I talked with a Walmart pharmacist during lunch today. He said sales of OTC sleep aids (mainly just diphenhydramine) are more than double this year over last. I have heard reports that nearly half of adults have trouble sleeping through the night this year. That's a cardinal sign of anxiety. By my nature I'm a "roamer." I love to travel, as does my wife but not quite to the same extent. We usually take three or four long trips every year, but not this one. I've been dealing with bouts of "cabin fever" off and on, a sort of anxiety. I suppose the one consolation I have is I live in South Dakota on the edge of a fairly unpopulated and open region. In a sense I have a huge "back yard" of thousands of square miles to wander and explore. There are no travel restrictions. My company allowed me to take the month of May off with the idea I could sit safely at home. Instead, I loaded up my holders with sheet film and my bottles with collodion & developer and began a systematic exploration of the narrow strip of South Dakota between I-29 and the Minnesota state line. This was a small area roughly 160x25 miles, or 4,000 square miles. It's filled with farms, small towns, and a lot of glacial lakes. I spent the entire month exploring this strip almost daily, returning home each night to process my film and keep my wife happy.
Mostly I kept to my self, but I inevitably ran into a cast of characters that inhabit places off the beaten path. In Kranzburg I talked with a Catholic priest who was just returning to his church after spending the day teaching his older parishioners how to Zoom. I noted there were more residents in the cemetery than in the town. In Astoria I found an old house on the edge of town that was surrounded by all kinds of junk and actual trash. As I was taking a photo of a junk car stuffed with trash a man walked up to me and said, "None of this is for sale!" No problem.
In Peever I met Tom who was running a Bobcat over the dirt street filling in pot holes. He's the mayor, public works employee, and he runs a wood working business across from the elevator. In Bemis I set up to take a photo of an abandoned house only to have the elderly owner pull up in her car to report she still lived there. In Goodwin I found an auto shop that looked like it was straight out of the 1920s! It was still in business--as a combination mechanic shop and bar. Bud Schultz, the owner, said it was the original Ford dealership in that part of the county. He was surrounded by a small herd of cats in his office.
I unintentionally met a number of interesting people and took several 4x5 or 8x10 b&w photos daily. There was a lot to see in this small sliver of the state and it took me a month to cover it. I wonder how long it would take me to explore the entire state in detail--all 77,100 square miles? On most weekends I've been driving 300-500 miles and that's been enough to reach the eastern half of the state. Now, the western half is enticing me as winter closes in. I did manage to talk my wife into a five day expedition to western South Dakota, eastern Wyoming and Montana earlier this month. That seems to have only increased my interest!
Kent in SD
