The Real Prairie

I wrote this the other day, after it seemed like everyone else had left South Dakota. This is the first time since then that I've managed to make it on to the internet.

No pictures today, just a little bit of sentiment as everyone heads home from South Dakota for a couple weeks before we come back here for good. I actually have one more week in South Dakota, but I’ll be ten hours across the state in Aberdeen, where things are very flat, learning how to coach my nonexistent athletes. I’m driving out to the coaching clinic on Monday with some folks from Crazy Horse, but I wasn’t really up for spending the weekend in my empty, unfurnished house alone and without a car, so I’m crashing for the weekend with Matt Douglass, another teacher over on Rosebud.

I spent the afternoon drifting down the Niobrara River in Nebraska with Netha, Jen Page, and Kate B. It was less of an adventure than I had anticipated—the Niobrara is never more than three feet deep, and the current is about three or four miles an hour—but it was a nice way to relax after a stressful week that has left me feeling less prepared for teaching than when I left Houston. So lounging on a river for a couple hours was a nice escape.

Around 3 PM the girls dropped me off in Valentine to head out towards Pine Ridge and Rapid City. I wandered through Young’s Western Wear, contemplating which elements of the cowboy outfit I will feel comfortable wearing first, and then got myself lunch at Mike’s Taco Casa. Just as I was finishing up lunch, Matt came to pick me up and we got some laundry done.

The most striking thing for me today was how different the prairie feels once everyone is gone. We’ve been a pack of almost thirty teachers for the past seven weeks, and all of a sudden everyone was dispersed; instead of teachers across the hall, all I have now is open land. We’re going to return one by one over the next couple weeks, tucked away in our different corners of our different reservations. Standing alone at a corner in Valentine, Nebraska—a dusty town of 2800 and the biggest town I’ve seen in a week—the difference between here and home seemed a little more profound than usual. I felt like I arrived on the prairie for the first time—like it wasn’t the summer anymore, but a real life that I was starting. Matt and I did some laundry in an unattended Laundromat on the edge of Valentine, playing Ms. Pac-Man while we waited. Even laundry seemed different today; it wasn’t just a chore that I could squeeze into some small, free moment, but one of those dull but very real cornerstones of a new, real life out here on the grassland. Later, when we were driving back to St. Francis, where Matt lives, with a carload of new-apartment essentials, we crested a hill, and for a second we were above the prairie, which stretched for miles in every direction. No cars, no cows, no water—just rolling hills of grass. Without the romantic light of a prairie sunset, it was pretty spectacular in a different way—almost overwhelming.