South Dakota is Obviously Doomed

so backward!

We were supposed to reach Sioux Falls on Friday night, to get a good night of sleep for a busy Saturday, but United Airlines had other plans. We finally reached our hotel room about twelve hours late, well into the morning, after the purgatory-on-earth experience of a four-hour predawn-into-morning layover at Chicago O’Hare, and looked out the window to see this:

Yes, that’s snow on the ledge. It was…28ish? It was not warm. What you do in South Dakota when the temperature drops below freezing and the snow starts to fall is that apparently you jump on the Sip-n-Cycle and have a late-morning beer.

The Sip-n-Cycle was still going, well into Saturday night, as we walked back to our hotel from Washington Pavilion. I’ve been reading that the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra is led by the most interesting conductor in the country — the future of classical music in America — and I decided to test the claim in person. Verdict: The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra is led by the most interesting conductor in the country. On Saturday, the SDSO paired Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” with Lou Harrison’s gamelan-influenced piano concerto:

….after starting the evening with a pre-concert discussion between Delta David Gier, the SDSO’s conductor and music director, and the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz. You can read Horowitz’s description of the evening here, with a deep dive into the remarkably significant pairing of Harrison and Rimsky-Korsakov. This is what the SDSO does: music history, cultural exploration, broad doses of teaching and thinking. And they play the hell out of the music. There was a post-concert discussion, too, but Miss Teenager was goggle-eyed after fourteen hours of overnight travel, for which I would again like to thank United Airlines, so we skipped it.

Walking back to the hotel, we passed through one of the liveliest downtowns I’ve seen in recent memory, a post-pandemic landscape that looks like there was never a pandemic and a period of spirit-crushing lockdowns. Sioux Falls is alive; if you’re there tonight, you can see The Third Man in a theater that was built in 1926. Tomorrow night is Stop Making Sense.

Thriving, interesting, culturally engaged, and growing. We saw much less of the city than we planned, United Airlines, but downtown Sioux Falls is adding on like new buildings are exploding out of the ground, especially along the riverfront.

This place is the future. Population growth, new construction everywhere, businesses opening and moving in. I felt this, especially because I live in a place where I so clearly and constantly feel the opposite. This is the news for California this week:

We’re losing money because we’re losing people. “California is in the midst of an unprecedented demographic period: the state’s population is declining for the first time since records have been kept. Between January 2020 and January 2023 California lost almost 800,000 residents.”

None of this makes easy sense. It’s 75 degrees and sunny in Los Angeles today; we drove up to Watertown on Sunday and walked the shore of Lake Kampeska, and I would like to assure you that it was neither 75 degrees nor sunny. South Dakota is a hard place to live; California is not. But people are fleeing the easy place and flooding into the hard place. This imbalance happens precisely as the prevailing narrative explains that vicious far-right South Dakota is cruel and backward:

You can’t even chemically castrate your children there! How is anyone supposed to live in such an atavistic hellhole?

If only there were a way to explain the mystery of California’s steep decline and the remarkable growth of a backward, difficult place like South Dakota.