feature the center of the world, by peter s. felknor 
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o me, it seems like the center of the world. And, though
I’ve never lived there, it feels more like home than any place I have lived.
I had driven Interstate 90 back and forth across the
country more times than I could count, yet I had never turned off the
interstate in southwestern Minnesota until I took a road trip in the early
1990s with my fellow meteorology student Chad Johnson and my (then) very young
son Michael. The idea was to get Chad out of Wisconsin so he could see a little
more of the world, especially the Great Plains that fascinated us both due to
the bizarre and extreme weather characteristic of the region. And it would be a
good experience for little Mike as well.
We had planned to camp in state parks. Well, it had been
quite a few years since I’d done that, and apparently quite a few years since
you could just drive into a state park during high summer and be assured of a
campsite. It was now well after dark and we had been turned away by one full-up
state park in South Dakota and another just across the border in Minnesota.
Hastily consulting our maps with a flashlight, we finally located Split Rock Creek State Park, between Pipestone and Jasper near
Minnesota’s southwest corner.
It was almost ten o’clock and the kid was (understandably)
getting cranky; we’d driven well over five hundred miles that day. “Sorry,
we’re full,” said the ranger, a lanky, pleasant fellow named Darnell
Christians. Mike registered his protest from the back seat (“Oh no, not again!”),
and Darnell raised a hand to stop us before we could drive off, probably to
Sioux Falls and a motel room.
“We’ve got this picnic area back there by the lake,” he
said. “It’s not really a campground, but I don’t see any reason why you
couldn’t pitch a tent there for the night. You’d just have to use one of the
grills in the picnic area instead of building a fire.”
“We’re too tired to cook anyway,” I said. “Hey, thanks a
lot. We’ll take it.”
Saved. We pitched camp under the light of a strong moon and
ate a belated dinner of tortilla chips and salsa. It was not difficult getting to
sleep that night, even though it was very hot.
The next morning we were awakened by a cacophony of bird
calls as the sun rose over Split Rock Lake.
I was also stunned by the beauty of the park, a tranquil
little island of trees and water amid the enormous sweeping vastness of the
Plains.
Upon Darnell’s recommendation, we motored a few miles south
into Jasper and took on supplies at the Jasper Mini-Mall. The town,
although I’d never been there, sounded vaguely familiar. What was it? Finally I
remembered: Jasper was where that classic old tornado photograph had been taken, way back in 1927.
Another notable thing about the area that became obvious in
the daylight was the preponderance of Sioux quartzite, a purplish stone that seemed to be everywhere; big
boulders were visible in the farm fields and quartzite building blocks had been
extensively used in the downtown areas of both Jasper and Pipestone. But
everything here was dwarfed by the immensity of the landscapes and the
relatively tiny works of men, the farms like specks and even the towns
appearing as little more than boats adrift in an endless sea.
Darnell Christians didn’t know it then, but his kindness to
that late-night trio from Wisconsin made a lasting impression. I would return
with my son nearly every year to Split Rock Creek State Park until he went off
to college in New Orleans. And then there was a couple of years when I did not
visit the center of the world, and as a result I felt a little less centered
myself.
Enter my fiancée and her nine-year old daughter. Also born
and bred in Wisconsin, JoAnn and Sydney had never been to the Great Plains either
(for some reason, this singularly beautiful part of North America ranks at the
top of few people’s lists of tourist destinations, even if they don’t live too
far away). And although Sydney had had plenty of experience with the Girl
Scouts, her mother had—incredibly—never gone camping. Deprivation! Now I was a man on a
mission: JoAnn and Sydney were going to get a guided tour of the northern
Plains, and JoAnn was going to experience life in a tent.
(Yes, we have a strong relationship.)
We set out during the last week in August and reached Split
Rock Creek in midafternoon. The weather was absolutely gorgeous; temps in the
low seventies, few clouds, and (amazingly) hardly any wind. Almost as
ubiquitous as the Sioux quartzite, wind farms dot the countryside of western Minnesota, and a new one had
been built just east of Split Rock Creek. The blades stood eerily motionless as
we pitched camp and tried to absorb the odd fact that, except for one other
family, we seemed to be the only people in the entire state park. Naturally, I
had made a campsite reservation over the Internet several weeks before we left,
thereby guaranteeing that we would not need it.
