Of Miles Rausch

Prairie Madness

It occurred to me, as the rain made a Pho­to­shop fil­ter out of my wind­shield. I squinted through the sheets of water, try­ing my best to dis­cern traf­fic and traf­fic light. Grad­u­ally, fog crept its way up the wind­shield, cocoon­ing me into the driver’s seat. And it occurred to me, as it has on so many other dri­ves home, that I hate my ancestors.

Why would you want to live here?

Why would you want to live here? Death Cab for Cutie sings a song by that name from the per­spec­tive of some­one who can’t under­stand why any­one would take up res­i­dence in Los Ange­les. No one writes songs about peo­ple who live in the Great Plains; it’s a fore­gone con­clu­sion that we’ve lost our minds. Any descen­dants of the peo­ple who stopped and set­tled in an area named for its vast­ness and bor­ing­ness, who aren’t in the process of mov­ing away, are right mental.

Guys. Where are we?

No need to worry, though, I made it home safely. Once inside, I dried off with my iPod touch (not lit­er­ally). I noticed that there was a new update to the Weather Chan­nel app. Intrigued (as I hadn’t used it since I’d down­loaded it months ago), I fired it up. Imag­ine my sur­prise when I saw that the county we live in was in the midst of four weather mes­sages: flood, flash flood, wind, and tornado.

(Side­note: Isn’t cou­pling a “wind advi­sory” with a “tor­nado watch” like announc­ing a “flat­u­lence advi­sory” dur­ing baked bean night?)

It seems poignant that Holli and I are re-watching LOST sea­son one. Look­ing back on that sea­son, the prob­lems that the char­ac­ters dealt with seem insignif­i­cant com­pared to what they are cur­rently fac­ing. One major thing has changed since the first sea­son; the sur­vivors have learned to live on The Island. Sea­son one had, as one of its themes, the mantra, “Every­thing can kill you.” That same mantra can be applied to liv­ing in South Dakota. Our win­ters are fraught with bliz­zards, frost bite, hypother­mia, over-exposure, and count­less car col­li­sions. Our sum­mers are replete with floods, tor­na­does, for­est fires, heat exhaus­tion, and, occa­sion­ally, earth­quakes. As the LOST sur­vivors learned how to exist away from soci­ety, they had to over­come obsta­cles like: no water, no meat, no fruit, wild ani­mals, wild peo­ple, and bad weather. Even­tu­ally, they were able to refine a new mantra of “Only spe­cific things will kill you”, as they learned to mas­ter their envi­ron­ment. South Dakotans haven’t been so lucky.

It is regret­tably fre­quent that I find myself dri­ving home in full real­iza­tion that I am trav­el­ing through con­di­tions that kill peo­ple. Cer­tainly, it doesn’t take much to give even expe­ri­enced dri­vers road duress, but the white knuckle rides get old. Dur­ing poor road con­di­tions, I can count on a Twit­ter update of how many vehi­cles have ended up in the ditch. We joke to our­selves that they were the stu­pid ones, the cocky dri­vers, but it could have been any of us. I won­der, not unoften, just how many times a year are Cal­i­for­nia roads closed to weather? How often does Florida shut down its inter­states? When is the last time some­one com­plained about New Hampshire’s weather?

Noth­ing on the inside

For all the crime in the big cities, I won­der how it stacks to the lives claimed by The Prairies. There’s a library in a col­lege in Min­nesota named after a man who wrote a book in which a woman con­tracts “prairie mad­ness”. Essen­tially, it’s a Dis­ease of Empty. The lack of peo­ple, of things besides grass, drove set­tlers insane, usu­ally end­ing in star­va­tion or sui­cide. That is what this place can do. That is the power of Nothing.

We’ve built mod­est cities, which has held back the tide, but more and more peo­ple are mov­ing to the pop­u­lated areas. Sioux Falls is grow­ing, and the vil­lages of South Dakota are dying. Towns like Big Stone City have largely weath­ered the move­ment, where the lake and sur­round­ing com­mu­nity keep it insu­lated. Other towns, like Doland, are fad­ing away, with noth­ing but farm land and mem­o­ries to keep peo­ple rooted there. Even those are eroding.

Part of the plot for the movie Cars revolved around the idea of the shrink­ing small-town cul­ture in Amer­ica. Like cars give a damn. But it did bring up a good point in that there’s a cul­ture asso­ci­ated with these smaller dwellings that can­not be repli­cated even within the rel­a­tively small sub­ur­ban areas. For as long as I can remem­ber, a motor repair shop occu­pied half of the build­ing devoted to our post office in Big Stone. A man, whose name I’ve for­got­ten, owned it. It was a sim­ple busi­ness, and it must have done fine enough by him. He may have yearned for more, but I think that prob­a­bly he didn’t. He was con­tent with that sim­ple lifestyle. He’s repair small motors all day, then go home and relax. A man can live that way, and die that way, and leave lit­tle behind. No great funeral would be held in his honor, but, pos­si­bly, he’d be happy more days of his life.

Dust in the wind

The prairie is per­ma­nent; its pop­u­la­tions are not. Once there were great groups of Sioux and Lakota, Iowa and Pawnee, Cheyenne and Wichita, that roamed these same hills and val­leys as we do today. Where now stands minor league base­ball sta­di­ums and con­ven­tion cen­ters, they trod that earth on horse­back, car­ry­ing homes on their backs. Even­tu­ally, vio­lently, they were extri­cated from their ways of liv­ing, and new set­tlers lay waste and stake, con­fi­dent, bring­ing Com­pli­ca­tion hid­den beneath the silken mask of Lib­erty. The dust of the First Fathers min­gles with the dust of our Fore­fa­thers pro­duc­ing the rain that chilled my car, today, and blurred my vision. One day, too, my bones will break down into earth which will feed the storms and tor­na­does of tomorrow.

Per­haps one such storm will catch a young Lakota man, dri­ving his hover car home from space-work. He’ll sigh, as fog climbs up his win­dows, and, tele­path­i­cally, he’ll turn on the defog­ger. And as he waits for the hover traf­fic light to turn space-green, he’ll curse aloud, “I hate my ancestors.”