Introduction
2017: A Last Trip West
Montgomery County traffic, Cirrus Four-three-five Sierra Romeo taking Runway one-four, VFR departure to the west. Montgomery.
DEB FALLOWS
And with that, we were off, flying away from frigid Washington, D.C., and its political postelection turmoil, on a southerly route to California.
We had flown nearly one hundred thousand miles in nearly four years in our small plane, with Jim as pilot and me in the right seat. We began in my home territory of the Upper Midwest, then headed over to Maine and flew south through New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to Georgia and Florida. We swept farther through the Deep South, to Texas and the Southwest, up the Central Valley of California to Oregon and Washington, and closed the loop after leaving Montana. All the while we snaked in and out of the so-called flyover country, through Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and much more.
We have landed in dozens of towns and cities along the way, anticipating in each of them local stories that would organize themselves into some kind of composed narrative about the backbone and character of the region and maybe beyond that, to help explain the character of the country. We began by looking for towns with positive energy, with signs of rebound from some kind of shock or shift, like a mine or factory that had closed or waves of people who’d departed or newcomers who’d arrived. We ended up adding towns with down-and-out reputations where we truly feared for what we might find. Life upon landing was never quite what we’d planned.
We have stayed in towns for weeks at a time. We have often revisited them, following threads from one person, or one group or town institution or movement, to the next, settling into the local rhythm. We have gone to town plays and musicals, sat in on civic meetings, hung out at coffee shops and brewpubs, spent days at schools, libraries, and ball games, taken tours of downtowns, visited factories, start-ups, and community college classes, taken boat rides and bike rides, swum in local public pools and run on high school tracks, borrowed cars, and stayed in motels, private homes, and one-off eco-hotels. We remained long enough to begin to imagine how much we didn’t know, but also to appreciate the unusual opportunity we’ve had, in seeing a broader sampling of modern America’s realities than most of its citizens will ever have a chance to do.
This time we were heading to Jim’s hometown of Redlands, in the orange-growing country of Southern California, to write this book. Our final flight west would mark both a leave-taking from frenetic Washington, D.C., and a homecoming. After so many miles, we knew that flight in a small plane is rarely routine. There are dramas when you’re airborne: weather, birds, parachute jumpers, mechanical blips, crop dusters, and drones. And perspectives unfold among the clouds or over the sights below: rangy forests, tamed farmlands, strings of quarries, hours of desert, well-defined prisons, pop-up small towns.
Our departure was not auspicious. Cold, wind, snow, and icy conditions in Washington gave us a few more days to organize at home and winnow the next six months’ belongings into the 140 extra pounds the plane could carry besides us and a lot of fuel. Clothes, flight gear, electronics, emergency supplies, water, books, a little food.
By now, I knew Travels with Charley the way some people know the Bible, and I was more than a little envious that Steinbeck could stock his trusty outfitted truck Rocinante without limit, including what he described as “far too many clothes” and a week’s worth of food, plus liquor! Steinbeck could pack quadruple what he needed until Rocinante’s springs overloaded, but if we did so we would never get off the runway.
Tuesday was still a blustery twenty-nine degrees outside, but the clouds were high enough that we could fly below them without worry about ice forming from their moisture collecting on our wings. We bundled into clothing layers so thick that I had to loosen my seat belt, a complex system of straps not unlike those in toddlers’ car seats. I stretched my headset to fit over a heavy knit cap. Jim unplugged the plane’s engine from its overnight warming station. After all that, the sound of the motor turning over quickly—and, I would add, proudly—was our signal.
The air traffic controllers (ATCs), my heroes of the sky, guided us through the busy Dulles airspace on a shortcut south. We were ready for headwinds, but not the strong 40 to 50 knots straight at us that slowed our ground speed from our accustomed 170 knots (about 200 mph) down to as low as a measly 109. I was grateful for my natural sea legs, dating back to a childhood of pounding over waves in small sailboats, which translated well to the bumps from gusty winds aloft.
