I had come home twenty years too late, my childhood doctor Barbara Spears declared. It was primarily to see my grandmother that I took my wife and daughter back to South Dakota. But while there I put together a dinner with some of my parents’ friends from the years we’d lived in Pierre: two or three couples who might tell a few good stories about life in the dry hills that range along the Missouri.
It wasn’t to be, Dr. Spears explained, and my mother and father’s friends around the table all nodded sagely: The blood had grown thin by the time it reached them, all the great South Dakota characters were gone, my parents’ generation had no tales to compare to the tales of their own parents — who had by now mostly passed on.
Of course, not ten minutes later, a lawyer named Bob Hofer began a story about the time he, my father, and Mike McClure were working for the attorney general and living together in Pierre. They’d just won a big case, and, after celebrating, Bob had gone to sleep, only to be awakened by explosions and cheers from the living room. Stumbling out, he found my father and Mike shooting a rifle into a stack of Montgomery-Ward catalogues and taking bets on how many pages the bullets would penetrate.
“What did you do?” Priscilla Schmidt looked up from dinner to ask. And in surprise, Bob answered, “I saw they weren’t shooting at me, so I went back to bed.” (As a way of easing into some political interviews I did on the trip, I mentioned this story to several people, forgetting what a small state South Dakota is. The governor, a previous governor’s sister, a Black Hills lawyer, and a former U.S. senator in Rapid City all promptly launched into their own accounts of those wild days. Mostly the stories involved escapades in college bars, courtroom antics in a state where cattle rustling carried much the same penalty as murder, and the attempt by a bunch of riotous young lawyers to hijack a 1962 Republican convention and get my great-uncle Joe elected to the Senate.)
Still, I knew what Dr. Spears meant — except I thought it was only in my own day that time had run down, only with me that stories had failed.
Perhaps it is simply the human condition, a seeing of one’s self from the inside and one’s parents from the outside, to believe in the falling away of generations: “Now take away my life, O Lord,” Elijah sat beneath a juniper tree and wept, “for I am not better than my fathers.”
Or perhaps there is something in the Dakota landscape that makes it seem especially so. To drive through that hard country — coming upon each little town with its white houses and carefully planted trees — is to be forced to recognize how much the past cost, for each of those towns was claimed from the prairie, grave by grave. I had breakfast with an old rancher from the hills northwest of Pierre. Once, during a blizzard in the 1940s, the furnace failed, and he had to decide whether to drive his wife and sick baby fifty miles to town. If they stayed, the child would die. If they went, and didn’t make it through the blinding snow, they all would die. Each South Dakota generation faced choices that were cleaner and harder than the next generation’s, because the consequences were more deadly.
Then again, my life may feel thinner than my parents’ because it actually is, my stories weaker because they are. My elementary-school classmate Terry Hipple runs the Capital Journal in Pierre, the fourth generation of his family to publish the town’s newspaper. And over coffee he joked about how he was reduced to printing advertising inserts while his grandfather had cowed the state legislature with editorials and seen central South Dakota as his personal domain.
But at least Terry still lives in a world that can sustain thick friendships — and thick animosities. Last January, an unpopular local businessman named Robert Parsons, exasperated by the guano, shot a Canada goose on his lawn, a block from the governor’s mansion. Parsons was right, of course, that thousands of wild geese ravage Pierre every year. (My own grandfather is partly to blame, having released the first of them to winter on Capitol Lake.) Nonetheless, Parsons was charged for his goosicide with reckless discharge of a firearm and (only in South Dakota) failure to use a shotgun in the hunting of game birds. And for weeks, the Capital Journal was filled with gleeful letters about the scandal.
It is the thickness of things — of time measured in generations, forward and back — that my parents had in South Dakota and I lack here in Washington. Whatever we gain in breadth, whatever friendships we form, whatever adventures we have, there is a price: the kind of rootedness that stories have in a world where everyone knows your mother and father. I feel it most when I take my own daughter back to the place she’ll never know to call home.
J. BOTTUM
