A-maize-ing

As the symbolic eastern frontier of our trip, we have picked the town of Mitchell, South Dakota. The reason? In a state full of manufactured tourist attractions (Sitting Bull's Cave, Old MacDonald's Farm, Mt. Rushmore) Mitchell has perhaps the best gotta-see-it of all. The world's only corn palace.

Some people—and not one of them should be allowed to reproduce—will say that the reason Mitchell has the world's only corn palace is because Mitchell itself invented the corn palace. I find this a travesty. We can't blame Mitchell because no other town has ever acutely felt the lack of a corn palace and dared to build one.

Mitchell's citizens came up the idea in 1892 as a way to put the town on the map. It turns out that Lewis and Clark, those bastards, had said that South Dakota was so barren that nothing could ever grow there. Mitchell proved them wrong. Every year, the city buys bushels of native South Dakotan corn, genetically engineered to have different colored kernels, and nails them in hokey patterns all over the building.

It's quite the attraction. 500,000 people will show up this year—including a carload of confused-looking Indian women in saris who followed us there. They took pictures and looked at us very politely, though every last one of them was thinking that America's time on the world stage should pass, and soon.

I would agree with them, except that I think Mitchell is an extraordinary place. It takes a special kind of person to walk up to complete strangers and say, with an entirely straight face, "Have you seen our Corn Palace?" I don't think I could do it. And, yet, the town has so many people who can.