In autumn, if we flew north, we would watch the green leaves near the Mason-Dixon Line fade to yellow, then pivot to a bright orange and red, until the foliage all but disappeared over northern New England. On this trip, the snowpack over Virginia melted thinner into the Carolinas, then gave way to dry land just south of Greenville. Clipped diction from the ATCs along the busy Eastern Seaboard slowed to a more languid drawl, and outside the temperature began inching up. We flew over Georgia’s catfish farms and the erratic geometry of forest-clearing, chasing the late-afternoon sunset in Demopolis, Alabama, our destination. Jim had spent a good part of the summer of 1968 around Selma, Montgomery, and Demopolis as a teenage cub reporter for a civil rights newspaper called The Southern Courier. We wanted to give the town at least a quick look.
Morning in Demopolis was downright balmy. In the Best Western breakfast room, Miss Nettie was making grits and biscuits for us and the out-of-town crews who had come in to monitor the planned outage at the cement factory.
Two small things stood between us and our progress west. One was a problem with our onboard weather system; the software wasn’t communicating to bring in the weather updates. Before this technology existed, we had flown without radar depictions of the weather. But once you’ve had new tools, it’s hard to go back, especially with some iffy weather forecast for the next few days along our route. The closest place to arrange for that repair was Dallas, but conditions by the time we could get there forecast crosswinds gusting above 30 and even 40 knots, far beyond safe landing guidelines for us.
We settled in for an extra unexpected day in Demopolis, as we had in other places, like Red Oak, Iowa, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Hickory, North Carolina. Luckily—and we have found there’s usually good luck to match the bad—we had ended up the night before at a cozy Demopolis bistro and found ourselves in conversation with owner Mike Grayson, who turned out to have been the mayor of Demopolis for the previous eight years. He was full of suggestions for what to see and do there.
Our first stop was the Demopolis Public Library. My favorite institution. Inside public libraries, we had learned from visiting them in nearly every town on our journey, you see the people, programs, problems, and answers that offer a genuine look into the heart and soul of a town. This public library, housed in a former furniture company store and warehouse, is as elegant and graceful as any Carnegie library I’ve seen. A wraparound balcony on the second-story mezzanine overlooks the main reading room, with its wooden Mission-style worktables and lamps. Oversized photos of some of the town’s historic moments lined the walls. One showed Woodrow Wilson, who’d visited nearly a century ago for the then-legal cockfighting, at a fund-raising auction to build a bridge over the Tombigbee River.
More recently, Bill and Melinda Gates visited in 1998 to check out one of the first computer donations made by their Gates Library Foundation. Connie Lawson, who worked at the library then and still does now, recalled the visit as if it were yesterday. They had spent days cleaning the building “down to the baseboards,” nervous about making a good impression. Lawson said that the Gateses were as nice as could be. She didn’t wear a touch of makeup; he held his tie in place against the wind with a piece of tape. “The world’s richest man had no tie clip,” Lawson marveled nearly twenty years later.
After a second morning’s grits and biscuits from Miss Nettie, we headed for Dallas, passing over Meridian and Jackson, south of the startlingly booming new heavy-manufacturing center of Mississippi’s Golden Triangle. This was territory familiar to us from at least three earlier reporting trips, where we’d seen a helicopter factory, a drone plant, a sophisticated state-of-the-art steel mill, the ground breaking for a Yokohama Tire plant, and East Mississippi Community College, which was training former textile workers for the new skilled jobs arriving in the area.
I always looked forward to crossing the Mississippi River. We’ve done that from just about every state through which the mighty river flows, especially in the Upper Midwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois. There it would be today as we left the state of Mississippi, below us just around Vicksburg. I was worried about even getting a glimpse because of the low clouds. We watched the navigation maps on the cockpit monitors, and just as we approached the river, the clouds parted. Jim banked the plane to dip the wing for a good view from my right-side seat. I stole enough of a look to recognize the powerful Mississippi.
The following day, a cool drizzle moved in over Dallas as we were preparing to depart, reminding us why we’d avoided winter during most of our flying in the last three years. We filed an instrument plan, and for the next three hours, we were either in the thick cloud layer or just above it, barely seeing the vast stretches of West Texas below us or the sun above.
I think Jim enjoys the challenge of this kind of flying. He is always on the instruments, pushing buttons, checking gauges, switching screens, and testing the redundant systems. The total focus of piloting spirits him away from every single earthly concern. For me, the opaque flying is unpleasant; I find it a little spooky and am unnerved by the absence of orientation to the ground.
