I'm going to try and fit this one in before a trip to my very first county fair. I have been fearlessly calling everyone I meet and like at all and asking them to do things with me, it's been working so far. Some of these lucky phone call recepients are the people who saved me from certain death in Kennebec last weekend. They were in Rapid City (the city in the western half of the state) for Pride Weekend last week. I know, exciting! The gay community in South Dakota is really building their infrastructure for political organizing. Possibly because of Amendment C, which proposes banning not just gay marriage, but all civil unions and recognition of any relationship that is not marriage. People in SoDak are not taken by the proposal, and it looks like it won't pass. It is similar in principle to the whole banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest thing, people here are not thrilled about abortion or gays, but they are also not chomping at the bit to take away people's individual rights. It is also interesting that the Amendment C slogan is "neighbors don't discriminate." But I digress...
When my friends picked me up on the gravel driveway outside my motel room I was very excited. They felt really bad for me so agreed to stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell. I don't know if you've ever heard of "the world's only corn palace" but it is a sight to see! Well, sort of, I mean half a million people see it every year, but I don't know that I would go out of my way. Basically one of the town's founders realized that there was nothing attracting people to Mitchell and not enough people for the town to prosper on its own, so he decided to construct the first corn palace. This is just a building (with a basketball court inside) that is decorated with panels of murals that are made out of corn. Each year a new theme is chosen (this years' is Salute to Rodeo). It turns out that was also the theme in 1995. There are not many themes that can be represented in corn that also have to do with the state of South Dakota. I guess Lewis and Clark can't be celebrated all the time.
When we got back to Vermillion I picked up Allison Higganbotham in the HyVee parking lot. My second visitor! She was also pretty horrified at the prospect of me living here for a whole year, but I am feeling better about it every day. Especially because I realized that I'm almost done with month one, hopefully the most boring month of the year because I have had very little to do and no one is around and I knew no one.
I guess the second part of my journey wasn't as interesting as the first, and certainly neither part is as interesting as what could have been had the car not broken down and I had been able to go out to Bear Butte. I heard from someone who had driven out to Sturgis that the bikers by and large were not going to the bar which just opened closest to the Butte. This means that the protesters actually were raising awareness and making the difference they were trying to make. Hearing about it made me happy, but also really frustrated because it is so rare to be able to take part in a movement that actually makes a tangible difference fairly immediately. Ah well, I still have a chance. I did register to vote in South Dakota, so technically my vote will count more this year then in any other year. Also, I get to vote in a booth! Enough about that, off to see some hogs.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Friday, August 11, 2006
Photographs
I just bought a bike! It was $10 and I hope no one steals it while I put up these pictures. I don't really know what I'm doing, so these will be a hodge podge. Above is the road to my friends house. All around are corn fields and sometimes cows. I often swerve to avoid bunnies. There are some turkeys at the bird feeder. They knock it over almost daily. Then there's the picture of main street. You, Me and Dupree is no longer playing, but Snakes on a Plane is coming this weekend! I don't have many pictures to choose from and I smell really bad from biking and I have to go to work. So, sorry about all that, but when my digital camera gets fixed and I learn how to post pictures and text to this I will keep the photos updated.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Alex B.'s Birthday Bash-- Installment One
It all started on Friday (birthday-2) when I decided that it was worth venturing off on my own to the other side of the state to participate in a protest. The Sturgis motorcycle rally is just starting this weekend, attracting about 500,000 people to the tiny town of Sturgis, just a few miles away from Bear Butte, a sacred Native American site. Each year Sturgis rally interrupts prayer on Bear Butte and each year the bikers get closer and closer to the mountain- a place where silence is necessary for sacred rites to be performed. A biker bar just opened up about 5 miles away from Bear Butte and the owner has not been particularly concerned with the rights of Native Americans. I wrote a paper on this very topic in May for my environmental history class and I felt like it would be pretty lame to sit back and not go to the rally that Native American groups were holding to defend Bear Butte (defendbearbutte.org). It took me a long time to decide that I was brave enough to drive my new car the six hours alone and camp out alone and protest alone and drive back alone on my birthday. I woke up Saturday morning and took off at 7am, feeling pretty good about my decision and better than I'd thought about sharing the road with bazillions of bikers and their trailers and their rvs and their equipment.
