A Brief Morning Visit to Belle Fourche
Geographic Center of the United States, Belle Fourche, South Dakota, USA. Visited Tuesday, April 18, 2023.
Behind the Belle Fourche Visitors center, there is a large round monument to the Geographic Center of the United States. It is only a monument. The actual location, I am told, is farther north, marked by a government surveyor. It’s close but still too far out of the way for most travelers, so they built one here.
Depending on who you ask, neither of these markers is the “real” center of the United States. The true center resides in Lebanon, Kansas (as every diehard Supernatural fan already knows.) The difference is rooted in a distinction. The Lebanon monument is measured by the contiguous 48 states. The one in Belle Fourche includes Alaska and Hawaii in its measurements.
Neither is the Center of the World or the Center of the Universe.
The parking lot is empty. In a town like this, the move is to drop in, move on. Maybe you stop for breakfast or lunch, depending on the time of day. Otherwise, you’re here for one reason – the monument.
What is it about these highly artificial, arbitrary markers of place that gets me started? It has to do with the bombastic nature of humanity, the sheer balls it takes to declare with such absolute certainty that this or that matters more than this or that. If I sound like I’m looking down on the practice, you’ve got me wrong. I have ambivalent feelings, but the one that rises most often to the top is curiosity. Confidence is sexy. T and I took the long way to our destination, the “scenic” route, based on my itch to stand at the monument.
I mean, I’d never heard of Belle Fourche before. But for this monument, its name might never cross the threshold of my consciousness. It’d be one of the many dozen small towns in South Dakota that I passed through on my way across the country.