Terror at Twin Lakes!

     Let's revisit something from earlier in the trip that has stuck with me. I've had my share of discomfort so far, and then some. Trying to go to sleep, and noticing a bump of a root underneath you that mysteriously popped up after you inspected the ground for a flat place to sleep. Waking up and finding the temperature, which was in the glorious upper seventies the day before, has now dropped to the twenties and the tent is covered in ice. None of this compares with the sense of foreboding and sheer doom I felt upon arriving at a place that's name still gives me the shakes when I hear or see it: Twin Lakes State Recreation Area.

Even the internets don't like this place.

     This eerie locale is not too far from the intersection of 395th Ave. and 236th St. I noticed this trend of street naming once we reached Ohio. You'll be driving through fields and fields of corn, or miles of empty grassland, and a small, pitted, dirt road will pass by. You glance at the name out of curiosity, and you'll do a double-take because it'll be something like, "849th St." Now you haven't seen shit in hours, and this road seems to go nowhere, and you're left wondering how the hell the number got up that high. Perhaps you nodded off briefly, and missed Streets 1 through 848?

This doesn't really apply to the blog, I just liked it.

      Outside of the oddly-numbered streets, the drive to Twin Lakes is...unpleasant. It seems the area used to be mostly cornfields, but at some point, they all became flooded. The whole area is a stinky, muddy marshland. And this is not something that happened recently either. Water fowl have moved into the area, and skim over the low, brown water. At one point we passed an old billboard sinking into the mud, and the old-school smiley face on it that once shone out with beaming yellow was now faded, and stained with years and years of brown-black high water marks. It was, to say the least, an ironic visage.

     After this journey through the wastelands, you finally come to Twin Lakes. They use the term "lake" extremely liberally, it seems, in South Dakota. I would have called it "Twin Piss Puddles State Recreation Area," but hey, I'm a stickler for accurate names. The grass was actually nicely manicured, and the half dozen or so campsites that faced the "shore" looked perfectly fine. Also, it's free to camp at, which was a first. Things were looking OK for us and Twin Lakes. That lasted for about 6 seconds, and then the bugs struck. A swarm of biting blackflies descended on us, and we scrambled back to the safety of the car. Which turned out not to be so safe, since (and we counted them as we killed them), 5 of the fuckers flew into the car in the time it took us to open the doors and get in.

Imagine Twin Lakes as this, but smaller, and marshier.

     As we sat in the car, scratching our fresh bites, I noticed a little community across the lake. Seeing as how the lake was only about 50 yards across, I got a pretty good view. Ramshackle houses and dingy trailers lined the opposite shore, about 10 in all. There were no cars, and while not boarded up or anything, it appeared to be a ghost town. I believe they were actually summer homes for people who wanted to boat on the lake. Which I imagine would be entirely possible, supposing your boat was made of folded newspaper and wax. Staring at those houses, though, I experienced something I don't think I've ever felt before. That would be the doom and foreboding I mentioned earlier.

     In the pit of my stomach, something started tingling, and not in a good, getting-a-boner kind of way. Something inside my head that wasn't a voice, exactly, but more like a repeating alarm clock going off, kept saying, "GO. GO. GO. GET OUT. GO." Panic overwhelmed me, and I'm not entirely sure why. I've seen shitty houses and creepy marshlands before, all the elements that made up my view. We've now camped almost 20 nights out here in the hinterlands, many of those places isolated and deep in the woods. But at none of them did I get the incredibly bad vibe that I did at Twin Lakes. I don't know if I thought some deeply inbred, nocturnal hicks were going to come out of the crawlspaces of those dilapidated houses once the sun set, paddle across the lake, and barbecue us...or maybe I would wake up to a mud-stained, mutated heron pecking out my eyeballs and swallowing them like grapes. Whatever it was I envisioned, it prompted me to get the hell out of there, leaving a rooster tail of dust behind my car as it hurtled away from that dark, evil place.