Murrs Across America

I know Jane already recorded this day but there were a few things she left out. We decided to stay for the pow-wow. We biked down to Pickstown and ate pie and lunch at the gas station/grocery store/restaurant, where we ran into Dave, a biker we’d met in Missouri. We visited the interpretative center at Fort Randall dam, which said nothing of the controversy over the dam’s displacement of twenty-four native families, but did have a place for the kids to dig for dinosaurs and learn more about Lewis and Clark. The young ladies on watch were great with the kids.

We returned to the Casino to set up camp on the pow-wow grounds. The warm-up and blessing of the grounds was underway and the announcer was telling a story about the Dog Soup and fry bread we would all be eating for dinner.

It means something to shake someone’s hand in the Yankton Sioux culture. More than a greeting, it is a demonstration of respect, and as the drummers sang songs of welcome and blessing, descendants of the great chief White Cloud danced and feebly hobbled to a spot at which the entire assemblage shook their hands.

Soup served from huge galvanized tubs was filling and good, made with hominy, beef, and potatoes. As guests, we were encouraged to follow the elders near the front of the line and to eat as much as we like. We ate on the bleachers with a family whose baby entertained the kids. We took the offered seconds.

After dinner and some more songs, we retired to our tent. It was a moon night and sleepless, full of wind and anticipation.

The ride from Springfield to Pickstown, SD was rough. For nearly 50 miles we fought headwinds and climbed high prairie hills, sometimes on gravel roads. To complicate things, there were semi-trucks with double loads of gravel that dusted us on our route, which was heavily under construction. Men perched at intersections directed traffic and pointed us toward Pickstown. The landscape was richly lonely, reservation land, hot and forgotten.

We rode through a reservation town that had been completely flooded. In Marty grass lay down. Debris cluttered the yards of humble homes. Boys rode bikes on dirty streets.

Our final ascent ended at the Fort Randall Casino. We debated whether to stop there, at the top of the hill, or coast down into Pickstown, but we were hungry and we didn’t know for sure the restaurant situation in town.

As we parked our bikes a man named Henry began to tell us stories of the Yankton Sioux landscape through which we’d passed, and he immediately invited us to the pow-wow, two days away. He was a little fuzzy on his facts, we learned later, but he was very welcoming, especially after such a hard ride. His welcome was eclipsed, however, when a security guard came to where we were chatting with Henry, changing our shoes, and said, “We’ve been expecting you.”

How odd, I thought, or maybe said, we’ve barely been expecting ourselves.

The guard explained that the manager of the casino restaurant had seen us struggling in the wind on the road and she called ahead to tell them if the tired, filthy family on bicycles came by to comp their meal.

I melted into a dirty puddle then at the thoughtfulness and kindness of a stranger and the family went inside to enjoy a buffet meal. We decided to stay at the hotel for the showers and beds and to think about whether or not to stay the two extra days for the pow-wow.

The Jane Blog

By Jane Murr

We saw a caterpillar. He was green. He was eating a leaf.

We saw a dead butterfly. We picked it up and kept it. We pulled out its tongue and looked at it. Our tongues are longer than the butterfly’s. Tootsie’s tongue is longer than ours and the butterfly’s, but butterflies have black tongues. We looked at the white spots on the orange and black butterfly. It was a monarch butterfly. They are so pretty and I wish I could watch one fly around in a jar. I would put water in the jar and I would let it go if I saw another butterfly I think is its mommy or daddy. The butterfly dust on our hands was purple and a little sparkly.

We saw a tractor that pooped out hay. We saw 21 hays that the tractor pooped out.

We dug for dinosaur bones. It was fun because we were scientists digging up dinosaur fossils and we got to pick them up and put them in a pile.

We saw Prairie Chickens. They were my favorite!

We watched drummers sing—it was just screaming, actually. It was too loud for me. I ate all my soup so I could have some cake.

When I get home, I’m going to have an applesauce carrot cake for my friend party. Here are the things you’ll need to make the cake, Mommy:

• sugar,
• butter,
• eggs,
• applesauce,
• carrots,
• flour,
• applesauce icing.

There are one hundred mosquitoes outside our tent! Good thing we have a tent: if we were sleeping outside, we would get eaten alive!

At scrabble the night before Michael insisted that, “anarchists use the scrabble dictionary too,” which pretty much sums up our visit at the Emmaus House, a restored historic Victorian-style residence that provides free food and lodging to folks visiting loved ones at local institutions, mainly prisions. The ideals of providing service, building community, and participating in active nonviolence (and the idea that these things are just the right thing to do—like using the scrabble dictionary—regardless of institutional directives) are personal tenants of Michael’s. They are diligently, yet comfortably, accessible for guests through the Emmaus House art, board games, refrigerator magnets, and gentle hospitality.