I’m not a pilot, which is often an uncomfortable admission. I don’t share the zealous passion for flying that I have seen in most pilots, and my eyesight has always been, well, wanting. If Jim says, “Do you see the runway?,” I’ll mumble something in return. But after a thousand hours of being in the right seat, I know a lot about flying the plane. I know its repertoire of gurgles and agitations as well as I knew those of our infant children. I am very familiar with the gauges, navigation, radio work with ATC, steering the plane, and I know how to pull the parachute, which deploys from the fuselage and settles the plane in a true emergency. The parachute of the Cirrus, now the best-selling small aircraft in the world, eliminates night-before-flight worries for me.
For distraction on days of long flights, there is always the radio. The air traffic controllers were busy over West Texas, with its vast stretches of military airspace. There were many calls between the ATCs and “Fighter 25” and “Fighter 26,” who were no doubt on training missions. I tallied at least five medevac flights in the air that day, which seemed like a lot until I considered the long, desolate stretches of road between sick or injured people and medical attention. Pilots this day requested vectoring to get to places with names that sounded exotic and evocative: Amarillo, San Angelo, Dalhart, Alpine, El Paso. When the ATC chatter faded out, we switched to SiriusXM radio and toggled around.
Road Dog Trucking warned about winter road conditions and impending ice storms over Omaha and St. Louis. In one of my favorite segments on Road Dog Trucking, called Worst Load Ever, drivers would call in with stories and try to outdo one another. One trucker was driving north to Saskatchewan through burning country, with flames along both sides of the highway. “We were on fire,” he said, with twenty-eight hundred gallons of aircraft fuel aboard. Helicopters were dropping water bombs alongside him. “It was kind of hot,” he continued undramatically, “a bad-load trip through kind of a shitty time. Ain’t too many people who could say: I hauled a load of jet fuel through a forest fire. What’ve you done?” Background music by The Band faded in: “I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ’bout half past dead.”
Rural Radio offered up local crop prices and advice on pest control. Entire stations were dedicated to Willie Nelson, or Bruce Springsteen, or coffeehouse music or jazz, or the irreverent guys on the Catholic Channel.
We ascended to 10,000 feet to cross the southernmost remnants of the Rockies, the Guadalupe Mountains, on our way to Las Cruces. This reminded me of the tail end of a stretch of the Great Wall of China in Gansu Province; we’d climbed a section near where the crumbling remains had become little more than an obstacle for farmers to work around in their fields. Finally, the cloud cover was dissipating.
Our little cabin, about the size of a sedan, isn’t pressurized. Legally, you can fly without oxygen up to 14,000 feet. We carry small bottles of oxygen on board for emergency. (A technical note: after thirty minutes at 12,500 feet, the pilot is required to use oxygen.) Even at 10,000 feet, I felt myself involuntarily taking longer, deeper breaths. And I also started checking the color of my fingernail beds for any tinge of blue, which signals oxygen deprivation. We were fine, of course.
We stopped in Las Cruces in search of cheap fuel and a late-afternoon lunch. We never knew what kind of food we would find. Many times, vending-machine peanut butter crackers were the best we could do. I worried about this a lot in our early days. Our go-to provisions were a cool sack with dried fruit, nuts, granola bars, carrots, hummus, grapes, cheese, Vitaminwater—you get the picture. Over time, the list became leaner and leaner. By now, more than three years later, we’d actually become aficionados of jerky: beef, buffalo, reindeer, elk, spicy, lime-ginger, teriyaki. One Uber driver who drove us on an unscheduled stop in Wyoming went on for twenty minutes with stories about his homemade jerky from a personal drying machine. When lunch in Las Cruces didn’t work out, jerky it was.
We pressed on for another hour or so to Tucson. The mountains deflated into undulating brown hills. We flew over flatlands with occasional volcanic outcroppings and long stretches of almost surreal desert landscapes that looked like pointillist paintings.
In Tucson were some threads we had left unraveled over Arizona. I wanted to trace a few more steps taken by Isabella Greenway, one of the extraordinary women I had stumbled onto. She was a lifelong friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, twice a widow to two of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, a builder and shaper who brought the beautiful copper-mining town of Ajo, Arizona, to its heyday. She was Arizona’s first female representative in Congress, as part of FDR’s New Deal Democratic majority. And she also built and opened Tucson’s Arizona Inn, which was, I had heard, still thriving today under the family eye.
