Pow Wow

We are woken by the sound of four rotund elderly ladies bouncing in the pool outside the window.

It was a late night by the time we had taken all the footage in and called it a day so it’s a bleary start. Breakfast overlooking the Missouri. Josh asks for HP sauce, then Marmite. The waitress is confused.

Back up on the reservation Richard calls a ‘meeting’ and passes around his ‘meeting stick’. It’s a very un-British approach to problems - talking about them - but it seems to yield results. Grievances and tensions which have been building for the past few days are aired. The filming process inevitably puts strain on everyone, and this seems to be a way of dealing with the issues quickly. The main one seems to be power lines and Richard’s pathological insistence that they shouldn’t be in any shots.

Richard gets very emotional when one of the Native American security ladies he has been buttering up gives him the phone number of the tribe’s medicine man as we are leaving. He tries to call but there's no reply. 

We drive out to Sitting Bull’s memorial and he picks up a couple of young squaws on the way. It’s a beautiful location but they have surprisingly little to say about Sitting Bull. He was a Sioux holy man who “had intense spirituality that pervaded his entire being in his adult years and that fueled a constant quest for an understanding of the universe and of the ways in which he personally could bring its infinite powers to the benefit of his people". Sounds like our kind of guy.

A full day of driving, and stopping to shoot scenery or airborne wildlife. At one point there's a flock of cranes riding thermals above us - We finally roll in to Lidgerwood for $1 burgers at the Genoseo Grill. Richard carries his own meat everywhere. Tonight he brings a full spread in Zip-Lock plastic bags and we commandeer an empty basketball court to eat in. I’ve never been so glad to see a bag of salad in my life. We drink the only four Fat Tire beers in the bar then retire exhausted to The Motel (there’s only one in Lidgerwood).