Bookended

A wintry mix in Chicago this morning...absolutely wonderful.

What are the chances???

I drive an hour to the airport from home, fly about four and a half hours total, drive—all told—about 350 miles to a place that is quite literally an easy hour away from anywhere, to walk in on two people having a conversation about the Target (Tar-ZHAY) and BestBuy in Pentagon City. Yep, no kidding.

When you grow up in the Washington area, it is axiomatic that 'no one is from here' and it is a region made up of transients. When you are asked where you are from, you generally say "DC" instead of Arlington or Falls Church or Bethesda or PG or whatever. But the corollary is that everywhere you go, you find people who have either lived in the DC area or have family in the area.

Mind-blowing way to start a conversation, that's fer sher.

Postscript: I almost forgot...a fan of the Frost Diner, as well. 

Addenda

• The other High School's team? The Braves.
• The dogs? Yep.
• While the deer you see are a different variety than the White-tailed deer of the east, and the birds are distinctly different, dead skunks appear to be universal.
• This is just funny:

"Will you be needing any cash back today, Mr. Orwell?"

• Note to tavernkeepers: Washing the filth off the sidewalk in front of your establishment by heaving a bucket of soapy water at it may not be the most effective strategy in, say, February, in say, South Dakota. It simply memorializes the filth like so many flies in frothy amber until the spring thaw.
• 'Ranch' ≠ 'Farm'
• The view from my motel room: 

Yep. That is a dumptruck. Right there.

Photos...of stuff

Those tracks there? The Oregon Trail. 

Decisions, decisions...oh, wait...*

Range horses, Lyman County

Lower Brule, foreground; Fort Thompson beyond the river.

Hand-painted sign on U.S. 14 west of Pierre

BIA Highway 5, Lower Brule, looking across the Missouri River/Lake Oahe towards Fort Thompson.

Approaching Eagle Butte on S.R 63

The scariest thing about these monstrous hay trucks is seeing all the ejected hay bales along the roadside. A round bale  can weight between 1,000 and 1,400 lbs, so at 65 mph, that's gonna hurt. 

Bridge across the Missouri River/Lake Oahe above Pierre. Interestingly, the body of water in all these pictures is always the Missouri/Lake Oahe. It's a big dammed river.

*Sturgis, South Dakota is the site of a world-famous, legendary gathering of bikers every August for a week of loud noise, drunken debauchery, showing off to other like-minded individuals and generally displaying all those behaviors that make people hate motorcyclists, and with good reason. It is an opportunity for accountants, dentists and middle-management to play in a 'Wild-Ones' themed playground. It is like Mardi Gras without the religious overtones, the haj with pork and beer. Some bikers wouldn't miss it, many motorcyclists wouldn't be caught dead within five hundred miles of it. Your correspondent is firmly in the latter category. Also, the distinction between 'bikers' and 'motorcyclists' is not to be taken lightly. 

Don't worry—the bagels were O-K!

I drove a little over ninety miles this morning to have this meeting. I arrive carrying a cake box of one dozen freshly-baked assorted bagels in my right hand; on my back is my trusty red daypack, containing among other things my (1) laptop (2) digital SLR camera (3) glasses and (4) mess of other things.

Entrance #1 appears to be locked. This is not a problem, I will just walk around to Entrance #2. Which also appears to be locked.

I can see no one inside.

I continue around the building towards Entrance #3, and it is just about at this point when BOTH OF MY FEET shoot straight out from under me, because apparently what I took for 'water' on the wheelchair apron was in fact not 'water' but 'ice.'

There are few times in life when one can be genuinely (somewhat) grateful for having a fat ass. This was one of those times. I landed hard, with an audible 'thud' (I heard my impact echo off the concrete wall of the building) but fortunately the daypack helped cushion the fall. (Remember the laptop, camera, et al?)

I sat there in the muddy melt for a moment, feeling the cold and damp soaking into the seat of my pants, as well as the big stupid pain asserting itself. My right hand was strangely pinned beneath the box of bagels, unwilling to give them up easily. The cakebox was sprung in that way that cakeboxes are wont to spring, yet not a single bagel got so much as a spot of dirt or a drop of water on it.

