John Williams: Life is Sweet . . . upon the seat of a bicycle built from two

By Kaija Swisher

Whether running up Spearfish Canyon, disc-golfing around BHSU, or biking to the Crow Peak Brewery, John Williams is familiar with the adventure the area has to offer.  “There’s an abundance here to partake in,” says the 2002 Spearfish High School and 2007 BHSU grad.  “I love to hike, bike, run, camp, backpack, disc golf, rock climb—there are so many activities that I sometimes have to cut some out!”  John keeps on the lookout for anything unique and different, full of fun and adventure, and has set the bar at least twice as high through his most recent activity: tall biking.   

Seated up on a tall bike built of two bicycle frames stacked on top of each other, John finds that most people give second or third looks as they try to figure out what they are seeing.  He has begun to anticipate the four main questions he gets from people about the bike: How the heck do you get on?  How do you get off?  Doesn’t it hurt when you fall off?  Why would you build something like this?  John is ready with the answers, and patiently explains and shows people the basics.  “If you can imagine having to get on a horse, you have a stirrup you have to step into, which is a little over your knee level,” he says.  “When you are getting on the bike, the pedal in down position is at about the same place.”

Jerry and Elaine Doll Dunn: Racing Hearts

By Danie Koskan

In love and running, sometimes you have to go the distance.

It was the fall of 1993, and 47-year-old Jerry Dunn was in the thick of a year-long endeavor to run 104 marathons when he found himself at the starting line of the Mount Rushmore International Marathon.

It was just another race. Jerry lived by the same schedule week after week: Work four days back home in Indiana, fly out to the next race, run, fly back and start the whole thing over again.

There was little time for anything else — romance included. Besides, he’d been married before, and marriage hadn’t worked out too well.

South Dakota seemed an unlikely place for second chances. But there she was.

Elaine Doll was something of a local running icon, having earned the name “Wonder Woman” for her post-40 athletic achievements.

The two runners exchanged pleasantries. Jerry was smitten. Sure, geography posed a problem, but he wasn’t about to let Elaine get away.

“I figured it was all or nothing,” Jerry said of his dogged determination to woo Wonder Woman.

Elaine eventually agreed to a date.

The fairy tale ending didn’t immediately follow. Elaine soon learned she had bladder cancer, but she didn’t take the disease lying down. She beat cancer. Jerry, however, wasn’t as easy to shake. He wanted to marry her.

Elaine had been widowed and divorced, raised seven children and now relished her newfound freedom. The single life suited her. Marriage, even to a great guy like Jerry, could change all that.

Jerry persisted and changed her mind.

The promise of unconditional love, Elaine said, “was a big draw.”

Less than two years after their first marathon encounter, the couple wed on the run. In true Dunn fashion, they went the distance and ran the Walt Disney World Marathon on their wedding day. Ten miles into their 26.2-mile undertaking, they stopped to exchange vows in front of Cinderella’s Castle.

(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘09 FACES)

Will Collins: Tour of Dreams

By Bill Schulz

It was twenty feet, just twenty feet . . .  Wil Collins faced the biggest putt of his life and would soon realize the fulfillment of his lifelong dream, and he didn’t even know it.

Born on August 24, 1978, Wil grew up on Nicklaus Drive in Rapid City just a short distance from Arrowhead Country Club. At age two he would play in the yard with his plastic golf clubs. At age five he would win his first golf tournament using an adult golf club his Dad had sawed down for him. As chronicled in the Rapid City Journal,

Wil Collins of Rapid City was the four-hole champion at Meadowbrook Golf Course. Collins Is only five years old, but captured the eight-to-14-year-olds’ four-hole division at the course on Wednesday…Collins says he’s not quite sure if he likes golf enough yet to turn professional.

The uncertainty ended three years later during the 1986 Masters when Wil realized that he did indeed want to be a pro golfer. “I went to my father’s work with him on Sunday morning. I remember watching Nicklaus make his back nine charge to overcome Greg Norman and others. When Nicklaus won, I had goose bumps cover my body; I still get them now even as I recall that moment.”

Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘09 FACES

Learning Curve: Rock Climbing 101 – Partners in Climb

 By James Van Nuys

My eyes popped open at 3:30 AM. It was the Fourth of July and it was the last day of my life. I suspected that my Maker had “issues” with some of the things I had done but I knew that a detailed confession of my sins would make me several weeks late for my appointment, so I just said, “Sorry–for everything,” and got out of bed. On the last day of your life even the most mundane objects assume an unaccountable poignance–your pillow, your toothbrush, your pile of dirty laundry; all these inanimate bits of the universe suddenly seem like your best friends as you bid them farewell. Even the llama in your front yard (don’t ask) is bathed in an ineffable radiance of nostalgia and you regretfully ask yourself: “Why did I not treat it with more sympathy and understanding?” Too late for all that; you are going rock climbing today.

 Rock climbing. Surely this was the most dangerous of the “Learning Curve” assignments I’d gotten myself into–but did it actually meet the criteria of a Learning Curve? These articles are supposed to involve something you haven’t done before; something outside your comfort zone. But hadn’t I been climbing since I was a few months old?

Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘09 FACES

Cover Story: Terra’s Territory – Terra Houska’s job is a walk in the woods

Terra Houska was in college when she heard the slang term “skins” for the first time.
”I had no idea what they were talking about. I asked, ‘what tribe is that?’” she says, breaking into a smile that brings out the dimples in her cheeks.

“I guess I was pretty naïve.”

It’s mid-June, and Terra and I are enjoying burgers at the Firehouse in downtown Rapid City. She’s on a tight schedule, breaking for lunch from the weeklong Forest Protection Training Program she’s attending in Rapid City. Technically, this training means she will be authorized to conduct limited enforcement activities in the forest like issuing warnings and violation notices.  In other words, if she catches me cutting down my Christmas tree on Inyan Kara Mountain in the Wyoming Black Hills without a permit, she can bust me for it.

Between bites of our burgers, we’re jumping around among topics–her family, her job as a wildlife biologist trainee for the U.S. Forest Service, her athletic endeavors, her roots both on and off the reservation.

If Terra is naïve, it is a naivety of the refreshing kind, born of an attitude that instinctively finds the positive in everything she encounters. After spending only a few minutes with this exotic-looking 29-year-old woman of Bohemian and Sioux descent, one thought comes to mind: here sits one contented and happy person. She has an understated zest for life that is contagious–a quiet yet powerful energy that makes you want to sit up straighter in your chair just being around it. She’s accomplished things, met goals—oftentimes against the odds. She’s a role model for Natives and non-Natives alike, though she’s much too polite and humble to ever bring that much attention to herself.

Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘09 FACES

The Many Faces of Lisa White Face

It’s midnight on any day of the week.  Do you know where your kids are?  Not where they said they were going, but where they truly are?

Keeping your kids safe is one of Rapid City Police officer Lisa White Face’s most important missions.  It is her job, certainly, but it’s also a passion that drives her life—and its roots go way back three decades ago to the Pine Ridge Reservation where she grew up.

“It’s sad to say this but many of the kids I grew up with are either dead from the effects of alcohol or suicide, or in prison. Most of the kids I started school with didn’t even make it to graduation,” Lisa says.

Lisa was born in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Reservation to Lakota parents Lenora Apple and Barny White Face.  Her mother, originally from Kyle, was a teacher, and her dad, from Porcupine, was chief of police. “I had three older sisters and one younger brother, then when my dad remarried there were eleven of us,” she says.

Among Lisa’s favorite memories of her childhood was time spent at her grandma’s house.  “We would go stay with my grandma’s and sleep under the stars.  I loved it there,” she recalls.  A typical day there would include all-day play and fishing—and for young Lisa, who had an early aptitude for all things mechanical, it often meant taking something apart and putting it back together again. “I remember we had this toy tractor and I was always fixing it,” she says, with a grin.

(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘08 FACES)

Learning Curve: Kayaking with Kaija (& Kelly)

Though my name has often been associated with the word, ‘kayak,’ it has nothing to do with my ability to kayak.  Using it to help people understand the pronunciation of my name (minus the final k), kayak was even a nickname of mine through middle school.  So, it wasn’t too much of a surprise when the FACES staff thought it would be fun to have me write a Learning Curve about kayaking.  With the close connection of the word to my name, plus my spirit of jumping right into unknown adventure, I enthusiastically agreed, having no idea exactly what type of learning discovery awaited. 

Though the day of the appointed kayak lesson dawned bright, as time drew nearer, clouds loomed ominously in the distance.  I dressed in plenty of non-cotton apparel, figuring that by the end of the day, I would be soaked from the amazing tricks and rolls I would be sure to accomplish, but drying quickly in the rays of glory I’d receive for my success.  With a name like Kaija, kayaking had to come naturally, right?  The approaching thunderhead couldn’t dampen my confidence. Kelly Lane, of Rapid City, was to be my kayaking guide for the day, and when I pulled up to his house, I could tell that he had been involved in sports for a long time.  His garage looks like a sporting goods store, filled with a variety of shapes and sizes of kayaks, skis, and many other accessories and gear with which to enjoy the outdoors.

(Read the rest of this story in Summer 2008 FACES)

Mick Harrison: Cowboys on Canvas

William Faulkner said that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.  South Dakota painter Mick Harrison would agree with that observation.  Mick was there when they buried Sitting Bull.  Maybe not the first time, but certainly when the bones of the great Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and chief were reinterred near Mobridge in 1953.  Mick remembers the event vividly.  The local dignitaries, the old cowboys and especially the Lakota, there in full regalia.  Some of those present had quite likely been with Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn. That proximity to history, the immediate presence of the past, has much to do with the inspiration for Mick Harrison’s paintings.

Growing up in Mobridge, Mick felt that history all around him.  Mobridge was founded near the site of Evarts, or Old Evarts,  as it is known by locals, and  Evarts had been one of the great railheads for shipping cattle from the Western range to Eastern markets.  Big outfits like the Matador, the H A T, Turkey Track, the H O and others sent thousands of head of cattle across the Cheyenne and Standing Rock Reservations toward Evarts on a six-mile wide, eighty-mile long strip that had been leased from the tribes by the Milwaukee Railroad.  The land that became his grandfather’s ranch sat just at the end of that strip, west, across the Missouri from Mobridge. Mick worked summers for his grandfather, and the ghosts of the old cowboy days always rode near.

(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘08 FACES)

M.J. Adams – Queen of Cuisine

Funny how you can put two people together–two virtual strangers who spent some or all of their formative years on South Dakota soil–and they feel like instant friends.  This was how it felt when I met executive chef and restaurateur M.J. Adams face to face for the first time.

I knew her by reputation, of course, having enjoyed three or four memorable evenings at her Corn Exchange Restaurant and Bistro in downtown Rapid City during the past decade.  In my stay-at-home-mom life of housework and child-rearing, the Corn Exchange was reserved for landmark birthdays or anniversaries, and I recall these nights as delightful forays into the grown-up, cosmopolitan world of gourmet cuisine—light-years away from happy meals and the mac, cheese ‘n peas impromptu casseroles of my kid-filled kitchen across town.

Looking back on these rare evenings of escape, I remember sampling the sumptuous food  at a simply yet tastefully set table in the colorful and eclectic dining room and wondering about the seemingly mysterious M.J., whose presence was made known only through the clatter and chatter of her nearby kitchen, which, though out of sight, was clearly at the center of the Corn Exchange fine dining experience. 

(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘08 FACES)

Donnie Williams: Musician with a Mission

Confront your fears; that’s what everyone says. As a guitarist, what scares me most is being on stage with Donny Williams, so I figured maybe the best way to deal with it would be to write an article about him. Why do my knees get shaky when Donny grabs a guitar? Well, there’s his blinding speed; he can play so fast that only dogs can hear it. He once told me he learned to play fast because some club owners “paid by the note.” Then there’s his singing; one minute he’s got a powerful rock and roll growl and the next minute he’s singing “Sons of the Pioneers” harmonies like a choirboy, plus he can scat along with his improvised guitar solos like George Benson. Then there’s the Walter Brennan impression I promised not to tell anyone about. But despite his awesome technical abilities the main thing that makes Donny a great entertainer is the way he looks when he’s playing; the smile on his face, the twinkle in his blue eyes, the pure joy and love of music that come through in his performances.

(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘08 FACES)