So, a visit to the Arizona Inn was very special (and a splurge for us), and it turned out to be exactly what I had imagined. Isabella Greenway herself described it as “a simple, home-like, cottage hotel,” but it is much more than that, with high-ceilinged, oversized rooms, furniture from its own shop, quiet green spaces, a big pool (almost twenty meters by my stroke count), wonderful food, and a hospitality still imbued with the family’s sensibility.
On a whim, I e-mailed the current proprietor, Patty Doar, the granddaughter of Isabella Greenway. To my surprise, she e-mailed right back. The next morning, we met with her and her son and co-proprietor, the writer Will Conroy, to swap photos and stories about the different pieces of Isabella’s life that we each knew.
We left Tucson reluctantly but with strong tailwinds, the first of this cross-continental trip. We hadn’t really been expecting tailwinds, since we were flying into the prevailing westerly winds, so this was indeed special and appreciated. Just north of Gila Bend, Jim and I were chatting about our first trip here a few years back on our way to Ajo, a tiny oasis of a town in the Sonoran Desert.
The ATC interrupted our reminiscing to say he could no longer see us on his radar. This wasn’t so surprising; it often happened with a relatively low-altitude flight, or in remote areas far from controllers, or with natural impediments like mountains that block radar beams. Jim recycled the transponder, a click of one button that often cleared up the connections. This time, nothing.
Then the dials and gauges on the cockpit monitors—showing ground speed, wind direction, location, just about everything—began to go haywire. They spun around randomly, showing a 150-knot headwind, then a tailwind, then no wind. I thought of The Exorcist. The moving map, with our location, waypoints, obstacles like mountains, restricted airspace, and other airplanes, suddenly blanked out as if it had no idea where our plane actually was. Red warning signs popped up on the dual GPS guidance systems (almost everything in the plane’s critical instrumentation has a backup), indicating lost signals. Then the urgent robo-voice was yelling, “TERRAIN! TERRAIN!” We looked around instinctively, confirming a flat desert floor but no high terrain of any sort.
All this was getting Jim’s attention. He switched to his pre-GPS, old-school backup navigation systems. It was dark comfort to hear a call from United 404, reporting to the ATC that they had also lost their GPS. At least it wasn’t just our plane. I studied the dials, thinking, overdramatically, that this was how the world as we know it might look during some kind of nefarious global technological takeover.
The ATC said calmly—controllers are always calm—that there must be a military test exercise of GPS jamming happening today. Later, on the ground, Jim learned that the air force was indeed running a month-long trial in that area, testing the effects of intentional GPS outages. Thanks for letting us know, I thought.
As we flew over Palm Springs, the aerial road signs were becoming familiar: the mountains north and south, the desert settlements below, the wind farms, the Banning Pass through to the Los Angeles basin. We had been here several times before. We flew over Redlands, our destination, to San Bernardino and the long, wide runways that had once accommodated B-52s when this site was Norton Air Force Base. Jim guided our Cirrus in, hovering near touchdown in the wind gusts for the final few hundred feet.
Landed. What were we supposed to feel now, some twenty-five hundred miles and four days later? Or one hundred thousand miles and four years later? Maybe like Mark Twain, I thought, one of the writers whose account of an epic journey I had read. At the end of twenty days by stagecoach, the Washoe Zephyr, from Missouri to the territory of Nevada, Twain wrote, “It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.”
We, too, had indeed “fed fat on wonders every day.” Our ending didn’t feel as sad as Twain described his, but he was young then and didn’t understand yet that you can craft many adventures in a lifetime. I knew we would head on to many more adventures, and that this ending was, again, another beginning.
JIM FALLOWS
We began this project with one purpose in mind: we wanted to take a fresh look at the country, its disappointments and its possibilities. We ended up wondering about questions and trends that were different from what we’d expected, and with a story to tell that we could barely have imagined when we were starting out.
By the end of the journey, we felt sure of something we had suspected at the beginning: an important part of the face of modern America has slipped from people’s view, in a way that makes a big and destructive difference in the country’s public and economic life. Despite the economic crises of the preceding decade and the social tensions of which every American is aware, most parts of the United States that we visited have been doing better, in most ways, than most Americans realize. Because many people don’t know that, they’re inclined to view any local problems as symptoms of wider disasters, and to dismiss local successes as fortunate anomalies. They feel even angrier about the country’s challenges than they should, and more fatalistic about the prospects of dealing with them.
