Free The Road to Grace (The Walk) by Richard Paul Evans

think of all the people I had met so far on my journey, he was the most pitiable.

     
    A few hours later I came to a building with a sign that read:
    Petrified Gardens
    “Family Approved Site”
    Bring your camera!
    I didn’t have a family or a camera, but I was curious about this building in the middle of nowhere so I went inside. A bell rang as I entered, and a gaunt, middle-aged man who looked a little like Christopher Walken met me at the door. “Would you like to buy a ticket?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    “How many?”
    “It’s just me.”
    “One ticket,” he said. “That’ll be seven dollars.”
    I paid him. He handed me a ticket. Then (I’m not making this up) he said, “Just a second.” He walked back ten feet to the museum’s entrance and held out his hand. “Ticket, please.”
    I handed him back the ticket.
    “Right this way,” he said, motioning me forward.
    I walked into a long, dark room with displays of mounted rocks behind glass and chicken wire. The room was lit by ultraviolet light, causing the rocks to fluoresce. I stayed there a few minutes, then walked out of the room through a door that led to the backyard.
    The yard was scattered with petrified wood, fossils, quartz, and dinosaur bones. There was a “petrified wood pile,” also an old cabin, about the size of a utility van, with a sign that read, “Eleven people survived the winter of 1949 in this cabin.” At first I envisioned pioneers huddled in buffalo skin blankets, stranded in a blizzard. Then I realized the sign said 1949, the same year Russia got the atom bomb. This place really was remote.
    To leave I had to walk back inside the building, where there was a display of fossils, a collection of geodes, and drilled slabs of stone that were somehow used or discarded in the making of Mount Rushmore. The exit led into a gift shop, which had much of the same Mount Rushmore merchandise I’d seen at the monument, and a whole lot of polished rocks set in various accessories: cuff links, tie tacks, key chains, and earrings. I asked the man, who now stood ready as the gift shop attendant, how business was.
    “This place has been in the family for fifty-seven years,” he said.
    He hadn’t really answered my question, but I suspected that was probably all he wanted to share. I used the restroom, then said good-bye and headed back to the road.
    That afternoon, six miles past the town of Belvidere, I encountered a billboard that read, “1880 Town. Dances with Wolves movie props next mile.”
    I smiled as I read the sign. I thought back to the evening I watched the movie with Nicole. That was also the first night I heard her crying. I wondered how she was doing.
    Less than a mile or so later I crossed north under the freeway, to 1880 Town. There was a large, painted wood sign out front that read:
     
    1880 TOWN
    DAKOTA TERRITORY
    ELEVATION: 2391 FT
    POPULATION: 170 GHOSTS
    9 CATS
    3 DOGS
    3905 820 36 6 2 RABBITS
    The entrance to the town was through a fourteen-sided barn (advertised as the only one in the world). The front fence was flanked by two train cars, an authentic steam engine, and a stainless steel dining car, which, appropriately, had been converted into a diner.
    I walked inside the barn where I paid twelve dollars to a grumpy woman with blue hair.
    The building was piled to the rafters with Old West antiques and Dances with Wolves movie memorabilia—including the sod house and tent from the movie set, the Timmons Freight Wagons, and scores of pictures of Kevin Costner and Mary McDonnell, the woman who played Stands With A Fist, Costner’s love interest. I got my phone out of my pack and called Nicole. She answered on the second ring.
    “Hello?”
    “Nicole, it’s Alan.”
    Her voice was animated. “Alan! Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “It’s so good to hear your voice. Where in the world are you?”
    “South Dakota.”
    “South Dakota? Have you passed Wall Drug?”
    “You know about Wall Drug?”
    “Everyone