Welcome to South Dakota

Abortion: The Choice That KILLS!

Educated people know their Bible

Enjoy our famous beef

We Dakotans reject animal rights activists

Hunting, Fishing, Golf!

So the signs proclaimed as we made our way along I-90 in South Dakota. Cows and calves ambled in nice open fields right next to the signs advertising beef...They seemed happy, at least, right now. Whatever it means for an animal to seem happy. Is there any way to interpret that? Is there meaning to it? They seemed, at least, untroubled, calm, and free, and I suppose we tend to associate that state with what we call happiness, although for humans it's certainly not that simple. I was thinking about how I project into their future to a time when they'll be killed prematurely so that people can eat them, and how that makes me sad for them...but maybe that's sort of made up in my own human mind. Do they have a concept of death? If they live happy lives while they live, can we rightly say that their situation is bad? Well, I think we can--I think death is death and killing is killing. But I can only see things as myself. Still, I felt sad seeing all the cows.

My dad said he wanted to buy a billboard along that road:

Meat: The Choice That KILLS!

The Holiday Inn we're staying at tonight has guns and arrows hung all over the walls of the lobby. We couldn't, obviously, comment to each other while standing right there how repulsive it seemed.

"Koko wa totemo warui desu neee..." my brother whispered to me.

"Kowai!" I agreed.

We figured no one there knew Japanese.

I know I'm a biased Northeast liberal, but knowing it doesn't change it. This state makes me uncomfortable. My brother reminded us that 35% of South Dakota voted for Kerry in 2004; still, those 35% don't have a strong presence in the public displays along our route. Guns scare me, hunting makes me angry, meat sort of grosses me out, and the anti-abortion billboards every few miles add a strange ironic and sinister sort of sense of moral judgment. Yes, I'm one of those evil heathen liberals who wants to take people's freedom (to shoot animals) away, who wants to kill lots of innocent unborn children for no particular reason, and who hasn't even read the Bible. I'm not saying, by any means, that I assume everyone in South Dakota thinks like that. It's just the vibe coming down off the sides of the highway. It feels so hostile.

I've driven into the South, down to Florida and down to New Orleans. In the Carolinas and Georgia and Tennessee there were plenty of anti-abortion billboards, lots of churches, signs for gun shops and hunting and so on...but somehow nowhere else so far has felt to me so agressively hostile toward liberals (again, the signs and decorations, not the people).

I've also been thinking how much I'd hate to live here. My aunt says that when she's too far from a large body of water she gets a claustrophobic, suffocated feeling, and I'm beginning to see what she means. Also, there's nothing to do! I don't think I could adjust to it, a life where I'd have to drive hours through farmland lightly dotted with houses just to get to a town large enough to have some restaurants and shops in it. I'm not trying to be critical of that sort of life--I just couldn't do it. I'm so used to being able to hop in the car and find lots of malls and restaurants of all sorts of ethnicities and museums and concerts and just people right around me.

I can't wait to be back on a coast!

I liked Minnesota much better; instead of anti-liberal billboards, the highway was lined with long posts waiting to be erected into power lines to carry the power from the wind turbines they were planting in many of the fields. I really find them quite beautiful, and uplifting. Imagine if a large percentage of the fields in this part of the country could be spotted with those. I'm not an expert on alternative energy, but it seems like it would be pretty damn helpful.

But I'm going backwards, so let me start going forwards and meet myself in the middle. This morning we had a very lovely breakfast at Alexander's, and then hit the road. We finished Illinois, passed through a bit of Wisconsin, which was pretty nice (lots of ads for cheese!), then Minnesota, and now South Dakota. For dinner we stopped at Perkins, a chain we'd never tried before. The girl who seated us was so sweet and friendly! Her name was Kandice, and she asked where we were headed and got really excited, since she'd gone to school in Tacoma. She started telling us all the places we should visit on the way--including the SPAM museum right in that town! We passed on that, but one thing she mentioned sounded pretty awesome--it was called Devil's Tower, I think, some sort of natural rock formation thing. Maybe on the way back. Our waitress was also nice--and also vegetarian! The quesadillas were the highlight, although the rest was good too. We took the little paper attached to the receipt with a website to give feedback so that we could say nice things about the two women who served us.

The sunset was amazing. We stopped at a rest area to take pictures, which I will get onto my computer as soon as I find the cord for my camera...which might be at home...

The only bad news from the day was that my grandma is feeling bad--an upset stomach for the past week and a half that's getting much worse. And she's already dealing with a heart arhythmia that's making it exhausting for her just to walk around the house; and to top it off, this week all three of her children are travelling out of the area! Lousy timing...My mom thinks it sounds like just a stomach bug and nothing to do with her heart, but still. Sigh.

We made reservations at a Holiday Inn right in downtown Seattle. It was more expensive than the ones ten or twenty miles outside the city, which were all on the side of big highways in the sort of neighborhood such hotels are usually in--a neighborhood of hotels, parking lots, truck stops, warehouses, and highways. Which is no problem for staying over one night...but for sightseeing around for four days, we decided to spring for the one five blocks from the Space Needle. Oh well. My brother doesn't need to go to college, does he?

Two more days and I'll be there, minutes away from Andrew. How am I supposed to survive Thursday and Friday?

I'm still scheming about that baseball game...

:-)

P.S. Speaking of cheese, I would just like to say for the record that a strong candidate for my favorite slogan ever is the slogan of Sargento:

Persnickety People. Exceptional Cheese.