At one point this morning, before I left last night’s campground, so many Robins kept flying down to the ground by my campsite I started to feel like I was with Hitchcock in The Birds. It would have been spooky if they hadn’t been Robins. There must have been 2 or 3 dozen of them all together. Very strange.
Last night my TV wouldn’t come on at all. No picture, even for a little bit. I wanted to take it down and substitute the smaller TV that’s mounted to the side of the RV (for outdoor football game viewing, per the RV salesman), but I knew they were too heavy for me to do it by myself. I hoped maybe I could find something in Mitchell.
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| route map |
On the road
I heard on the radio that there were already 300,000 vehicles in Sturgis. Apparently none of those folks has heard the phrase “super-spreader event” or, if they have, they think it doesn’t apply to them, or they think it’s a hoax by the media or the Democrats or somebody. People are strange sometimes. My instinct for self-preservation is at least a little better developed than that.
I’m saddened to say that today I ran into a swallow. I’ve noticed over and over that some of these birds seem nearly suicidal, because they fly up when I come near which is reasonable, but then they fly right across my path and it’s hard to avoid them. I see it constantly and haven’t figured out how to mitigate the lethal possibilities. Well, today, it happened. And I’m very sorry about it.
South Dakota has a town named Winner, and apparently 3,137 people think it is, at least enough to live there.
I saw a bird cross the road that at first I thought was a roadrunner. Then I wondered if it might have been a pheasant. Which is certainly what it was because the bird book says roadrunners don’t get any farther north than southern Kansas, while Ring-necked Pheasants are here year-round. It was the long, stiff upright tail that gave me a clue.
Gregory
I was heading for Gregory County and the town of Gregory. Contrary to what you might think (at least, I did), Gregory is not the county seat. The town of Burke, a little farther southeast, has that distinction. I’d driven through here on my way up to North Dakota a couple of months ago, and at the time I wasn’t at all impressed. But I decided to give it a chance and took the detour for another look. I’m glad I did.
Gregory turned out to be a nice little town. With a population 1,295, it has a winery nearby, some attractive little houses, and some decent public facilities.
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| Gregory Middle School/Gregory High School Home of the Gorillas |
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| Gregory City Pool |
The pool was in a nice little park where the dogs and I walked around for a bit. I saw another Red-headed Woodpecker there.
Back on the road
On the road heading north, I passed an unpaved side road with a highway warning sign: “Gravel Windrow.” I’ve never seen that sign before.
I saw 3 wild turkeys standing under a tree. I know I keep saying “wild turkey” when "wild" should seem obvious because otherwise I’d be talking about a turkey farm or something domestic. But to me, an actual turkey being wild is such a wonderful concept I feel like it deserves a mention.
I saw several cows lying on the ground, and one had 2 calves lying right next to her. In another field I saw 2 foals in with a bunch of other horses. And in yet another field I saw lots of calves. This was apparently a fertile year for critters.
I came to an 8% grade on a downhill slope. Who says South Dakota’s flat?
South Dakota has a town named Reliance.
“Dignity”
I drove 13 miles on I-90 because where I wanted to go was a rest area on the interstate, and the only way to get there was via the interstate. I was looking for a statue named “Dignity.”
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| "Dignity" |
Her cloak moves in the wind, which there’s plenty of because it’s perched on a high hill over the Missouri River. The movement of the cloak isn’t as obvious as a flag flapping in the wind, but you can see small differences in these photos that aren’t just a result of the angle I took the photos from. I saw the back of the statue from the highway. I was fascinated with this statue, took photos from different angles, and then couldn’t decide which one I liked the best – because of her cloak moving. So I’m including them all.
This is the plaque at the base,
and this is the sign explaining how the statue is made.
The Making and Meaning of Dignity
I’d heard about her from the
chatty person at the Visitor Center when I first got to South Dakota. Good call.
Back on the road
Back on the road, I saw a sign:
Drop the Phone
Make it Home
South Dakota likes that one – I saw it several times here and there.
