Getting There

            Pine Ridge, South Dakota, is a surprisingly long way from Asheville, North Carolina. To reach it we had to first drive the dull road to Charlotte, where Derek was judged suspicious enough to be body scanned, then fly to Atlanta, where we had to run past 20 gates to make our next flight, to Denver, where we were able to sleep better than we could on the planes. From there we drove alongside the rockies until the land flattened out into nothing but short rolling hills. 

         The landscape from then on is something that takes time to get used to. To be able to see that far, as Chuck's mom would say, "Flat enough to see your dog running away for 2 weeks", means a sky bigger than anything you get in the Appalachians. Here you can see the shadows of clouds moving across tan grass miles away. You can see the rain that smacked the windshield of your van drift away for hours. 

       Drifting in and out of sleep, we finally reached the reservation, walking quietly into the retreat center we'll be staying in this week and getting another much needed night of sleep. This morning we were able to see Pine Ridge in the daylight. What sticks out most about the place itself is the mud. It sticks to the tires of our van, it cakes inches thick to our boots, the splatters of it decorate the hems of our jeans. A lot of the houses we pass are missing siding, and most of the cars don't look like they're driven. The picnic tables in a park we pass are all covered in graffiti. A baseball field looks completely unused. From everything we've heard and learned, though, there's much more to this place than we first see from a car window. We all share the sense that our first impressions will be forgotten once we spend time with the people who live here