In the heart of July, a child’s westward trek to South Dakota, leaves behind the coastal waters and rolling hills as they flatten out through the roads in Ohio; traded in for searing heat, rippling grain fields, blue flax and corn in good seasons…burnt, crisping drought at other times and the odd wooden clapboard floors in small towns with ancient names. The James River disappears into dried mud.
One gas pump, a root beer float and cash only, please; a sign warns ‘last stop for the next hundred miles’; the land swallowing us gone as our car pulls back out onto the pink ribbon of highway.
Drought feels and knows…rutted mud so dried out and thick that tripping and injury awaits the child in careless flip flops, the bruised soles of small feet tell the story. The crops, struggling up against a steady prairie wind which beats back and all around a single row of sparsely planted Russian olive trees; one row of these green gems holds the line determinedly against all odds. There is nothing in any direction for the next hundred miles and we are alone.
The radio plays quietly with static, fuzzy crop and herd reports…and we watch the land out of a tired and melting window. The sun has made a half round, shifting from one side of the car to the other and the day readies to wind down.
Then…in our stupor, there rises up ahead the figure of a lone Native American runner with a long black braid…strong, striding with singular purpose along the edge of the burnt tar, at the edge of pink stone quartzite…as our single car quickly, in all that incomprehensible vast sea of prairie and wheat and sweet air…sails past and disappears into a wall of bright, shimmering, unbearable heat. The runner with singular purpose vanishes behind us.
690 Saint Paul 