Erica and I are currently living in South Dakota spending time in between Sioux Falls and Watertown. South Dakota isn't exactly what I had expected after having driven through so many times on I-90. If you find yourself driving through the state on I-90, you will find out very suddenly that there is apparently no limitation on how many billboards you can have for any given location. If you think you need to eat deep fried breading and you think that it may be at some restaurant sometime in the next 200 miles, you can be certain that you will start seeing billboards for it about every mile until you get within 5 miles of the exit in which case you will start to see 4 or 5 of them at a time, each will a different special that they are running. The only thing that is more important than telling you that there is apparently the best hotel or the best eatery coming up is the state's inability to stop promoting Wall Drug. If you have the option, DO NOT go got Wall drug. That's another story, however.
One of the things that we have found about South Dakota that has been more interesting than other places we have been is the amazing amount of pawn shops that we have come across. Someone looked at Starbucks in Seattle and thought to themselves, "well, self, I think if we open a 3 pawn shops on every block in the city, people will bring us their items and we can sell them and make money. lots of money". And this is still the business model that is working for them. Every street becomes a boulevard of broken dreams with little stores advertising sales and specials and how much money you might make if you bring them the items that you saved up for but can no longer afford to hold onto.
We like to think that every item in the store has been liquidated by the owners in order to keep them in the latest meth or heroin addiction. When you view it that way, the items inside the pawn shop become a magic mystery tour of broken hearts and, I have to say, it makes me giggle. The tricycle in the corner with the Fisher Price record player that's 30 years old sitting on it's seat? Yup, there is a child sitting on the sidewalk somewhere wondering where the music and the fun sunset rides on his bright red tricycle have gone while mommy is in the house in a drunken stupor. The power tools for building houses that are so well used? Daddy hasn't been to work in awhile, he's laying in a gutter after telling his wife he was going to work strung out on crack. The rascal scooter that is sitting outside of the store in all it's glory? Some handicapable grandmother is sitting on the wooden chair in her living room wondering where her tweaking kids have taken her scooter to be "repaired". Every item in the store has some great story - I know it!
Which means that when you see something totally out of the ordinary, it makes you wonder what could have happened to cause this and it allows E and I to come up with amazing stories. In one of the stores we came across a wall of guitars, but there, just in the corner, was a very clean, very loved banjo. That's right, someone who was low on money thought that the best way to raise funds was to bring down their beloved banjo because that's what they thought that they could expend. Some senior citizen is sitting out there in the autumn breeze sitting on a wooden chair with a mouth full of tabaccy, occasionally spitting into a bucket next to him while his fingers slowly play on an instrument that isn't there any more. There is no more dueling banjoes, there is only the sound of crickets, oh, and the sound of the bong being hit again.
And to make it better, if you tell anyone else from the area that pawn shops are the place to go for an entire day of fun and story making, they look at you like you just grew an extra genital out of your left eye socket; somewhere between horror and fun fascination. We told someone in the hotel that pawn shops are entertaining and the stories that we have come up with and what we heard back was "but we had to sell some stuff for gas"
While I would never settle here for life, I love that any time that I come to South Dakota that I can walk into a building and see where the latest collection of Nazi memorabilia, collector plates with pictures of wolves or kitties, a plethora of handguns and knives, and walls of items that someone had originally thought would have been a pretty damn good addition to the hoard they are working on for their home.
