“Here is where the map should fold.”

Resilience in the wind.

Missouri River in Chamberlain, SD.

October 17, 2023.

It is a day when news of the world is almost too much to bear.

A doctor is on the radio. She has spent the past week and a half trying to identify scores of mutilated bodies. She feels a shift in the equilibrium of the world. For her, good no longer balances out evil. Still, she perseveres.

I am on I-90 crossing the Missouri River in Chamberlain, South Dakota. My mind is on home. It is straight ahead across the right side of the map. No exits I need until Albany.

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John Steinbeck, as he relates in Travels With Charley (1962), always imagined as a young man that the West began at the North Dakota state line in Fargo. It was where the page in his map book folded.

But it wasn’t until he was driving cross-country with his dog Charley many years later that he realized that the West actually begins at the Missouri River. They crossed over in Bismarck, two hundred miles from the state line.

“I came upon it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.”

— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

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For me this day, the temperature was in the mid-70’s, unusually hot for October. Everyone I had talked to was sure that it was the last warm day before the seasons changed. That feeling was compounded by a strong wind blowing steadily out of the Rockies. High wind warnings were forecast across the Dakotas for constant 55 mph winds all that evening until the next day.

With that wind pushing me along as I drove over the Missouri River bridge, it felt that I really was leaving the west behind.

Things seemed heavy.

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Chamberlain sits at a point where the Lewis and Clark expedition rested for several days in September, 1804 before traveling farther west. I guess it’s a good spot for resting. The state of South Dakota put a highway rest area here.

The photograph above is taken from that rest area, looking back across the river. One can see the difference between the two sides that Steinbeck noticed.

As I tried to hold my camera steady on the bluff, there were several wind gusts that nearly blew me off my feet.

But the view from here is only part of a powerful story.

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On the same hill stands “Dignity: of Earth & Sky.”

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She is 50 feet tall and looks to the east.

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Made by the sculptor Dale Lamphere, she honors the Dakota and Lakota cultures.

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She is dressed how a woman from the 1850’s would dress.

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Her quilt flutters in the wind like aspen leaves.

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She is resilient in the wind. She is a reminder of how we must balance the pain of others with our own.

I think of doctors and nurses in Israel and Gaza, thankful for their resilience. I think of my own sister who is struggling with challenges of her own, thankful for her resilience as well.

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As I brace myself against the wind, a sharp-shinned hawk rides up and over the bluff, in front of my eyes. I turn my head as she rises up into the sun. She one of literally hundreds — maybe thousands — of her species I have seen on this trip since I left home six weeks ago from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains to the Rockies and the North Coast. She is heading south and she is quickly gone. She is resilience in the wind.

Travel safely, travel well, she seems to say.