The women and children who stay at the Emmaus house typically travel and do not have resources to pay for a hotel room. They may be visiting loved ones in any of the four prisons in the Yankton area, one of which really caught my attention because before its transition to a federal prison camp in 1986 it was a liberal arts college. The facility is completely service-oriented and sustained by Michael and others who give of their time and resources in the spirit of community: in other words, it isn’t a not-for-profit organization or a business, but a volunteer organization. None of the volunteers are paid, and they describe themselves as “…just some folks trying to live out our faith”.

Michael works tirelessly to provide clean rooms and meals for free. He lives in a room off the kitchen where guests gather to eat and wash dishes, an activity that often plants the seeds of community between guests. He says his wife, Beth, who is a nurse that was away on business when we visited, brings home the cash that makes their service possible. He tells stories about leaving his home in Indiana at an early age, encountering positive mentors through the Catholic Worker movement, and devoting his life to active nonviolence and promotion of peace. He tells of his incarceration for civil disobedience and the rewarding experience of disarming hostility. These days this primarily includes watching Emmaus House guests begin to melt into support of one another and learn from each other in the quiet house. Beneath vaulted ceilings and among houseplants, with the aroma of home cooked meals and dryer sheets meeting the needs of safety and comfort, much more is generously and humbly, offered at the Emmaus House, where a depth of service contributes to the sincere hospitality we had the pleasure to experience.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Emmaus House or supporting this ministry, please contact Michael at PO Box 353 Yakton, SD 57078 or by phone at 605-664-3662.

Here are my notes for the rest of this day:

Breakfast at Emmaus house
Yankton bike shop (Ace Hardware & bike shop)
A dip in the lake
Biking to Springfield, SD
Libby’s Steakhouse and Spiderman III
Camp set up
Rescue from storm by Tim, the guy at the gas station
Evening with Tim and Sandy
Constant lightning

The morning of the summer solstice I had a conference call with my colleagues at UPsidEo. It was the one-year anniversary of our company, which despite challenges is positioned firmly upon a fantastic foundation to do good work to help develop the leaders who are changing the world. You can check out our website, if you like, here.

Perhaps the most important “to do” item on the list for the day, however, was to make the pilgrimage back to main street to visit Edgar’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain. We’ve been to a couple of soda fountains on this trip: Stuart’s Corner Café in Tennessee and Bell Brothers in Atchison, KS. However, Edgar’s was definitely in it’s own cherry-sweet category at the tip-top of soda fountain glory.

Here’s where I would like Stuart to write something about growing up as a soda jerk on Main Street in Cabool. If he doesn’t write something here I’ll explain that he was a soda jerk, that they had very good ice cream and pulled soda and mixed pop from syrups and used the old-fashioned spoons and glasses. They did the same at Edgars. Here the polite and efficient soda jerk explains how to properly make a cherry soda, Stuart’s favorite.

We said fond farewells to the Giorgios and biked to Vermillion, which also had quite a bit of construction going on just off of their Main Street. We played in the park where we called a friend of the Giorgios in Yankton, Michael, at the Emmaus house. He had heard from the Giorgios we might be coming, so when Stuart called, he informed us that he had our room ready and we would be eating dinner at the house. The Gorgios were invited too. Rather than press on through the heat then, we decided that I should go work on the blog at the local coffee shop and Stuart and the kids would hit the library. We would wait for the Giorgios to come through town and pick us up on the way to Yankton.

Our plan was thwarted, however, when Stuart came crashing off his bike. While falling off my bike is not an infrequent occurrence, Stuart hadn’t wrecked a single time on the journey. Turns out a rather stout stick, about six inches long, had wedged into his front spoke and pushed his fender up into a mangled mess. This halted his forward progress and landed him on the sidewalk of the sleepy neighborhood street. He was stunned, but fine, and we quickly figured out what the problem was. One of his spokes was a little bent, but not broken, and the rumpled fender smoothed nicely back in to place. Still, we thought we should go consult the local bike mechanic to make sure everything was still safe.

The bike shop man was just closing up shop, but he took a look at Stuart’s bike anyway, pronouncing it road-trip-ready. The Giorgios showed up and whisked us away to Yankton, which is how we arrived, poetically, at our half-way point on the summer solstice, a day of equilibrium if not balance.