One recent May morning when, according to my weather app, an unseasonably warm south wind would push temps near ninety, I decided to get out of Walnut Grove and head west on U.S. 14. While I had a specific destination in South Dakota in mind, I didn’t need to hurry and meant to stop whenever my legs wanted stretching or curiosity got the better of me. I was simply determined to make the most of this meteorological aberration, this glowing summery radical protesting against all the cold, cloudy, heartless days surrounding it.
Driving east inevitably leads to heavier traffic, aggressive drivers, and eventually toll roads and claustrophobia. But striking out for the west, especially on a two-laner rather than the interstate, brings long unfurling roads and drowsy little towns with peculiar names like Volga, Carthage, and Blunt. Drivers of oncoming pickups often raise two fingers from the top of the steering wheel as they pass. Mallards and pintails, Canada geese, cormorants and pelicans speckle sloughs and lakes, and unrestrained vistas run to the Earth’s curvature. So west I went.
As I crossed Plum Creek and passed black fields and budding maples, the wind swept out of the south, the sun shone through the back window, and the pale gibbous moon, its tidal pull drawing me westward, hung over Buffalo Ridge and the long undulating sprawl of the plains. I happily gave in to the warmth and lure of distance since — for the first spring in thirty years — I didn’t have the racket of teenage students and endless teaching and grading responsibilities overwhelming my daydreams, invading my solitude, and constricting my landscape.
I slowed to 35 as I rolled through Tracy and passed the small metal sculpture of a tornado-twisted tree commemorating the nine fatalities of an F5 that ripped through town in 1968. Another seven miles west, I braked at the four-way stop where U.S. 14 intersects U.S. 59, and six miles later I bent around the south shore of Lake Yankton in Balaton, MN. Already the land had begun to rise out of the Minnesota River watershed behind me. The change is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, but in those twenty miles west I’d already gained over 320 feet of elevation; in the next twenty-two miles from Balaton to Lake Benton, about ten miles from the state line, the land rises another 220 feet. This is the Coteau des Prairies, a long tabletop stretching down the west side of Minnesota where a glacier creeping south split, carved out the land on either side, and left this “Mountain of the Prairies” behind. All water east of this ridge flows toward the Minnesota River; water to the west flows toward the Big Sioux River and then south to the Missouri.
Near the South Dakota state line stands a historic marker, so I pulled over; the face of the large brass plaque mounted on the post is so twisted by the wind it’s no longer perpendicular to the highway but, instead, faces the field on the north side of the road. I got out and stood in the grass before it. “Hole-in-the-Mountain” in large caps runs across the top; the paragraph below quotes Engineer Samuel A. Medary, who in 1857 explained that the “’Hole… is the only known route favorable for a railroad through or over the Coteau des Prairies.’” While this height hardly qualifies as a “mountain,” early settlers traveling on foot or in horse-drawn wagons would surely have felt the incline and the need to find a “hole” or pass through the Coteau to ease travel westward onto the plains.
As I walked back to the Jeep, I looked again to the southwest sky. There, faint in the glare of sunlight and as white as the thin clouds, the moon drifted toward the horizon as if riding down the long slope of the Coteau. I continued west, took the U.S. 14 bypass around Brookings, home of the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits, and then wound through DeSmet, which, like Walnut Grove and several other towns scattered around the middle of the country, brags that it was once the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of The Little House on the Prairie and other books.
Around 11:00, I crossed the sedate James River, climbed the hill into Huron, and pulled into the empty dirt parking lot near the gates to Memorial Field Stadium. While y’all claim that everything’s bigger in Texas, I defy you to outdo Huron’s most prominent landmark, which stands across the street from the stadium: “The World’s Largest Pheasant.” Of course, the fact that the ring-neck pheasant was introduced from China and is a non-native species (or in the conservative vernacular, un-American) probably explains Texans’ lack of interest in erecting a larger one. And while the pheasant is a favorite of SoDak hunters, it doesn’t entirely explain how this reliably red state could choose zhì-jī as their state bird.
Eventually, I got back in the Jeep and drove another half mile west before turning off of U.S. 14 and onto 37, a quiet state road heading north out of town. The day had warmed considerably, so I rolled down the window, stuck my elbow into the sun and breeze, and watched the empty fields go by. After about fifteen miles I began to think I’d missed my turn until on the right I spotted a patch of grass dotted with wooden crosses and a half dozen or so headstones. I slowed as I passed it, made a U-turn at the next intersection, drove back, and pulled into the field entrance on the south side of the tiny cemetery. I backed onto the grass so the end gate faced the markers and crosses, shut off the Jeep, and got out.
