Sturgis Twenty Years Ago 

 

     I did Sturgis again this year, but it wasn’t under the best of circumstances.  My folks live in Sturgis and my Dad was sick.

       In modern parlance, what one means when they say they “did” Sturgis is that they attended the Black Hills Motorcycle Rally. Normally Sturgis is done on a motorcycle. As memories of my daughter’s desire to become a tattoo artist and in my role as her human scratch pad, the underside of my right arm, from elbow to wrist, is inked with the years that I “did” Sturgis on a Harley.  

      Sturgis, South Dakota is situated on the northern edge of the Black Hills at the foot of Bear Butte, a two-thousand foot rocky cone that is way sacred to Lakota folks and contains a secret cave high on the western slope that is, some say, the home of Crazy Horse’s bones.  It is a pretty little town, with a creek running through it, a variety of wooden house styles, plenty of broadleaf street trees, is the county seat, and is about double the size and year-round population of Cascade, Idaho.  

     My family has lived in the northern Black Hills off and on for fifty-some years.  I attended grade school in Deadwood, seven miles up Boulder Canyon from Sturgis. My Dad ran the train out of Deadwood that supplied Homestake Mine, the largest, deepest, most productive gold mine in the western hemisphere.

      I headed toward Sturgis in the Love Van, a 1993 Astro with 200,000 miles on a transmission that was yearning to join Crazy Horse. I didn’t have time to make plane reservations, and I was 1300 miles away when my Mom called, too far for a leisurely putt on the Harley, so I pointed the Love Van east on I-90 and prayed to the Gods of Detroit that I wouldn’t have to put it out of its misery somewhere around Deer Lodge.  We made it.

     In 1940, the Jackpine Gypsy Motorcycle Club built a little oval dirt flat track on the west edge of Sturgis, and advertised by word of mouth that they would hold a rally that year, with racing and hill climbs and fun for all.  250 bikers showed up that first year.

     Because it is too much like trying to count ants, nobody issued an official count on the 2004 attendance. The unofficial guesses were based on numbers of motorcycles per hour visually passing certain points on I-90 and from data provided by those little rubber hose thingamabobs that count tires and divide by two that were placed at all roads leading into Sturgis. After the exhaust had cleared, it was estimated that there were 600,000 bikers in that part of the Black Hills on any given day during the first couple of weeks of August.  It was not an unusual year.  Annual attendance has held at about that level since 1990.    

     That is a whole lotta petroleum-burning iron, a great big bunch of hungry mouths, a very large herd of t-shirt shoppers. One might think that an annual influx of half a million two-wheeling tourists would be very good for the local tax base, but (listen up, ye proponents of tourism as a replacement for the resource-based economy) the plain simple fact of the matter is that the Black Hills Motorcycle Rally has gotten too big for its rural pants, and the whole town has been hijacked in the process.

     Local folks, those who live there year-round, treat the Rally as a black leather blizzard that they can see coming on schedule every year. They provision their cupboards, close their doors, turn on their police scanners, and wait for the whole mess to pass. It is motorcycle gridlock out there.  

     They are not afraid of bikers. Oh sure, the Angels and the Bandidos and Sons of Silence and Fugarwe and other one-percenters show up in groups at the Rally, and they do have badass reputations, and they may have serious issues with each other, but these guys didn’t rattle across half of America on hardtail Harleys to harass the local folks.  

     No, in my humble opinion, the biggest threat to the rural lifestyle of the people of Sturgis, South Dakota has come from people who have too much money and are determined to amass a fortune in a couple of weeks.  

      Twenty-five years ago, when attendance was still below the 100,000 level, the business folks on Main Street would pile their inventory in the back rooms of their western boot stores and drug stores and furniture stores, then rent their spaces for two weeks to vendors selling “Try to burn this one” American flag t-shirts and black leather bikinis and used rocker arm covers and tattoos.  

      Then something changed in biker world.  It became fashionable for folks with wads of disposable income to buy 25 thousand-dollar new Harley Davidson motorcycles, toss them in ten thousand dollar trailers behind hundred thousand dollar motorhomes, and show up on Main Street in designer leathers, folks like Malcom Forbes and Jay Leno.

    That brought out the greed leeches who figured hey, why rent when you can own, and began to buy up the small business on Main Street, then the little working class houses for five thousand each that they now rent for five hundred a day during the Rally, and the empty lots that they could rent out as vendor space.

     As a consequence, all non-biker commerce in Sturgis went down the tubes in the 80’s and 90’s.  Main Street is now a consumer’s desert for 50 weeks a year.  Need a pair of pants, maybe some curtains, or a hairbrush?  Drive to Spearfish, fifteen miles down the pike. Tax revenues? All public money generated by the annual anthill is spent on support and emergency services. Net profits leave town with the absentee landlords and the vendors.

     I spent most of Sturgis, 2004, between Fort Meade hospital and my parents’ apartment, but I did sit beside Main Street on a bench provided by the Riders for the Son Christian Motorcyclists and watch the madness for a couple of hours. It was unremarkable in its uniformity. Too many junior account executives on too many new motorcycles trying too hard to be badass for a day. I wanted to run out into traffic and tell the insurance salesman from Des Moines that if he really wants to express his individuality and be totally radical, he should ditch the brand new fringed leathers, the chaps, the vest, the square-toed boots, the snotrag tied around his head, and ride the new Road King down Main Street Sturgis in the coat and tie that he wears every other day of the year.  

     OK, I’ll stop raving.  One last story. On Thursday, the 12^th of August, a couple from Wisconsin were riding their motorcycle past the city park right downtown in Sturgis, South Dakota, in the midst of hundreds and hundreds of other motorcycles just like theirs when they hit, and killed, without any real injury to themselves, a two-year old cougar, mountain lion, Felix concolor, that had been radio tagged by the South Dakota Department of Fish and Game.  Fish and Game reported that the animal might have been disoriented by the extreme activity.  I figure it was suicide.