I was tired enough by this point that I just stayed on the interstate all the way to Mitchell. Part of the way, the speed limit is 80 mph. I wouldn’t have gone that speed in any case, but there was a very strong crosswind and I had a hard enough time staying in my lane at 65 mph.
I saw a flock of sheep. And I saw a few bikers westbound but lots of bikers eastbound. The Sturgis rally just runs a few days more, and I guess some folks are already getting out of town.
Mitchell
Coming into Mitchell, pop. 15,254, I saw a sign for Dakotafest, scheduled for August 17-18. I’m not planning to be here then, but I think it’d be interesting. They say it’s a program of IDEAg, and the festival is to “showcase agricultural products, services and technologies.” Sounds like a trade show to me. I like trade shows, like seeing how other industries work, how people earn money.
I saw a sign pointing me to the George McGovern Museum, which jarred me for a minute. And then my memory cranked into gear and I remembered that this former presidential candidate who was derailed by Nixon’s campaign came from South Dakota.
The James River runs through Mitchell. This is the same James River that I met up at Jamestown in North Dakota.
And to the campground, a few miles east of town.
After I got into my campsite, lots of things happened. First, I saw a chipmunk and noticed that it had several holes right at my campsite. I could only pray that it had enough sense to avoid Dexter and couldn’t figure out how on earth I’d be able to get the dogs out for walks with that chipmunk lurking.
Next, I noticed an unfortunate number of flies and had a hard time opening and closing the door fast enough to keep them out of the cabin.
The other event was in regard to my TV. When I checked in, I asked at the desk if they knew of anybody reliable in town who repaired TVs. I’d already looked online and hadn’t been able to find anybody. They said they might know somebody in the campground who could help.
Almost as soon as I was in my site and plugged in, a guy named Wayne came over and asked what kind of help I needed. He looked about my age – kind of a handyman type – and I explained my problem: about the TV being damaged and gradually not working, and about the swivel arm being broken, and what I thought my solution might be. He said he’d go get some tools and come back to help.
He came back with some tools and a boy named Riley, who I’m guessing was his grandson. They neither of them wore masks, which worried me quite a bit. But by then I’d noticed that on the list of campground rules, Number 1 was “THIS CAMPGROUND IS NOT A GUN-FREE ZONE.” That worried me quite a lot too. I mean, I’ve never thought about whether guns were allowed in a campground or not. In the more than 3 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve run across campgrounds here and there that said guns weren’t allowed, but usually nobody says anything about it one way or the other. For this place to make such a public proclamation about allowing them, and doing it in a way that sounded maybe snide or sarcastic to me, made me nervous.
Because of that, I was actually afraid to ask either of them to wear a mask to come into my home. I know that sounds weird. I’ve actually refused to let people in before, usually because of the virus but also because of my safety. But this time I couldn’t pull it off. I really wanted help with my TV and I really wanted to stay safe from the virus and I really believed if this guy was a buddy of the campground owners then he might well be pro-gun and possibly also anti-vaccine, and he was clearly anti-mask. My brain just got overloaded with too many ideas bouncing around in it, so I let them both in. Riley’s job was to keep the dogs occupied at the bedroom end of the RV.
Wayne took down my big TV and we discussed whether it was repairable. He and the campground owner, who’d come back by, agreed it was likely considered a throw-away (which just seems obscene – even the old TVs we had when I was a kid were repairable), but they said with all the computer stuff inside, they didn’t figure anyone would touch it. Which may explain why I couldn’t find a TV repair shop in Mitchell. Anyway, the owner took it off to dump in the trash – just a full-service campground – and Wayne started to mount the small TV in its place.
But then I thought about that arm that was still not really under control and afraid it’d swing this smaller TV around too, and that this smaller one wouldn’t be as easy to wedge in place with pillows as the bigger one had been – and so forth and so on and I finally just told him not to bother mounting it right now.
Still, despite the no mask and so forth, he’d solved a big headache for me and I was grateful and paid him $50 for his trouble, so he was grateful too.
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