Dignity and Getting to the YMCA of the Seven Council Fires

 We started the morning with a Quest.

It was to get to the Dignity of Earth and Sky, a statue that John had found when he and I were looking with Linda K. into the tradition of Star Quilts in the Lakota tribes. The hotel didn't really have breakfast so we made do with a banana we'd bought the day before and the toasted oats I'd brought for myself. 

She is in Chamberlain, South Dakota, right in a rest area! I was so surprised by that, but she was also a lot larger than it looked from the photos in Google maps. Most of them didn't have a person in there as someone to compare against, but the photos made her look like she was about the size of a real person instead of being nearly seven times as tall.

There are LED lights built into her star quilt, into the blue panes of the star, and there was a lot of care taken to have her represent her people as three different Lakota women were used as the models for her. The rest stop had a little museum, and along with that was a small model of the boat that Lewis and Clark used to explore this part of the country. I was pretty impressed by how much they could pack in the boat. 

The city of Chamberlain also had a museum, depicting the history of the Sioux tribes in the area, including a huge bookstore and gift shop that highlighted a lot of the history that was in there. The timeline of the tribe's negotiations and history with the US government and all the military forces of the time were all around the building. 

The gift shop also carried locally made jewelry and these star quilts. The backdrop of the greeting desk even had a star quilt pattern in the wood.

I loved the colors used and coordinated for these. I especially loved the turquoises and greens in the quilt in the middle left, but was sad that it wasn't a traditional design. I think I would have bought that one if it were just the star. But the middle one on the right caught both John's and my eye, so we bought that one. It's nice to support the local economy.

And that's a lot of work. These quilts were all obviously hand quilted, too. So beautiful and warm.

From there we headed north to Pierre, found a local meat shop and we got and shared a sandwich along with a locally created kettle chip that had super fine salt, so that they tasted super salty, but didn't actually have much more sodium than a normal potato chip. I'd cheerfully driven all the interstate and four lane highways up to this point, and from Pierre we headed west on two lane roads. 

And we entered the country we now know pretty well. Where there are so few cars that when someone approaches you on the road, you wave and they'll wave back. The rolling hills were covered with corn, hay, soy beans, and most impressive of all, acres and acres of giant sunflowers, their faces so heavy with seed they're now turned toward the earth. They leave them out in the fields until they're completely dried, some folks here say that that's how they'll actually yield more oil when they're pressed. But taking a video of acres and acres of passing sunflowers really is a thing.

We managed to arrive in Dupree at about 3pm, and heard people working away at the houses, so we quickly unloaded the Eurovan. All our stuff went into one of the tiny apartment bedrooms, but for two 20 pound boxes of peaches and nearly 40 dozen Monster cookies (John's special recipe) that went into the kitchen.

We immediately got to work, doing a few odds and ends that David, Walt and others needed to finish their tasks of the day. They included screwing in some pieces to fill in some gaps, and it was good to know that my grip was solid enough and without pain so I could use a power drill easily to get screws in far enough to solidly put things together.

It felt good to slide back into working so easily, with the people that we really enjoyed working with. And then an hour later, the van arrived from the airport with everyone who had flown in during the day. George Painter, the organizer of the whole project here in Dupree, had gone to pick them up and it was great to see him again, along with a lot of familiar and new faces. 

It's fun to be on this adventure again.

When everyone arrived and most of the folks who had arrived early ended with what they were working on, we all gathered in the middle of all four houses and George got to do his spiel to the newcomers. We all got to introduce ourselves, and then we went into dinner.

Frank, the master of the kitchen, was there, and it was so good to see him as well, and he was able to give me wifi information that had been broken in the dorms. Which was a very good thing. Instead of getting to know everyone else better, I was stuck doing a Council meeting for church out on the back porch of the YMCA. It was important that I do it, as I was taking the minutes, but I kept getting distracted by the nearly full moon that was rising.

The lady that keeps the place clean came by after my meeting to tell me that it was going to be even more spectacular tomorrow, and I'm grateful that I'll get to enjoy it in peace tomorrow. I really do enjoy this place now that it's familiar.