We wanted to look at parts of the country generally missed by the media spotlight. That would mean reporting in the places often considered as “flyover country.” Such cities, medium-sized or below, and rural areas usually made their way to national attention only after a tornado or a mass shooting; during presidential-campaign season; or as backdrops for “concept” pieces like “The Private Prison Revolution” or “After Coal: What?” We were interested in places that had faced adversity of some sort, from crop failure to job loss to political crisis, and had looked for ways to respond.
Since the late 1990s, we had flown at low altitude in little single-engine, four-seat propeller planes, seeing the sorts of landscapes, communities, and cultures that can be hard to reach. Once we had stopped unexpectedly in Red Oak, Iowa, a tiny farming center usually neglected even during the saturation coverage, every four years, of the Iowa caucus. There we learned about an enclave of Central American immigrants who had set up successful operations in what would be considered a classically insular, non-diverse part of America.
When we touched down at the small airport on the evening of our arrival, taking our place in the landing sequence among the crop dusters that were buzzing in and out to fertilize or apply insecticide to the surrounding corn and soybean fields, we saw a group of junior-high-school-aged boys, plus one girl, gathered in the small airport building. They were clustered around a grizzled-looking flight instructor, who was teaching them about aerial navigation as part of the weekly meeting of local cadets in the Civil Air Patrol. We stayed for a while and talked with students and instructors, learned about some other efforts under way to add life and attract residents to what had been a declining small town, and left the next day with an impression we frequently found ourselves with: that of an intensity of local civic life that generally escaped any outside notice. It was the kind of activity that readers take for granted in Tocqueville-era accounts of the American genius for “association,” or in Frank Capra–era depictions of the most appealing sides of mid-twentieth-century American life, but also the type assumed to have vanished in this era of social-media silos.
Wherever we stopped, we saw things of this sort. On a trip through the Mountain West, bad weather forced us to make an overnight stay in the rough mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming. It had been famous in the nineteenth century for a race riot, in which white mine workers beat and shot and burned the houses of Chinese immigrants who had come to the western United States to build the transcontinental railroads but then stayed to work in the mines. Mainly white miners killed at least twenty-eight Chinese workers during that riot in 1885. When we visited, more than 125 years later, Rock Springs was booming again as the world’s main source of a mineral called trona, which, when converted to soda ash, is a necessary component for countless industrial processes around the world. (Glass, detergents, baking soda, kitty litter, and many other products all depend on trona mined in Rock Springs.) We saw Rock Springs’ modern Chinese community, its African-American miners, and others improbably attracted to a city we had come upon by happenstance. We had a similar sense—Wait, there is more here than we imagined—after stops in Scotts Bluff and Grand Island, Nebraska; and Richmond, Indiana; and Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and Astoria, Oregon; and Yakima, Washington.
In late 2012, we began planning a journey. We knew we were looking for medium-sized or smaller towns. The definition was flexible; we ended up visiting places as sizable as Columbus, Ohio, the fifteenth-largest city in the country, though most were much smaller, like Eastport, Maine, population less than 1,500. Early in 2013, I put an item on The Atlantic’s website, asking for suggestions from readers on why it would be worth learning the story of their town. More than one thousand entries arrived, at least seven hundred of them extended essays, and we began compiling a list.
In June we began our travels. Early on was a week-long stop in the little lakeside town of Holland, Michigan, a longtime manufacturing center that had managed to avoid the general fate of Rust Belt decline, and a city that had also coped with what we have come to see as a much broader pattern of ethnic change.
Before our time in Holland and on a return trip afterward, we went to Sioux Falls and Rapid City, in South Dakota, which had their own economic, cultural, and political surprises. We spent several months working our way up and down the West Coast, from the tiny town of Ajo, Arizona, built next to what was once one of North America’s largest copper mines, to the troubled and now-famous California city of San Bernardino—and northward to Fresno, in California’s Central Valley, Bend and its neighboring cities in central Oregon, and the twin cities of Lewiston, Idaho, and Clarkston, Washington. On the East Coast, we’ve been as far north as Eastport, the very last city on Maine’s Down East coast before the Bay of Fundy and Canada, and as far south as St. Marys, Georgia, which is east of the Okefenokee Swamp and just north of the Florida border.
By the end, we’d made extended visits, usually totaling two weeks in each of twenty-five cities across the country, with shorter visits to another two dozen.
