{"id":797,"date":"2017-08-26T21:04:26","date_gmt":"2017-08-27T04:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/?p=797"},"modified":"2017-09-21T20:32:35","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T03:32:35","slug":"michelangelos-missiles-and-mauvaises-terres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/?p=797","title":{"rendered":"Michelangelos, Missiles, and Mauvaises Terres<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

So far, South Dakota is pretty great.<\/p>\n

I mean, sure, there\u2019s a lot of nothing<\/em> here. Grassy prairies stretching as far as the eye can see, without even a tree or ramshackle old barn to break the horizon between land and sky. But we\u2019ve also discovered a lot of something<\/em> here… and some of that something is, well, really something<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Big Thumbs Up for Big Sioux<\/h2>\n

Our first two nights in South Dakota were at the Big Sioux Recreation Area outside of Sioux Falls. This is a really pretty campground just a few miles from the largest city in the state. We had a nice, tree-shaded site that backed onto a walking and biking trail on the bank of the Big Sioux River. As we pulled in, there was a feral cat strolling down the trail, so Zora naturally spent the next two days monitoring all passersby for additional feline activity. Alas, we never saw kitty again.<\/p>\n

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The falls in Sioux Falls.<\/p><\/div>We were staying for two nights, so we spent the better part of Tuesday exploring the city of Sioux Falls, the centerpiece of which is the park with the waterfalls that give the city its name. It\u2019s a beautiful spot with rolling green hills, the ruins of an old stone mill, and of course the river tumbling over a series of rocky terraces. We spent a couple relaxing hours there, had lunch, and then googled \u201cthings to do in Sioux Falls.\u201d We learned that there are two bronze casts of Michelangelo sculptures in town: Moses (original sculpture in Rome) and David, which we had seen a few years ago in Florence. So we decided to visit them.<\/p>\n

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Moses, horns and all.<\/p><\/div>

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David checks out the Sioux Falls skyline.<\/p><\/div>The Moses casting is on the campus of Augustana College (go Vikings!). It\u2019s especially interesting because Big Mo has horns. No, not musical instruments, but real devil or goat horns on the top of his head. According to Wikipedia, this is the result of a translation error in the Latin Vulgate Bible, where \u201chis face shone\u201d (after meeting God) was mistranslated as \u201chis face had horns.\u201d Pretty big error, huh? Makes you wonder about some of the other stuff in that old book so many people seem to rely on for direction.<\/p>\n

After checking out horny Moses, we drove across town to see David\u2019s, um, man parts. Rumor has it that his unmentionables, even undersized as they are (cut the guy some slack for shrinkage, he was squaring off against a giant!), caused quite a stir when the bronze casting of Michelangelo\u2019s marble original was unveiled in Sioux Falls in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

A Different Kind of Silo<\/h2>\n

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This launch facility is closed, but hundreds of others are still operational\u2014and still using 1960s vintage equipment. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p><\/div>After two nights at Big Sioux, we drove due west on I-90 toward the Badlands area, with a brief stop to gawk at the Corn Palace in the town of Mitchell. We\u2019d seen a lot of grain silos in the Midwest, but now we were headed to a Minuteman missile silo. I had a reservation for a tour of an ICBM launch facility that had been preserved as tourist attraction after the START arms reduction treaties of the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

It was an interesting experience, stepping into the underground control room where \u201cmissiliers\u201d had been just a couple key-turns away from annihilating the world I grew up in (although I learned that actually two separate<\/em> launch centers had to independently receive and confirm launch commands in order to initiate Armageddon). The entire facility has been preserved exactly as it was on the day it was deactivated in 1993, right down to the issues of Newsweek<\/em> and Time<\/em> in the Day Room with cover photos of David Koresh and the burning Waco compound.<\/p>\n

It was the last tour of the day and I was the only American in the group, so I got to help the ranger take down the American flag at the launch facility while the tourists from Europe and the couple from Saskatchewan snapped photos.<\/p>\n

Baking in The Badlands<\/h2>\n

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Those sure are some baaad lands.<\/p><\/div>After pondering nuclear desolation at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, we headed a few miles down the road to a landscape that looked like the apocalypse had already happened there: Badlands National Park. The area got its name from French trappers, who called the canyons full of wrinkly and pointed rock formations \u201cmauvaises terres a traverser,\u201d or \u201cbad lands to cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maureen was relieved when we pulled into our campsite, because it meant she didn\u2019t have to listen to me sing the same Bruce Springsteen song over and over anymore, as I had for the past few hours. The campground was nothing special\u2014just a loop road with wide spots to pull over on the shoulder of the pavement. And our assigned site was smack on a small hill, which made for some white knuckle moments unhitching the trailer and hoping the wheel chocks would win out against gravity. Plus, it was 90 degrees with no trees for shade anywhere in the campground.<\/p>\n

The rest of the park was fantastic, however. Zora and I saw a really informative ranger talk about prairie dogs (Maureen was battling some kind of flu) the first night, and then saw hundreds of actual prairie dogs the next day on a drive through the park. (The little stinkers didn\u2019t seem impressed when I shouted at them with trivia from the ranger talk the night before: \u201cDo you guys know that scientists regard your vocalizations as a sophisticated language that allows you to alert each other about the specific appearance of potential threats near your burrows?\u201d) We also saw amazing, multicolored mounds and spires of layered rock, a coyote stalking a buffalo, and a bighorn sheep. But Zora really only cared about those damned prairie dogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So far, South Dakota is pretty great. I mean, sure, there\u2019s a lot of nothing here. Grassy prairies stretching as far as the eye can see, without even a tree or ramshackle old barn to break the horizon between land and sky. But we\u2019ve also discovered a lot of something here… and some of that …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Michelangelos, Missiles, and Mauvaises Terres<\/em>’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-midwest-meander-2017"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":833,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions\/833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}