“South Dakota…it's like the world's first drive-thru deprivation chamber.”
- Bill Bryson
Dad and I hauled off and went to South Dakota in 1999. Just the two of us. He was pretty feeble, 82 and on the losing side of cancer. Nobody said it out loud, but everybody knew. The shadows were getting longer. He'd always talked about wanting to visit the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and “out in there” as he put it. Kendra and I were living in Cleveland, OH and Mom and Dad were still on the farm in north Missouri, but we worked out the logistics and he and I went. We flew from St. Louis to Rapid City. It was pre-9-11. Remember those days? Even one percent of that innocence would be welcome now.
“Out in there” we saw the Presidents chiseled into the mountain. the moonscape of the Badlands, Crazy Horse emerging from his enormous mountaintop, and we snuck into Wyoming to see The Devil's Tower. Mentally ill people were climbing up the side of it that day. Dad and I shook our heads. On the drive back to Rapid City, the landscape was such that Dad said, “Sometimes things are so beautiful you don't even know what to say.” Before the trip wrapped up, we made our way to Wall Drug. Visiting it is a legal requirement in the state. We didn't want to get a citation. Dad was a trooper through it all. He was on fumes but he never complained. I don't remember him complaining about anything ever my whole life. He wasn't about to start then. In just over a year he'd be gone, so I give thanks it all worked out.
Ten years later Kendra and I went “out in there” and on a trail through the Black Hills she ran her first half-marathon. It was a rainy morning, chilly and humid together, and the ground was greasy. No matter. She owned the course like a boss. We stayed for a few days after and took in the sights. It being pre-GPS, we asked a woman at the Mt. Rushmore information desk the best route to get to Crazy Horse. “Now, are you in a big rig?” It struck us as funny since we'd never thought of ourselves as giving off much of a “big rig” vibe. “No…no, we're not in a big rig.” She proceeded to show us on the handy map, the quicker, non-big rig route. The Crazy Horse memorial didn't look a lot different than it had a decade previous. His face was a little more evident but no more than that. Because of its massive scale, the often forbidding weather conditions that limit construction, and funding from private donations only, means it's gonna be a minute before it's ever completed. It'll be something, though, when it is.
Music of South Dakota…not a ton going on.
Best Band: I don't know any bands from SD so I had to do some hunting around. I landed on Indigenous, a blues rock group from the Assiniboine tribe. The founding member grew up on the Yankton Indian Reservation and released their first recored in 1995. They list Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana as major influences. Once you've heard them, that would not be hard to guess. They've won several Native American Music awards.
Best Solo Artist. This is ground I've already trod a time or two, but here goes again. Back around 1990, a girl I knew who was a singer, Rochelle, gave me a compilation cassette (yes, cassette) of up and coming folkies. She knew I was all goofy about music and thought I'd dig it. I don't remember any of the people or songs on it except one, Shawn Colvin's Shotgun Down the Avalanche. That's some song title, I thought, I know right where I was when I heard it, too. Boy, sometimes a song and a voice just hits. Who was she? I found out and she became the first female folkster that got me all spun up. She wrote good songs, had a great voice and she could flat out play guitar. She started on it when she was ten, I learned. It showed. I've seen her, I think, six times. Four times in Memphis at various venues and twice at the Ryman in Nashville. She was born in Vermillion, SD. Her career path has been like many a troubadour, playing anywhere and everywhere, numerous relocations, staying at it, grinding away, building an audience and eventually getting a record contract. She did all that. Her breakthrough album came in 1997 with A Few Small Repairs. It spawned, Sunny Came Home which won “Song of the Year” at the Grammys in 1998. That was back when the Grammys sorta meant something.
Wildcard: Haley Bonar is a singer/songwriter raised in Rapid City. She's new to me. She seems to have had a successful career, depending on how “successful” is defined. She's released a load of solo albums and EPs since 2001 and two records with a group she was in called “Grandma's Boyfriend." She could be terrible and I'd still like her for that. band name alone.