We South Dakotans are used to exposure. A couple weeks ago parts of the state received forty-eight inches of snow with sustained winds of over thirty miles per hour. Gusts went as high as sixty. This week it was sunburn and more wind. I once wrote in a novel that you know you’ve come to the Great Plains of South Dakota when you get the feeling that the whole world could see you, but no one is watching. Yes, we out here in the hard mid-section of the country know a lot about natural exposure. But we don’t know much about national exposure.

This spring has been a little different. The Democratic presidential primary is giving South Dakota a shot at its five minutes of fame. For the last month South Dakota, geographically obscure and chronically conservative, has been a focus for the national media and courted by the two remaining Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination. It has been a very long time since South Dakota’s opinion of who should run for president had a chance for expression. It is a sort of prairie stoicism. As if to show that we don’t care about our lack of national exposure, we have doggedly stuck to our historic position of dead last (along with Montana) in the schedule of national primaries. Like refusing to vote for George McGovern in 1972 and unseating our native-son Senate Majority leader in 2006, it is as if we have historically taken pride in denying the value of our delegates. But despite our apparent wish for anonymity, in this wild primary season, our puny little 23 Democratic delegates suddenly have, if not power, at least significance. And people are discovering that they like the lime light. In fact, people are beside themselves with giddy expectation. How could it be that insignificant South Dakota could suddenly have a chance to be heard? Is it serendipitous or does it make some sort of sense that the windy little hyper-red state that somehow brought the world George McGovern, Jim Abourezk, and Tom Daschle will weigh in for either the first non-male, or non-white presidential candidate ever nominated by a major party in the good old United States of America? We finally get a turn at bat and we are chomping at the bit to get inside that voting booth.

The South Dakota Democratic Party is experiencing a resurrection of roughly equivalent to the experience of Lasuras. It has been so long since any of this has mattered that people are checking and adjusting their registrations – Democrats, Independents, and even some spoiler Republicans don’t want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote in a meaningful primary. The blogs are buzzing. The letters to the editor filled with excitement and bombast.

Usually we are the "fly over" part of the country but lately private jets have been dropping off their political cargos all over the state. Bill Clinton has been on our reservations and in our high school auditoriums. Tom Daschle has reappeared as a segregate for Obama. George McGovern floats above it all in the rightful role of party elder. Even the candidates themselves have been present and accessible. I am not the only South Dakotan to have this spring seen, up close and personal, my very first presidential primary candidate.

Of course we had hopes that our votes might actually tip the balance in a concrete way. We had hoped that Obama or Clinton would end up in our debt. We dreamed of one of them standing up in front of the entire world and saying, "Thank you South Dakota, thank you, thank you." But the way things seem to be playing out; it looks like we will have to content ourselves with a little attention. As far as many of us are concerned our votes do still count. I heard a news commentator compare Senator Clinton to the dinner guest that stayed too long at the party. That may be true if you live in a state where dinner parties of this intensity are frequent events. But in South Dakota having Hillary Clinton as a guest is big deal. She can stay as long as she likes and it’s great that she brought alone her friends and her husband.

And even though we may not have a chance for the distinction of putting one of these candidates "over the top", there is some unfamiliar magic in the air of South Dakota. When you stand out on these lonely plains you still feel that you are exposed, that the whole world could see you. But this year they are actually watching. It feels great.

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by Gervase Hittle

About a week ago I was returning to the ranch and stopped at a popular restaurant near Chamberlain, SD for lunch. There AI happened to run into an old friend that I had not seen for about ten years. After we finished the basic getting caught up with our lives and what we had been up to during the intervening years, he invited me out to the farm he had bought North of the Missouri River breaks near Chamberlain.

He knows of my interest and concern for wildlife and land management for same, and he wanted to show me what he had done with the farm place he had bought several years ago. His renovations and restorations spread across everything from remodeling the house to building some new buildings and converting the typical SD east river row crop and hay farm to a wildlife intensive location; so he plants food plots for the wild life, principally pheasant and deer. His main interest is hunting, and enhancing the prospects of that, but simultaneously he spends more time just watching than he does in hunting. His joy is in seeing the way things work with the interactions of wildlife; so he tries to feed his passion by accommodating the wildlife.

Anyway we went on a tour of the place and I could see the extreme care he had taken and, of course, the expense he had gone to in facilitating his dream to build something substantial and sustainable for the land and its inhabitants--and not just exploit the land for personal profit. In this effort he has established shelter belts of trees, food plots, mostly of Milo, and put in small dams in natural drainages to hold sufficient water to carry the wildlife and not large enough to inhibit the natural water courses unduly.

What interested me mostly was that he had not done all of this for personal profit other than the joy of his own interest and love for wildlife. I do not see that kind of thing very often, but there it is.

My point is this, since this is one of the few times I do not write about buffalo and this ranch. It is really nice o see someone doing something similar, though different, from what we do here--attempt to enhance the native land for the native species because it deserves to be done. I must, therefore, applaud his efforts. So congratulations to my friend and his wife for what they are trying to do and thus far it looks successful. Yes, congratulations.