Go West

Corn Nightmare
From Vermont we headed west, and you know what we saw?

CORN!! Mile after bloody mile of CORN!! From New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana to Illinois to Iowa to South Dakota is a vast sea of corn. Throw in a few million hectares of soy beans and you have described the entire grain belt.

When you walk into a grocery store they often have you start in the produce section. This is a psychological ploy, since the mind interprets stacked fruits and vegetables as bounty. The mind becomes confused by all the other aisles of cans and jars. Is this bounty?

It turns out that CORN (and increasingly soy) makes the modern grocery store possible as it is a part of nearly every box, can, and jar you find there. It feeds every animal, it is used as an ingredient in almost everything, even in drinks. And now, through our rigged political process we are being forced to put ethanol into our cars in order to benefit the corn industry, a singularly stupid idea. (But just add it to the list of stupid things we are forced to do to make even more profits for big business.)

This explains why every possible square inch is now planted in corn, a dreary, dead landscape of unsightly monoculture far into the dim misty horizon. The last fourteen remaining trees in the midwest are shaking to their roots and trying to look invisible.

These signs are found all along the corn belt. They are evidence of a massive, parallel experiment going on in the arena of man-messing-with-nature. Resistance to the herbicide “Round Up” has been spliced into the corn genes so that when they spray Round Up on the corn field all but the corn will die. These signs tell the business men which of their franken-strains are performing better. Does this make you a little uncomfortable about consuming this sludge?

Family visit!
Janet's brother Duane lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, so we dropped in for a visit. Fortunately, Janet's mother and father had driven up too! It was a nice time.

Badlands
On the western end of South Dakota we stayed for a few days. First we did the Badlands. Isn't that a great name? The BADlands!

While Connor and I were hiking we came upon a solitary elk. He was way off in the distance, but he let us get surprisingly close before bounding away. Here is a moment just before he bolted.

Next post: more South Dakota cool stuff!