A Ride to Pierre - 1

March 21, 2010

When I was living on a Native American reservation for the five years I did in South Dakota, the very first time I’d leave town would be to relieve cabin fever and accept a ride to visit and grocery shop in Pierre

Pierre, pronounced pier, or peer is the capital of that gorgeous state. Although there was really only one big grocery store on the rez, it was nothing in size nor did it have many of the products offered compared to bigger cities. In 1995 mmy home town had about 500 residents.

Five years later when being asked to facilitate a mmusic mural for and with a grammar school in Michigan, a Kroger’s chain store was the very first grocery store I had seen other than the one mentioned a little later in this blog.

I remember that day in 2001 as if it were yesterday. Although I was raised in a big city, years later living in a small one for five years, I stood at the cheese department while gaping in awe and amazement at the amount of choices of just CHEESE for about ten minutes.

I picked up and looked at many of the packages with names on them that I’ve never seen nor heard of before. It was like finding a treasure chest on a desert island except for the process of picking one and paying for it was the next step.

It just presented to mme once again how not to take anything in this life for granted. That thought came to mme more times than I can count while living on the rez. Most of the people there have a really hard life; not all mmined you, but most.

Two of the poorest counties in the U.S. are in S.D. The Pine Ridge reservation and The Cheyenne River Sioux reservations are those places. I lived in the small administrative town of the CRST. The CRST is about the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut.

There was another place for grocery shopping in the immediate environs of the tiny administrative and the main town of the rez. It was a much smaller family owned business about one fifth the size of the main market owned and operated by the tribe.

The tribe had mostly the same group of people, a committee in charge of the telephone company, a propane company, and all sorts of tribal run businesses that really kept a good eye and hands on their businesses when and after they took over the mostly failing and poorly run enterprises.

One person in particular was J.D.; one of the main people if not the main person period that was responsible in turning the tribes businesses into profitable and on going or growing concerns. A good man with plenty of knowledge to accomplish anything he set his mind to in order to help his people. Kenny W-Es, Bill J are other ones.

The big grocery market was a tribal run business the committee had taken over in order to keep it growing. I think J.D. was also a rancher but don’t quote mme on that. Like many people on the rez, ranching and farming are mostly the way of life in that getting to be less remote area.

Of course it’s been growing and becoming less remote for the last one hundred years or so. There used to be 14 lumber yards there in the early days when the government checker boarded reservations. That was done to try and assimilate the Native Peoples thereby once again taking land away that was initially given to them.

After building a house and settling in to a singular kind of lifestyle almost immediately I mostly hung out in the tiny town or stuck close to it. I had met and made enough friends and acquaintances without needing to go too far in any direction for any reason whatsoever.

There was one video store; three businesses that sold gas but only one could work mechanically on a vehicle. Once you’ve been to a place where there’s only one grocery store, one that can fill most of your needs, you may find out that having a few dozen more choices isn’t really necessary unless something specific is needed for a reason.

Maybe you can relate being on a desert or a desert island where one source of water is the only place you’ll find it. It’s all we need really. Now if you want different kinds of coloured or flavoured water, that’s another story. Competition is good and monopoly’s are not. OK?

Living on the rez at that time was a very comfortable environment. I had gone there for one specific reason while hoping that if I stayed there long enough I’d find the others. I was glad to be left alone to do the things I had wanted to do for a very, very long time; years in fact.

After a while I did get a wander lust because as I’ve said, I hadn’t traveled too far in any direction. Friends or families I had met often tried to talk mme into traveling with them for a weekend shopping in the capital city of Pierre, South Dakota. To this city boy it’s a long ride.

I had always bowed out with a thank you anyway mostly because I didn’t want to travel the seventy five miles one way it took to just go shopping. That was like going to another state where I came from.

Not only that but most of the time spent would be in a car with too many people crammed together before all the packages that couldn’t fit in the trunk were piled on laps and any place one could find with no room to breathe.

That didn’t happen all the time but when it did the obvious choice for mme at least was to just shop locally. I know or knew many people went to do other things besides shopping. I guess I got to be more like a hermit without realising or being too aware of it until one of mmy friends pointed that out.

I admitted it at the time but thought nothing of it because I was perfectly satisfied doing what I was doing. That’s all I needed. It wasn’t that much later when I took mmy friend’s words to heart. That and the fact that I got a bad case of cabin fever. I decided to expand the horizons a bit to see what I could see or do in the capital.

It was when that same friend asked mme again to take a little trip, “to go shopping for groceries or whatever,” were her words. This time I accepted gladly. It only took a year or more but here we come Pierre.
Sheesh, what’s with the seventy five miles anyway? Couldn’t they put that city and its airport a little closer to us? Is what I used to think.

She drove and I sat in the passenger seat while looking at everything that passed by in a whiz. Yes, a whiz. When a person doesn’t really travel that much or lives in a small slow town; unless one uses a highway everyday, which I didn’t; seventy five miles an hour is like flying in a jet compared to what a calmer ride would be in the horse and buggy speed of people like the Amish; night and day difference.

To Be Continued: