There is still lots to tell about Holland, Michigan. Mentally we are mainly still there, but physically my wife and I are now in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where this morning as part of our Atlantic-Marketplace collaboration I did a discussion with Kai Ryssdal. After Labor Day, Marketplace will kick off its Sioux Falls series, and we'll be getting into it here after we finish several more installments of the Holland saga.
Locals will recognize this as the observation tower at the eponymous Falls Park. In the background is the famed John Morrell packing house, where some 20,000 pigs meet their maker each day. (The Morrell works, now owned by Shuanghui of China as part of the Smithfield deal, are an absolutely fascinating part of Sioux Falls's story, as we hope to show.) Kai Ryssdal and I -- he is in the center -- are both leaning into the building, in an attempt to avoid the then-steadily mounting rain. The stoic engineer Charlton Thorp manfully sticks to his post. Kai Ryssdal did a brief intro to the Sioux Falls saga on this evening's show.
As part of the Atlantic-Marketplace combine, I flew my Cirrus airplane to the downtown St. Paul airport to pick up Kai and Charlton, who had come via airline from Los Angeles, and fly them back to Sioux Falls. Kai Ryssdal learned to fly in the Navy, and on the way back I flew but he did all the radio work. It was droll to hear a very well-known broadcast voice saying the likes of "Sioux Falls approach, this is Cirrus Five Sierra Romeo, two-zero miles east with ATIS Kilo for runway two-one." I couldn't tell whether the controllers did an aural double-take -- or whether this was so much like the ideal Yeager Cool Guy Pilot Voice that they took it all in stride.
Greetings from the "East River" side of the state. And here, for the record, is how the downtown Falls themselves looked at the time.
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