Found in America’s Bellybutton:

SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA--This report comes form the heart and soul of the great American republic.

Fortunately for the Americans, that is not Manhattan Island, still less Hollywood or Washington DC. It’s a place named Buffalo, South Dakota, where much nicer Americans live. American scientists say the geographic centre of their nation is just outside this almost invisible settlement (one motel, made of mobile trailers) that is a bit north of the great I-90 Interstate Highway which connects Seattle and Boston. This is a long way north in the continental US but that’s because of the drag of the vast territory of Alaska.

True enough, being the geographic centre of anything is not proof of its high merit. If it were, my soul would be found in my bellybutton. But the geographic curiosity of little Buffalo grabbed your attention for a minute, didn’t it, and that’s good enough.

Now, as to the soul of America, what can the traveller discover here at Bullseye America, the car droning across all those empty acres with the cruise control on 80? National Public Radio has a lot to say. NPR is the American form of CBC except that it is supported largely by donations volunteered by the listeners, which may be a help. There are now few parts of the continental US where you are out of range of an NPR station which combines local news with national interests.

In addition to NPR, you may hold a finger to the public pulse by reading thin local newspapers in roadside cafes, mournful frame buildings huddled even in the springtime against the coming snows. They arouse memories of Sally Ann huts in the Second World War where the friendship was so much better than the food.

The heartbeat?

In Sioux Falls we learn that a South Dakota Penitentiary inmate, being irritated by the presence of a cell mate, killed him. In the new nature of things, this does not lead to a court trial until there has been the ritual of plea bargaining. Sure enough, a bargain has been struck. If he will plead guilty to murder, the state will not insist on his living in a two bed cell. Apart from the man who is dead, who lost, it is very difficult to tell who won this dispute.

Political correctness overwhelms even the windy plains. South Dakota has prohibited all public smoking. It’s not particularly noticeable in this cafe, but it’s true, anyway.

The United Nations sponsored a study of second hand smoke and found that no conclusive evidence that it is harmful to non-smokers who breathe it but that doesn’t matter here any more than it does in Vancouver or New York. Bans and lawsuits against tobacco companies are trendy and South Dakota wants to prove it is as trendy as Frisco.

Unfortunately there is another law called the Law of Unexpected Consequences. Here the City Council decided to exempt drinking establishments from the no smoking rule. Presumably if you’re ruining your constitution by boozing, one more form of self abuse can’t matter.

The result has been that businesses that had never served alcohol, such as tractor lots and catfish shops, started taking out beer licences so their customers could light up without being bothered by with pieces of blue paper served by the gendarmerie. So council’s solution is the require people who take out beer licences to actually shove some beer into their customers and not merely stick the licence on the salesroom wall.

Again, it’s a bit difficult to see what the government has accomplished here for the general good if, in the effort to bad the Filthy Weed they force the public to partake of the Demon Rum.

How long, steep and twisting is the path of the true reformer. However he perserveres, for no do-gooder can rest peacefully in his bed by night knowing there is still a cell vacant in the prison system.

The news here is better for pheasants than for people. Shortly after the Second World War pheasants outnumbered the cars on these roads. But human improvements overtook them. In the many years of good crop prices, farmers sought to cultivate every square meter they owned. First they started ploughing closer to fence lines, then they ploughed right up against the fences and finally they took out the fences and tamed the last thin strip of wild prairie. The birds were left homeless.

Partly because of farm prices, partly because of a rebirth of respect for the land and its original inhabitants, the government now pays farmers here $150 an acre to return cropland to its original condition, undisciplined, unregulated, quite wild. Does it never occur to legislators that there are citizens who feel the way the pheasants do? -

First of a series on a transcontinental trip.

May/03