There are dozens more we would like already to have visited, and that we plan to spend time in and learn about in the next wave of our travels. These are places like Rochester and Buffalo, New York; Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee; Dayton and Youngstown, Ohio; South Bend and Gary, Indiana; the Batavia area and Moline, Illinois; Stockton and Fremont, California; Brownsville, Texas; Lakeland and St. Petersburg, Florida; Danville, Kentucky; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; greater St. Louis, Missouri; Roanoke and Hampton Roads, Virginia; Frederick, Maryland; Lewiston, Maine; Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Reno, Nevada; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and many more. With each new city we’ve spent time in and learned about, the list of places we’d like to go next continues to grow.
This is an ongoing project: we ask readers to send a tweet about their cities to @JamesFallows or @FallowsDeb, with the tag #ThisIsMyTown, or a longer message about where you live and why to TheStoryOfMyTown@gmail.com.
There is a high-toned tradition of road trips as a means of “discovering” America, from Lewis and Clark and Tocqueville through John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and William Least Heat-Moon. Apart from other obvious points of contrast, our project is different in that rather than going by car (or wagon or pirogue), we’ve gone from city to city in our family’s small single-engine propeller airplane, a Cirrus SR22. This was a decision made for convenience, for beauty, and for edification.
The convenience comes from the simple fact that almost any settlement in America is within close range of a place where a small airplane can land. Some five thousand public landing facilities, many of them built for military purposes during and after World War II, are scattered about the United States, making many remote hamlets more easily reachable by air than by other means.
The beauty comes from the unending fascination of watching the American landscape unfurl below as you travel at low altitude. At the dawn of powered flight, a century ago, it was assumed that writers and painters would want to become aviators, and vice versa—Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Ernest K. Gann were fliers who wrote; Beryl Markham, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh were writers who flew—because of the unique perspective on civilization and nature offered by the aerial view. The late novelist James Salter, who was a Korean War fighter pilot and retained his passion for flight, was a midcentury example; William Langewiesche, a longtime book and magazine writer, and the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, whose Stick and Rudder is the flying world’s equivalent of The Elements of Style, is a recent one. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who writes about flight with extraordinary elegance in his book Skyfaring, is another.
From ground level, America is mainly road—after all, that’s where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the West, before the strip of intense development along the California coast. It’s also full of features obvious from the sky that are much harder to notice from the ground and are difficult to pick out from six miles up in an airliner. Some of the most striking are quarries at the edge of most towns, to provide gravel for roads and construction sites; prisons, instantly identifiable by their fencing (though some mega–high schools can look similar), usually miles from the nearest town or tucked into locations where normal traffic won’t pass by; and the vast sea of parking-lot spaces surrounding shopping malls, on the edges of towns. We never tire of the view from this height, as different from the normal, grim airliner perspective as scuba diving is from traveling on a container ship.
The edification comes from lessons in history, geography, urban planning, and environmental protection and despoliation that are inescapably obvious from above. Why is St. Louis where it is? Ah, of course! It’s where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers come together. Why were mill towns built along the fall line of the Appalachians? Because of the long north-to-south series of waterfalls. As you cross South Dakota from east to west, from the big city of Sioux Falls, at the Iowa and Minnesota borders, toward Rapid City and the Black Hills and beyond, you can see the terrain change sharply. In the East River portion of the state, between Sioux Falls and the Missouri, you see flat, well-watered farmlands and small farming towns. Then past Pierre you reach West River, with rough, dry badlands, some grazing cattle, and very few structures. Everyone who has looked at a map “knows” about the effect of topography and rainfall, but it means something different as it unfolds below you, like a real-world Google Earth.
You can also see the history of transportation in the way towns are settled. Even in South Dakota’s fertile East River area, you can easily trace, from low altitude, what the railroads ushered in 150 years ago, and how their impact has ebbed. As we flew along one of the east-west lines that brought settlers into these territories and carried crops out to markets, we would see little settlements every few minutes. In the 1800s, they were set up at roughly ten-mile intervals, an efficient distance when farmers were delivering their harvests by wagon. Now it seems that four out of five of those towns are withering, as farms are run with giant combines and crops are hauled by truck.
With each city we visited and stop we made, the list of future places we hoped to learn about only grew. But as the months and years went on, we developed a picture of on-the-ground realities different from what we had assumed when the journey began.