Into South Dakota

This posting was written on Friday evening, the 17th. Our hotel in Watertown SD required that I reconfigure the computer to take advantage of their internet connection. While I could have done it, I'm sure, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to return the computer to normal.

Today started out early. We had a very long way to go. But first …

Having stumbled upon it in June of 2004, Tal and I both knew about the Bass store in St Charles MO, just west of St Louis. We also knew that it opened at 9AM. So, there was absolutely no use in trying to get a jump on our 800 mile day. We had to time our departure from the hotel in Festus. Even slightly dragging out feet, however, brought us to their bolted door with a 45 minute wait. And, my husband – who doesn’t wait well – did it! When 9:00 came and the door swung open, we both were like children in a candy store. Now, we have appropriate bait for walleye fishing, probably, for the next half decade. How much fun.

We crossed the Missouri River three times today, each time something of a drama (in St Louis, just west of Columbia and, finally, in Kansas City). I won’t go into it now, but each major river we’ve encountered since leaving home on Wednesday has brought its own moment of impact – the Savannah with a light mist drifting along its surface, the mighty bend in the Tennessee at Chattanooga, the Cumberland flowing right through Nashville, the Ohio and the Mississippi converging were Cairo IL sits on a not particularly large peninsula. Where that convengence is concerned, our route took us from Paducah KY over the Ohio and into Illinois for the briefest of moments before we mounted another bridge over the Mississippi and found ourselves in Missouri. Both of those back-to-back bridges looked like close kin to the old bridge in Charleston – narrow and high. On the occasion of each river we were always traveling too fast for me to take it in. Truth be known, though (and Tal knows it), I could very easily stand for hours and hours and gaze at each and every one. We would never get anywhere at that rate, I know. But, enchanted by them I am.

For much of today we paralleled the Missouri: from our stopping point last night south of St Louis, west to Kansas City where we turned north to Sioux City IO. It was at Sioux City where our paths finally diverged, we continuing north and the river continuing west. The Missouri Valley is wide and fertile, growing mostly corn, soybeans, some wheat and great numbers of cattle. The valley’s width, while I can’t guess at the distance across, is broken only by the infrequent groupings of trees, suggesting a house site and farm outbuildings in their midst. Larger areas of trees on the horizon generally sprouted a water tower and a steeple, letting us know a town was in the distance. Of course, there are roads crisscrossing (at right angles) the expanse of farmland, although they remain unseen for most part given the height of the crops in the fields. From time-to-time, however, a boiling plume of white dust gave away the passage of a local vehicle, that intensely churning tight cloud, dissipating and beginning to drift like an earthborn contrail almost at the same moment it was produced.

Tal and I, insulated in our vehicle and passing through at 70+ mph, wondered at those clusters of buildings housing a family and a livelihood, at those steeples in the distance well off the interstate focusing the hopes and dreams (probably of an earlier generation) and, most especially, about the occupants and occupations and immediate missions of the drivers of those unseen vehicles among the fields in the Missouri's valley. Each one of them was living a life unique to that person. Each one carried through the day, perhaps, the burden of secret sins or the buoyant joy of newfound love, the truth of responsibilities as well as privileges, just like I do and Tal does. Each one is beloved of God and knows it sometimes and forgets it often, just like I do and Tal does. Each one forgets that the rest of the world exists, intent on the immediate and the personal, just like I do and Tal does. Just like we all do.

As I invite sleep tonight those boiling clouds of white dust are clear in my thoughts. I want to remember them and the unseen people driving along dusty roads creating them. I want to keep them part of my world.