Diners

I decided to cut short the stay on the Mississippi, and head into South Dakota.  I found a site at the Palisades State Park, about 20 miles north of Sioux Falls near Garretson.  I pulled into town in search of a grocery store, having decided I needed to cook a decent meal.  Garretson has a population of slightly over 1000 souls, all of whom seem to have a smile on their face.  Where else do you go into the grocery store and a kid asks you if you found everything you needed?  Weird.  The state park is new, built around Split Rock Creek, and the namesake palisade formations of South Dakota Quartzite.  These are not the palisades of the Hudson, but in a land of perpetual flatness, you feature what you can.

But even in the flat monotony, if you are aware, something wonderful always shows its face.  Rosie was up promptly at 5:30 am, looking for a walk and her next meal.  After a little caffeine I took her to the edge of the campground, just as the sun was rising.  From an area of low brush and wild sunflowers, you could hear the loud clucking of what I thought were pheasants, first one or two, then it seemed, all around us.  With a flutter, a large male flew out of the brush right into the rising sun.  It was a beautiful sight, the shadow of the large bird, fat from sunseed and Farmer Jones corn, backlit by the sun.

Garretson does not have a much, but it does have a Catholic Church.  I went to Mass and thought I had happened into the land of giants … everyone was enormous.  It was Gulliver in reverse – my six feet, 200 pounds did not break the median for adults, male and female alike. I learned later that the gene pool was Norwegian, that they worked hard, but spent the long winter eating and procreating.  There were big, rambunctious, blond kids everywhere.  After Mass, being pointed to the local taproom as the only breakfast option, I decided to try my luck in Sioux Falls.

I like to eat at diners.  Diners have counters.  A man alone at the counter of a diner looks purposeful not alone, The odds of conversation at the counter are greatly increased.  I realize this is risky business.  Out here you may learn all you need to know about the effective use of manure holding tanks.  Or, like today, you may get lucky.  After I had ordered breakfast, a man sat next to me, eager to chat.  He asked the usual questions about where I was from and where I was headed and offered that he grew up in Sioux Falls but now lived in California.  Retired, he said he missed Sioux Falls and was trying to convince his wife to move back 6 months a year.  She was from California – his case was hopeless.

After a bit of back and forth, I asked what he had done for a living.  I was thinking seed salesman.  No, he had been a surgeon. (He ordered a cinnamon roll with some kind of sticky thick goo on top – not a cardiologist.) His mother had told him when he was 12 that he was going to be a doctor.  She expected him to come home and be a shining example of her excellent parentage, but he had different ideas.  Over the objections of his advisor at University of South Dakota (no one from SD ever got accepted there!), he was accepted at Washington University Medical School, followed by a residency at Stanford.    Mom never got her showpiece … he stayed in California for a long career. 

Then he told me that he was back in Sioux Falls for the funeral of his niece’s husband, who had died of a sudden heart attack.  He was a good man, he said.  His face turned red, on the edge of tears.  He told me that he saw death all the time … it was part of the job.  He made a habit of never knowing his patients’ first names, keeping a certain personal distance.  But this was different … “I knew his first name.”  We shook hands, me off to see the Falls, him for a plane to Austin to see his daughter.