The Land of Infinite Variety
Or, learning to live with South Dakota's many extremes.
The Missouri River cuts through the heart of South Dakota, dividing east from west, or west from east. In many ways, that divide defines life for the people who live here. One either lives East River or West River, and there is no in-between.
Topographically speaking, South Dakota is a transition state between the Midwest and the mountains. East River has prairies, farmland, and scattered glacial lakes; West River is home to the rugged Badlands, Black Hills, Spearfish Canyon, and generally higher elevations. Far from the nondescript wasteland of popular imagination, South Dakota is a land of rich variety—even, as the official pledge to the South Dakota state flag would have us believe, infinite variety.
That’s the nice way of putting it. In his 1977 history of the state, former USD professor John R. Milton calls South Dakota a land of “extremes.” For him, the East-West River divide symbolizes the broader polarities and disparities that characterize not only the geography but also the weather, culture, and politics of the state. Anyone who lives here knows the most obvious extreme is weather. Milton notes how the “most freakish” rise in temperature ever recorded on planet Earth occurred at Spearfish on January 22, 1943, from 4 degrees below zero to 45 above zero—in two minutes. We laugh, we cry, we carry on.
It might have been Custer who first described the Badlands—an extreme place if ever there was one—as “a part of Hell with the fires burned out.” On the other hand, renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright had a near-mystical encounter when he first toured that same landscape in 1935. He wrote: “Communion with what man often calls ‘God’ is inevitable in this place.” So, which is it? Is South Dakota more like Heaven or Hell on Earth? Yes.
The cultural differences between East and West River can also be pronounced. I have lived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota’s largest city, for over fifteen years now. Our city limits practically border both Minnesota and Iowa, and we probably share more in common with those neighbors than the mountain states of Colorado and Wyoming to the west. In general, East River people value community, education, entrepreneurship, civic engagement, and the arts. On the other hand, Milton describes West River people as:
conservative, proud, independent, healthy, and reasonably contented … They are an open people, like the land, and friendly and hospitable. But they are suspicious of change, of the power of the intellect, of the university, and of the “big city”—Sioux Falls (141).
I wonder if East River folk are aware of this suspicion. Growing up in Sioux Falls, my friends and their families were always taking trips out west, for vacations, sporting events, summer camps, and, of course, for Wall Drug maple donuts. In addition to its natural beauty, West River boasts (and I mean boasts) a more fabled history—in part because of the 1870s Black Hills gold rush—which involved the legendary likes of Custer, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Sitting Bull.
Passing all those retro Wall Drug billboards along I-90, one almost gets the sense of traveling back in time, back to days on the frontier. This romantic, nostalgic image is doubtless part of what makes the trek so alluring to some. If East River stands for civilization, perhaps West River stands for wilderness. Milton again:
Whereas it [wilderness] once conveyed a sense of danger, it now evokes the feeling of escape from a world which pits men and women against their own kind, daily, in the arena of “civilized” activities. And, although the frontier seems to have been dissipated by a continuous string of settled towns and counties and states from one ocean to the other, there are places where it is still real, either in memory or in fact (159).
Milton goes on to demonstrate how the idea of the frontier “lingers” in present day South Dakota, in the dispositions and traditions of its people, in its pockets of wilderness. (Have you heard of the Custer Beetle Burn?) But it’s easy to overstate here. Milton’s East-West characterizations are not absolute. West River is not the Wild West of cinema, and East River has its fair share of cowboys. Even so, the conceptual dichotomies are suggestive: East and West, Order and Chaos, Civilization and Wilderness—all river-stitched into the fabric of South Dakota’s being, just as they are stitched in the heart of every individual.
In "The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche saw something like these two fundamental forces at work in Greek tragedy: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian is associated with reason, logic, and individuality, while the Dionysian is associated with passion, chaos, and the dissolution of individual boundaries in favor of a primal, universal experience. Apollo is the god of dreams and ideals, Dionysius of intoxication and ecstasy. Nietzsche argued that the balance and interplay between these two forces are what made Greek tragedy, particularly the works of Sophocles and Aeschylus, so powerful.
So too, Milton suggests that the tensions generated by South Dakota’s many extremes constitute its central image, and that this image—a balance of beauty and severity—might serve as a “source of both art and psychology.” I have elsewhere observed this theme in the works of writers like Kathleen Norris and Kevin Cole. Under their influence, and Milton’s, the “extremes” of South Dakota have also shaped my own creative work.
Jumping in the car and heading west for the Hills has always provided a sense of both adventure and respite from the “arena of ‘civilized’ activities.” At some point, though, the journey also took on a metaphorical significance. (And occasionally more than metaphorical, like the time I nearly sold my house and moved to Spearfish.) Of course, metaphor is the lifeblood of poetry so, to close, I want to share a new poem of mine that gets at some of this.
“Ponderosa” recently appeared in Issue 3 of Opt West, perhaps the most fitting home this poem could ever know. It sprang from a line I found in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s journals, which he penned while crossing South Dakota. But while the poem is a reaction to Stevenson’s question, it is not an answer. I’m still working on that.
PONDEROSA
What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness?
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Dizzied by swells of prairie grass,
a huge sameness, a vast
expanse of oceanic green;
irked, too, by retro billboard ads
along the interstate
(meant less to sell than, well, divert
one’s gaze from the vertiginous
vistas of sprawling plain),
I wind up here again, walking
deep rings of ponderosa pine.
Boughs jeweled in April ice
they circle a marble reservoir,
stand sentinel atop steep crags
to curb infinity.
I listen for the snow-silence
and picture old sailors who saw
in their delirium
endless green meadows in lieu
of endless seas, longing to hurl
themselves overboard.
What relief they must have felt,
once moored, to find the earth once more
a fixed, familiar place,
of trees and stones and clock towers.
