analysis outloud, “I’d pay $100 right now to tell this guy he’s an idiot and maybe make fun of his stupid park ranger hat.” At one point, I even threatened to buy a hat in the gift shop for the sole purpose of impersonating and demeaning them. A family of four approached the ranger’s car because he was blocking them in. He came back and told us he had messed up when writing out the $80 ticket so “due to (his) stupidity,” we could go. I started the car and pulled into a parking space nearby. “It would’ve been worth $80,” I said.

After eating, we went to the viewing area and talked about how impressive the carved figures were. I set up my timer and got a picture of us in front of Mount Rushmore. Lindsay asked a woman nearby to do the same with her camera. After she’d handed it back, we thanked her and leaned in to see the photo. “Uhhhh,” Lindsay muttered confusedly as we stared at the screen. I feel safe in my assumption that this woman had also come to see the mountain with the 60 foot tall heads carved into it that we were standing directly in front of; however she’d chosen not to include it in our photograph. After we’d grasped what happened neither of us moved for a minute, in the hopes that stillness would ward off the hysterical laughter we both knew was coming but wanted to avoid while the woman was still around.

On our walk back, a familiar car drove by. “Was that them?” I asked. Lindsay confirmed that it was my nemesis, the Park Rangers. “I didn’t see any hats in the gift shop,” I continued.  Lindsay and I walked silently for a second when I turned to her and said with complete seriousness, “If I had a Park Ranger hat on right now, that would’ve gone a lot differently.”