By the time the sun had gone down and we had a fire built,
the air had turned noticeably chilly. Of course we indulged in the time-honored
tradition of roasting hot dogs and marshmallows—it was JoAnn’s first camping trip, after all—and listened to a Bob Marley CD,
bringing a little bit of Jamaica to the Plains. Our “neighbors,” who looked to
be an academic couple from the Twin Cities and their three young children,
seemed a little worried when I followed the Bob Marley with some Waylon
Jennings. Oh well.
We had no trouble getting to sleep in our little canvas
(nylon?) house, which made me remember other camping trips when it was
freezing, or the wind was blowing a gale, or it poured down rain and stuff got
wet, or the time my son and I camped at the top of Powder River Pass in Wyoming
in late June and awoke to find a foot of snow on the ground. Being as we were
way out on the Plains, any of those scenarios—except for, perhaps, the snow—was
always a distinct possibility at this time of year, and I was grateful that
JoAnn and Sydney were experiencing the most beautiful weather I had ever seen
in the swath of states between Saskatchewan and Texas.
The next morning we noticed that our neighbors had left; apparently
we were the only people in the park. We hadn’t even seen a park ranger. Well
alackaday, it meant that if nothing else, we had the showers to ourselves. (I
am a highly seasoned veteran of Boy Scout camp, YMCA camp, and numerous
non-affiliated camping sorties… and let me tell you, camping facilities with indoor showers are to be highly recommended.
Especially when traveling with women.) After a quick swing by the Jasper
Mini-Mall for breakfast—yes, we cheated, because white-chocolate-with-macadamia-nut
cookies are just too hard to make at camp—we set out for Pipestone National
Monument.
Only a few miles northwest of Split Rock Creek, this small
but impressive site is an absolute must-see for any visitor to the area. “Pipestone,” or Catlinite (after the renowed Western artist
George Catlin) is a very fine mudstone that occurs in stratified beds
surrounded by Sioux quartzite. This is the stone that Plains Indians used to
fashion their ceremonial pipes, and as such the small quarries at the national
monument are still sacred to several Native American tribes that have extracted
the pipestone for hundreds of years and continue to do so today. In fact, the
quarries were considered a “demilitarized zone” where even tribes that were
age-old enemies agreed to suspend hostilities while they mined the sacred
stone.
It is probably impolite to hover over the Indians as they
work the quarries, but not to worry: during the summer season highly skilled
Native artisans fashion pipes inside the visitor center and are more than happy
to answer questions. This also gives the visitor a chance to see the tools that
are used to work pipestone and the fascinating process by which blocks of stone
are turned into bowls and pipestems. Unfortunately, we learned from one of the
craftsmen that the pipemaking skill is a dying art; one must be a registered
tribal member to be eligible to apprentice, and too few young people have shown
an interest or a willingness to commit to the lengthy apprenticeship.
In addition to the quarries and the spacious visitor
center, the nature loop around the grounds is also not to be missed. An easy
hike of under two miles, there are signs pointing out unusual local vegetation
and a huge, far-distant tree festooned with Native American prayer flags. The trail also winds past the
beautiful Winnewissa Falls (with its dramatic nearby rock formations) and a
quarry exhibit that illustrates how small— and, often, nearly inaccesible—the veins of pipestone are,
especially to people who could not rely on modern excavating equipment.
Although occasional signs exhorted us not to do so, a
couple of times we found ourselves wandering off the main trail without, um,
really meaning to—in the process horrifying our former neighbors from Split Rock Creek
who just happened to be at the national monument at the same time we were and
whose Sydney-aged daughter looked for all the world like she wanted to jump
ship and join our family instead. (It probably didn’t help that her mother
insisted upon reading every single trail sign aloud in a grating, whiny
schoolmarm voice.) But we paid for our transgressions. Soon we had our first
encounter with the unquestionable bane of southwestern Minnesota: the
Plains Prickly Pear Cactus.
“Hold still, JoAnn,” I said. “You’ve got a burr attached to
your sock.” I reached down and grabbed at the “burr”—which promptly proceeded to bite
me. Hard.
“Owww! What the—”
“Whoa,” JoAnn said. “You’re bleeding.”
“What is that
thing? It ain’t no burr.”
Sydney had peered down to look closer at the strange,
greenish object. “Actually, it’s a cactus.”
“Sydney. They don’t have cactus in Minnesota,” said her
stepfather (the renowned botanist).