The Irving Cemetery in Spink County, SD, has no particular significance to me, and none of my descendants are buried here. I stopped mostly to see if this neglected little plot far from any town or farm site might hint at the history of this area. Plus, I was hungry, and the solitude of a country cemetery made a good place for the lunch I packed before leaving Minnesota.
As I sat on a folding chair and ate a ham sandwich, Sun chips, and yogurt, a white sulphur butterfly flitted past, around the broken headstones and tilted white crosses, and over 37. About a mile west across the field, an irrigator pipe ran parallel to the ground and perpendicular to the brown rows of stubble from last year’s corn. Above that, a seam of blue sky rose to the edge of a broad sheet of thin high cloud — so thin the blue beyond seemed to bleed through as it stretched overhead and east toward Minnesota. The breeze sighing across the empty fields and around the Jeep carried the whistles, clicks, and chimes of redwing blackbirds. A pheasant crowed, a rusty-hinge-like creaking, and a meadowlark yodeled, probably from a distant fence post. A semi pulling a grain trailer rushed north; a few minutes later two southbound SUV’s swept by. When the noise of wheels and of wind whooshing over fenders, hood, and windshield died away, the pheasant’s scrape, redwings’ strain, and meadowlark’s trill again filled the air over the Dakota prairie.
After lunch I wandered among the crosses and headstones, several of which mark the burial place of infants and children. A small upright marker stands over the grave of Lyle H. Cole, who died in 1896 when just 26 days old. At the base of a cross, a flat stone flush with the ground commemorates six-month-old Floyd A. Jessie Gilbert, who died in 1898. Two crane flies clung to the stone marking the resting place of Henry Shoemaker’s wife, Rachel, who died in 1885 at the age of only 42. I watched a redwing alight on one of the PVC pipes bracing up the sign facing the road. And on the east fringe of the cemetery where grass meets the dry field, I skirted a deep hole, likely home to a badger, its entrance so broad it could easily accommodate a volleyball. Eventually, I got back in the Jeep and pulled onto 37.
I backtracked 1¾ miles south and turned east on 24, a gravel county road. At the first intersection just a mile off 37, I found Rose Hill Cemetery, my original destination. Here lie the remains of Christian Meyers, my great-great grandpa Daniel Meyer’s half-brother, and his wife Caroline. They immigrated from Germany in 1858, but their only child was born and died during the voyage to America and was buried at sea. Of all the descendants on my dad’s side of the family, Christian and Caroline ventured the farthest west — over 200 miles from where Daniel settled in northwest Iowa. Now, their headstones face the plains as if remaining in Spink County wasn’t sufficiently west.
I walked the perimeter of the cemetery, starting on the west side where a metal framed gate made with roll top fencing hung open. Waist-high grass swayed along the woven wire under two strands of barbed wire that rose, sagged, collapsed into the grass, and at the next steel post regained its vigor, turned along the north side, and for a few yards stayed horizontal before slouching, as if exhausted, and finally expiring in a ragged clump of cedars.
Later, I sat in the narrow shade of a leafless tree’s trunk as mares’ tails drifted across the blue sky. Two mourning doves, wings whistling, swerved through the twisted limbs, over the headstones, and beyond the cedars lining the east end of the cemetery. A dragonfly droned past. A meadowlark trilled. Several redwings flitted from bare tree to bare tree, veered between the brush and broken limbs in the northwest corner, swooped into the tops of the cedars before flying back — like tiny Blue Angels in two diamond formations — over the leaning tombstones and then perched briefly, four above the ramshackle gate, four in the tumbledown corner.
By late afternoon when I started for home, the wind had died down, and on U.S. 14 pickup trucks towed sleek boats with large black outboard motors, and bikers roared by, some gray-haired and helmeted behind fairings, others sunglassed and gripping handlebars higher than their bare heads. Though the moon had long ago dropped beneath the western horizon, it was, like me, now on its way east. I expected we’d find each other in the morning, both seeming smaller in the confines of home, both eventually swollen with longing for the fullness of the west.