When I was beginning to feel a little tired I put on some Christian radio, and believe me, that shit wakes you right up. First Dad was telling little Billy that his friend sounded like no good, and couldn't he wait to meet some new friends at Church. Then Uncle Jim and Aunt Jean educated all the children on hypocrites, mostly on how Jesus doesn't like hypocrites. Then some anonymous kid sang a little song about how bad hypocrites are just to drive the point home. I was getting a little freaked out by the whole talking like the folks in Reefer Madness and cautioning (threatening?) children against crossing Jesus when a new story started. In this tale a woman with a vaguely British, vaguely witchish accent started to talk about how "Rabbis don't even talk to women!" I began to understand that she was speaking from the time of Jesus and was educating me on women's rights. "Even when Peter came home and made his mother rise from her sick bed to prepare food for his friends she was happy, because she was serving Jesus." Then it got staticky and I took my cue to listen elsewhere. btw- this was broadcast from Milwaukee. Shouldn't the Guis family get on that?
Sometime during this I crossed the Missouri river. People here talk about East River/West River all the time. East River (where I live) is where corn and soybeans are grown while West River is like the frontier where ranchers herd cows and steer and do rancher things. I was not prepared for the massive topographical shift right alongside the river. I felt like I had been transported out west, with rolling hills of hay and cows meandering and just a very unique landscape. (I understand that pictures would help, but my camera is broken, which sounds bad, but is apparently just foreshadowing). The scenery kept me motivated, and for the first time in my life I was feeling like I HAD to see Mount Rushmore (a mere 100 ish miles away). The billboards every mile or so advertising a plethora of tourist traps were also working their magic. Gas stations seemed few and far between and while I felt ok watching all the bikers go by from the safety of my car I sort of felt petrified by the chance that I would break down and be left to their mercy. So I pulled off the exit at a little town called Kennebec (pop. appx. 241) and my car promptly died.
Yes, my used car which I had just registered in my name THE DAY BEFORE had died. I magically drifted into the gas station where I calmly informed someone that my battery had died and she calmly called Sam over as he calmly used a tow truck to push my car into the garage. Two hours later, after watching Sam fix some tires, while countless people wearing leather chaps drifted by, some bikers had borrowed the drill bit to fix some big hunk of something, and Sam had sawed at something to attach my battery without using any form of protection and almost certainly getting sparks on his face, it was abundantly clear that it was not just the battery that was dead. After much cursing and frantic phone calling I found that it would cost $400 to tow it to a mechanic, who probably wouldn't be able to look at it until Monday and who knows how much that would cost. I abandoned said car and checked into the Budget Inn that was thankfully right across the street. Just for reference, this is the most exciting thing in Kennebec: http://www.grainelevatorphotos.com/photos/sd/kennebec.html
Happy birthday to me. More later...
When I was beginning to feel a little tired I put on some Christian radio, and believe me, that shit wakes you right up. First Dad was telling little Billy that his friend sounded like no good, and couldn't he wait to meet some new friends at Church. Then Uncle Jim and Aunt Jean educated all the children on hypocrites, mostly on how Jesus doesn't like hypocrites. Then some anonymous kid sang a little song about how bad hypocrites are just to drive the point home. I was getting a little freaked out by the whole talking like the folks in Reefer Madness and cautioning (threatening?) children against crossing Jesus when a new story started. In this tale a woman with a vaguely British, vaguely witchish accent started to talk about how "Rabbis don't even talk to women!" I began to understand that she was speaking from the time of Jesus and was educating me on women's rights. "Even when Peter came home and made his mother rise from her sick bed to prepare food for his friends she was happy, because she was serving Jesus." Then it got staticky and I took my cue to listen elsewhere. btw- this was broadcast from Milwaukee. Shouldn't the Guis family get on that?
Sometime during this I crossed the Missouri river. People here talk about East River/West River all the time. East River (where I live) is where corn and soybeans are grown while West River is like the frontier where ranchers herd cows and steer and do rancher things. I was not prepared for the massive topographical shift right alongside the river. I felt like I had been transported out west, with rolling hills of hay and cows meandering and just a very unique landscape. (I understand that pictures would help, but my camera is broken, which sounds bad, but is apparently just foreshadowing). The scenery kept me motivated, and for the first time in my life I was feeling like I HAD to see Mount Rushmore (a mere 100 ish miles away). The billboards every mile or so advertising a plethora of tourist traps were also working their magic. Gas stations seemed few and far between and while I felt ok watching all the bikers go by from the safety of my car I sort of felt petrified by the chance that I would break down and be left to their mercy. So I pulled off the exit at a little town called Kennebec (pop. appx. 241) and my car promptly died.
