Grassroot Goodness in the American Heartland

It’s true that riding the U.S. Midwest gives you lots of time to think. Straight, flat roads have stamped a uniform grid on the American plains. But if you search the horizon (and maybe Google), your travel can be punctuated with interesting and unusual experiences. Racing east across South Dakota, for example, I did a double take at a large sculpture of a skeleton man out walking his pet Tyrannosaurus on a leash. They were heading to 1880 Town, an attraction where visitors donned period dress and browsed buildings packed with relics and photographs from pioneer days. 

And on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, I encountered a 15-metre-high stainless steel Indigenous woman receiving a star quilt. Created by South Dakota artist Dale Lamphere to honour the cultures of the Lakota and Dakota people, the sculpture, called Dignity of Earth and Sky, stood tall over Chamberlain, a frontier town whose history is most celebrated for Lewis and Clark’s westward explorations. The striking monument eloquently attempts to balance the narrative. 

After an hour or so, I needed to stretch, and my timing quite conveniently brought me to the big city of Mitchell, SD, population 15,660. There on North Main Street stood the Corn Palace, a fitting venue for the “Corn Capital of the World.” The sports complex/convention centre, with its Russian onion domes and minarets, is redecorated annually from roof to sidewalk in murals made entirely of corn. Like a tourist, I snapped photos of this year’s theme, “Under the Big Top,” depicting clowns, lions and tigers, trapeze artists and elephants — all in variously coloured kernels and cobs. Then I wandered in to watch the Dakota Wesleyan University Tigers, an NAIA basketball team, running drills. The interior walls displayed photos of murals past. 

SNOT ON THE PRAIRIE

In the late afternoon, I arrived in the comparatively tiny town of De Smet, the childhood home of Laura Ingalls. Her books capture the town’s early days, and I was interested to learn that her Little House on the Prairie was the first building in a town whose population, even now, numbers barely 1,000. Although the sand and clay road to her homestead had just seen rain, it wasn’t until I was already committed that I discovered how very slippery it was, and to turn around seemed almost as risky as just getting up on the pegs. Happily, a knobby front tire, a 50/50 rear, and the wider handlebars of the Suzuki V-Strom 800DE all got me to my destination — just in time to see a woman turn the window sign to CLOSED. I surveyed the shuttered buildings, read a few plaques, and then got to ride the snot all over again.

Tracking ever eastward, I watched as dry ranch land became crops-by-irrigation, and then, as precipitation…