“Look, Pete, they’re everywhere,”
JoAnn exclaimed, pointing at the ground. And they were. Little clumps of the
buggers. Just like the ones you see for sale in clay planters outside of
Wal-Mart. No doubt about it: It was cactus. And it was aggressive cactus to boot. I [very…
carefully…] picked a couple more from JoAnn’s sweater. She had to remove
one from the seat of my pants, saving me from being launched into orbit when I
sat down at the wheel of the car.
“Now we know why they said to stay on the trail,” JoAnn
sighed.
After rising early, hiking a lot, and being attacked by
cactus, we were famished. While cruising around downtown Pipestone (pop. 4384)—also pictured at the top of this article—JoAnn spotted Lange’s Cafe on Highway 23. “Hey, this looks like the
kind of place we used to see when we were kids,” she said. “Bet they’ve got
real good food. Let’s check it out.” I had already learned to trust JoAnn’s
impressive ability to pick out a great restaurant based upon certain shifiting intangibles
that only she understands, because she has never steered me wrong. However,
with Lange’s Café she outdid herself.
The food was exactly like what Mom used to
make, provided, of course, that your mom had the culinary skill of a four-star
French chef and the tastes of a dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner. As I dug lustily
through my pot roast, I was pleased to discover that the average local had
figured that they’d drive seventy-seven
miles to eat at Lange’s. Heck, on the East Coast, that would be about like
driving from New York to Philly just to have dinner. Lange’s also features an
in-house bakery that is, as a New Yorker might say, to die for. My best guess
is that this bakery was responsible for those incredibly delectable white-chocolate-macadamia-nut
cookies we’d scored in Jasper.
Back at Split Rock Creek, we did finally
see a ranger (a friendly woman who let me know that Darnell had been reassigned
to a nearby state park), but we still had no fellow campers. This was nearly
unbelievable, because the weather continued to be picture-perfect. It is very
difficult to go more than twenty-four hours on the Plains without some kind of
weather that will get a camper’s attention in a hurry, but we didn’t even have humidity to contend with. Another lovely
night to build a fire, listen to music, and turn in early. As I fell asleep I
heard the howl and clatter of a freight train on the nearby tracks and wondered
what it would be like to be a railroad engineer roaring across the prairies in
the middle of the night.
For our last full day of vacation before
heading home, we decided to take a jog over to South Dakota. I had mentioned
that my son and I had, unbeknownst to us, stumbled upon the “Little Town on the
Prairie” hometown of famed novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder on one of our trips
together. I had never read her books, but I did know that she was a
well-regarded American writer (not to mention that, eventually, a television
series was based upon her work, perhaps the ultimate imprimatur of an
ever-fickle public).
De Smet, South Dakota sits smack in the middle of my
favorite part of the state, the vast, wild region of prairies and glacial pothole
lakes that begins just past the border west of Pipestone.
Photo by South Dakota Tourism
There is a real power to the land here, where
America truly begins to open up and the more congested, “civilized” world to
the east becomes a fast-fading memory. The vistas are astonishing enough today;
when Laura Ingalls was a girl in the 1870s and 1880s, they must have been
overwhelming.
We spent a pleasant afternoon in De Smet, taking
the walkabout tour conducted by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society which I unabashedly recommend,
even having never read her books (I just kept my mouth shut on the tour since
JoAnn and Sydney and the others in our group were all familiar with Laura and
her family—and one kid, a twelve-year-old
boy, seemed to be a genuine Laura Ingalls scholar).
Back across a hundred miles of glacial pothole country, a
beautiful painted Plains sunset arching across the skies behind us. In the
newspapers and on the radio over the past couple of days, we had heard the
increasingly ominous news of what was happening a thousand miles to our south
as Hurricane Katrina enveloped New Orleans (and during a hasty nighttime call
placed from the lonely telephone booth at Split Rock Creek, I had made sure
that my son, about to return to Tulane University, had canceled his flight from
Madison to New Orleans). By the time we had stopped in Le Mars, Iowa to indulge
in some Blue Bunny Ice Cream, it was clear that the Crescent City was in very
serious trouble.
That all seemed far, far away as JoAnn, Sydney and I made
our way back home. For all three of us, our sojourn to the Great Plains had
been like a dream… a very pleasant dream.
Photo of Pipestone Commercial Historic District
courtesy Lorraine Draper and Pipestone County Museum, via PipestoneMinnesota.com
Photo of Split Rock Creek State Park, Minnesota: Peter
Felknor
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