Once I caught my breath, gathered my thoughts and determined nothing physical was irreparably damaged, I slowly and deliberately released an unfettered torrent of bilious invective and profanity into the robin's-egg-blue South Dakota sky. Then I gathered myself up, brushed off the seat of my pants, refolded the cakebox of bagels into proper order, and began walking again towards Entrance #3.

At this point, a petite woman rushes out with great purpose and urgency to see if I am okay. The last syllables of my tirade had mercifully faded as she made her approach, and she very kindly and solicitously escorted me into the facility and looked after me until I convinced her I was not mortally wounded. (turns out Entrance #3 was also locked). I offered her a bagel.

If one is going to slip on an icy sidewalk, it is wise to do so on the premises of a hospital or health-care facility. It is optional to do it in full view of a conference room full of bored senior staff who are looking for a humorous and entertaining diversion in the middle of a long and tedious presentation. 

Did you know that the Federal Government has an online, web-based incident reporting form to be used in just such instances? Well, not surprisingly, they do. And I have completed it.

In the final analysis, no bagels were harmed, the laptop, camera and everything else in the daypack were fine. The folks I went to meet with did not witness my hijinks; those folks who did witness them know a grand entrance when they see one. They will remember my visit long after the @#$%^& pain in my ass (and my humiliation) have faded.

PS: My Sioux name is now "Ass-Walker Who Brings Goodies"

PPS: I realize I should have titled this "So Sioux Me."

PPPS: Maybe file this under "Sioux Falls?" "Ow! My Butte!"

The Birds

I mentioned birds. Let me elaborate a bit.

Today I saw, among other things, several examples of both Golden (juvenile and adult) and Bald eagles. I saw numerous lesser raptors I was unable to identify. 

 

 

I saw numerous flocks of pheasants and grouse, both on the ground and in flight; and a cloud of Canada Geese which behaved exactly as the cloud of starlings we see back east—morphing and shifting and forming and reforming, coalescing and diffusing and moving like a swarm of gnats.

The simple density of wildfowl in this region is unlike anything I have ever seen in the east, and in particular the flock of geese may have been the largest mass of living things I have ever seen in the air. It was breathtaking.

The Houses We Build

In places like this, the houses we build are few and far between. You tend to notice them, and pay great attention to them, as there is precious little else of detail to observe. So there are houses of breathtaking beauty sited amid astonishing landscapes; and for each of these, there are handfuls of squalid homes scattered in landscapes of soul-crushing despair.

Yet one thing all these houses have in common is that they make no accommodation for this wide open and unconstrained country. They are the exact same style of houses that were built back east a hundred-and-fifty or ten years ago. They are built upon the earth and jut their story or two straight up to the sky, gables and cornices and rooflines just as they were made wherever their builders hailed from. Yet there are no sheltering woods and forests to stall the brutal winds and biting cold here, little to slow the blowing snows and summer storms. These houses, splendid and squalid both, are built fully exposed to the elements on all four sides and offer little to blunt the elemental forces that abound.

I heat with wood, mostly. I know how much wood it takes to heat my house, and my house was built with the elements and frugality in mind. On a cold day with bright sun, wood will keep it warm; on a mild grey day, wood may fall short. And my house, nestled in the earth and sheltered by trees, never feels the brunt of the elements such as they are in Virginia.

I can pick up a stone, throw it in any direction, and hit a tree that I need felled. With a day's work, I could cut enough good firewood to heat my house for a month or so, weather depending. Yet in these places, I couldn't find enough standing wood within a day's walk to warm my frugal house; what does a poor man do here to heat their home, standing in the gale like a rude-carved toy on the ocean?

I see these isolated little places, and cannot imagine what winter must bring...what balance of time spent, money squandered, shivering misery or absolute knife-edged suffering. I noted one shack in passing with a small woodpile which appeared to be old telephone poles, cut and stacked.

Some of the natives built earth-sheltered lodges to thwart the winters, yet few examples of such design are apparent on the grasslands today, native or otherwise. And the hillocks pose their own issues. Build in the valleys, and accept the cold air pooling about you, the sun rising late and disappearing early, and the risk of floods—or build on the ridges where the warm sun shines and the warm breezes are found, along with the blizzards and the lightning?

Maybe we haven't occupied this land long enough for the old habits to die and the new lesson to be learned? Or maybe it just doesn't matter as much to those who have chosen to call this place home?

I don't know.