Yes, my used car which I had just registered in my name THE DAY BEFORE had died. I magically drifted into the gas station where I calmly informed someone that my battery had died and she calmly called Sam over as he calmly used a tow truck to push my car into the garage. Two hours later, after watching Sam fix some tires, while countless people wearing leather chaps drifted by, some bikers had borrowed the drill bit to fix some big hunk of something, and Sam had sawed at something to attach my battery without using any form of protection and almost certainly getting sparks on his face, it was abundantly clear that it was not just the battery that was dead. After much cursing and frantic phone calling I found that it would cost $400 to tow it to a mechanic, who probably wouldn't be able to look at it until Monday and who knows how much that would cost. I abandoned said car and checked into the Budget Inn that was thankfully right across the street. Just for reference, this is the most exciting thing in Kennebec: http://www.grainelevatorphotos.com/photos/sd/kennebec.html
Happy birthday to me. More later...
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
O!
I have been meaning to keep this updated better, but without unfettered internet access it is hard to find myself in a place where it is ok to blather (i.e. work is not an acceptable environment). This past week has been a big one, I took a trip down to Omaha- driving all by myself- and staying with Rebekah, a girl I met at our service-learning training last week. Omaha has plenty of sprawl and mall, but there was also a great downtown area called the Old Market where I went to the Farmer's Market, ate Persian food for lunch and bought a skirt that is very Ithaca hippy reminiscent. We also went to the Joslyn art museum which has two giant Chihuly glass sculptures that are pretty overwhelmingly impressive. The rest of the collection was small, but interesting. They had artists that I'd heard of and seen in other, bigger, more cosmopolitan museums, but the works they displayed were all really interesting and a bit different (did you know that Mondrian painted landscapes, I didn't). Another attraction of Omaha was that I was hanging out with someone my age, who I would actively be friends with even if I weren't in the Midwest. We spent a lot of time sitting around and listening to the band Devotchka (who we then saw in concert) while I read through Rebekah's graphic novel collection. We also stopped at the Hindu temple, located conveniently behind Target. I have never been to a Hindu temple in the US and it was really weird to me that it was air conditioned AND carpeted, but it always feels nice to smell the familiar smell and see Indian families en masse. I am looking forward to visiting the local temple in Elk Point this weekend for some good Indian food and company. Btw, Omaha for some reason thinks that O! is a great catchphrase/marketing thing for their town. I think of Oprah, but whatever.
On the way back to Vermillion I tried to take the scenic route, with the intention of driving through the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska. I have been really interested in learning more about the Native American community, but I have those imperialist guilt pangs about observation vs. learning, etc. Somehow I missed the turn and when I stopped for cheap gas the BIA policeman told me that I should just get on the main road. It was really bizarre to stop at this gas station because I didn't realize that the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) had a police force that was on the reservation, which brought home the fact that I am completely not used to being in "Indian Country."
Last week at the poetry slam (won by a woman whose poem was titled "Mammogram Cryptogram" a witty, rhyming take on why the man who created mammograms should be kicked in the balls) the second place winner read poems about life growing up on the reservation. Besides the fact that it was a little disconcerting to have a mammogram poem followed by this young guy talking about drinking sugar water as a child cause everyone was too drunk and poor to get milk, I continue to be floored by the fact that I really know nothing about this very important part of America. I have been reading Leonard Peltier's Prison Writings which has been depressing, but a good overview of some history that I should really know. Especially since Pine Ridge is about four hours away.
Anyway, this is my lunch hour and I have to get back to work. I am in the process of moving out of my friends house and into my own, so eventually I will have wireless internet at home and we will all benefit.
On the way back to Vermillion I tried to take the scenic route, with the intention of driving through the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska. I have been really interested in learning more about the Native American community, but I have those imperialist guilt pangs about observation vs. learning, etc. Somehow I missed the turn and when I stopped for cheap gas the BIA policeman told me that I should just get on the main road. It was really bizarre to stop at this gas station because I didn't realize that the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) had a police force that was on the reservation, which brought home the fact that I am completely not used to being in "Indian Country."
Last week at the poetry slam (won by a woman whose poem was titled "Mammogram Cryptogram" a witty, rhyming take on why the man who created mammograms should be kicked in the balls) the second place winner read poems about life growing up on the reservation. Besides the fact that it was a little disconcerting to have a mammogram poem followed by this young guy talking about drinking sugar water as a child cause everyone was too drunk and poor to get milk, I continue to be floored by the fact that I really know nothing about this very important part of America. I have been reading Leonard Peltier's Prison Writings which has been depressing, but a good overview of some history that I should really know. Especially since Pine Ridge is about four hours away.
Anyway, this is my lunch hour and I have to get back to work. I am in the process of moving out of my friends house and into my own, so eventually I will have wireless internet at home and we will all benefit.
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