Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls

Coming into Sioux Falls on I-90 is a boring affair. Driving over a never ending wasteland of prairie—there's nothing really to offer the eye, or the imagination. You turn the music up. You blast it until you can't think anymore. And you're okay. Everything's fine. You've made it.

Coming into Sioux Falls: lots of little lights spread out over a great flat space. If your destination is Sioux Falls itself, you feel a certain twinge of anticipation. No matter how far you are away your destination is from the interstates it's never more than ten minutes. No real neighborhoods exist in Sioux Falls. Rather there's the “west side,” the “east side,” etc. And none of these have any clear borders or interesting demographic demarcations. Some people who live there might disagree and might even bring median incomes and certain ethnic groups to bear on the argument that there are indeed different parts of the cities. Poor parts and rich parts. Suburban and otherwise. But it's nonsense: never forget it. Everything's so close (and yet so spread out) that it doesn't matter. City planners have renovated downtown to look and feel like a suburb and the suburbs to look and feel like downtown. Whatever superficial differences exist evaporate upon closer inspection.

Driving is required. You can't really ride a bike in Sioux Falls, though you can try. For a smaller city it's remarkably spread out, and it would make no sense to ride you bike ten miles to a baseball game. Or fifteen miles to go to work downtown. Even in larger cities like Minneapolis, the furthest suburbs like Eden Prairie are only just beyond biking range. Whereas everything of worth in Sioux Falls is beyond biking range. From my parent's house in Southwest Sioux Falls you can't bike downtown—it's too far. Whereas from my apartment in Minneapolis I can get to virtually any place in Minneapolis, or really even St. Paul, with little trouble.

And so everybody drives. Every building has large spaces between it and the next. The houses have large yards with fences. The chain stores sit far back from the street. Nobody walks or uses crosswalks, and in fact a dominant feeling you may have if you decide to walk is an intense scrutiny bearing down on you from every passing car. When I was in high school I decided not to pay for parking in the school parking lot—again, everybody drove. No buses. But I refused to pay for the “privilege” of parking in the lot and so I spent the first part of my senior year dodging some large woman driving a golf cart around, yelling at those without tags. Finally she caught me and I gave up, which meant I had to park across the street. As if this would matter to anyone with an ethical sense of parking, a real ethical sense of parking would go a long way in Sioux Falls high schools—but again, we're talking about an automobile city and nothing is going to change this. People love cars there. But regardless, I parked across the street. What this meant was that I had to cross the street in order to go to school, leave school, go to lunch, etc. And I would get honked at by other students who parked in the lot—as if I were some weirdo for not forking over sixty dollars for the privilege of parking in the school lot.

Luckily, in high school, I was a weird little vegan, money-hating environmentalist oddball. So I took it as a backwards-complement. Having losers make fun of you is actually a self-esteem boost. I'm definitely exaggerating here, but I'm still accurately describing the structure of the general situation. All of this for simply parking across a street.

In Sioux Falls, there's now a Planned Parenthood next to my high school. Protesters regularly stand outside and hold pictures of aborted fetuses. Just recently they enacted a law requiring a three day way and anti-abortion counseling for any woman seeking an abortion. You should hate the people supporting these measures. South Dakota is very right-wing in spirit, though the people themselves are friendly enough.

Rather than a web linking the whole community together, the community is linked first through a common core. The political structure is located far away from the populated areas of the state; perhaps this explains part of the right-wing anti-federal stance of the population. The people of Sioux Falls are governed by Pierre, a faraway place; and Pierre, in turn, connects to Washington, an even farther away dreamworld. Add to this the utter ineffectual nature of all politics in South Dakota—which is on nobody's radar for any election. Indeed, the people of South Dakota have an uncanny ability to shoot themselves in the foot: for example, taking Tom Daschle out of office and replacing him with whomever. Daschle, of course, was one of the most powerful people in the Senate. And South Dakota would never want such an advocate for their state: they'd rather have John Thune, a junior senator with a bad haircut. It's rather sad.

Sioux Falls, however, is not a wasteland. Downtown was renovated. Even the Falls—the actual waterfalls—were renovated. Everything has a certain Disney feel. Even the Statue of David was turned around so as not to offend. Now he faces the park and the river, not some road where a family “might catch a glimpse.” I suppose real art is a buffalo sculpture that you can climb on. In a way, that's exactly right. A bronze buffalo you can climb on is indeed genuine South Dakota art. Why import one of the most famous statues in existence when you can get a 1970's prairie artist to make a bronze buffalo?

Since I left Sioux Falls I have been back many times. The longest I have ever been back is one month—Christmas break during my freshman year of college. I've been back for a week or two at other times but never as long as that. And I've always gotten bored. I've always had a sad sense of alienation there: I don't have any friends there anymore, just my parents. Which is fine. Perhaps that has influenced me: why else would I focus on the distance between houses? Or why would feel that a representative memory is being honked at while crossing a street, as if that were some embarrassment?

My dislike of Sioux Falls is a fear of being alone. Sioux Falls is a lonely city. The people have a certain feel to them that doesn't exist in any Twin Cities neighborhood. They have that certain feel that makes one think that nothing is happening—that life has stalled, that hope is dead. It's a certain slimy-stillness. Even those with better jobs—with real lives, insofar as that's possible in Sioux Falls—are infected by it. I would call it provincialism but I don't think it's accurate. Sioux Falls is indeed connected to the outside world. And indeed, it wants to be. It's just bad at it.