The alarm rang at 5:26 in the morning, and Martin was already out of bed, which was its own kind of scandal. His wife, still half-asleep beside him, could not understand how a man could be tormented so thoroughly on a Saturday that he could no longer bear to stay in bed. She insisted he was innocent, of course, as innocent as their two cats always were, no matter what they had broken. Sebastian, their son, had recently complained that Selina should not bring her stuffed animals into his room, and Selina had wondered how he had even gotten the crazy idea that she did any such thing.
Then Martin heard it, there in the quiet of the morning, right next to the staircase: tap, tap, tap. The tomcat came padding down the stairs, and unbelievably, it had one of Selina’s stuffed animals in its mouth, dragging the girl’s enormous horse across the floor. The cat had survived the whole night with the thing. “You’re the victim,” Martin said to his wife.
“Oh yes, women are never the victim. I have never seen a woman be the victim. Not when she’s married. ”
After a short rest phase, there was work to do.
The plan was a quick stop, then something for reconciliation, which meant telling a bit about South Dakota before getting back on the road. They had already seen the Corn Palace, the building redecorated every year with fresh corn cobs that built up the facade. The best T-Rex in the world had been discovered here in the vast Badlands in 1990, and the fossil was displayed here accordingly. And there was Mount Rushmore, the idea for which had come in 1923 from state historian Doane Robinson, who originally wanted to depict figures like Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, and Buffalo Bill.
But the sculptor had said no, no, no, they would put the American presidents there instead, and so it was agreed. Before the faces were carved into the rock, the cliff had been called “Six Grandfathers” by the Lakota. It got its current name by chance, from a New York lawyer named Charles E. Rushmore, who arrived in 1885 for a mining project.
He asked his local guide what the striking mountain was called, and the guide replied quite simply that it had no name, so he might as well call it Rushmore. Rushmore arrived at the mining site and told the story, and the mountain has been called Mount Rushmore ever since. A mountain named after a New York lawyer: that was truly American. South Dakota had its share of crazy laws, too.
It was legally forbidden to lie down on the floor in a cheese factory and fall asleep, and it was illegal to show films in which police officers were beaten, attacked, or treated offensively. Martin could think of a few films where cops got beaten up, but he left that aside. For food, there was herbal tea made from sage and mint, which he actually drank every morning. Sage was very good for coughs, colds, and hoarseness, good for the throat because it had a disinfecting effect.
Then there were peppers stuffed with wild rice, a well-known and popular crop in the South Dakota area. The whole thing could be filled with wild rice alone or with wild rice and bison meat. And as a third option, there were Wojapi bison meatballs, meatballs made of bison with a tart, unsweetened berry reduction of boiled-down berries. They headed back out on the road, and Martin remembered he had forgotten his trailer.
The annoying thing was that at the parking spot, you could only sleep if you uncoupled the trailer. So it was: uncouple, sleep, hook the trailer back up, and then the whole thing worked. And don’t forget the trailer afterward, like he had just done. That would have been extremely sensible, of course.
The conversation drifted to the IAA Transportation trade fair, where Martin had met Nemiro and Oscar. Oscar was employed at SCS Software primarily as a liaison to the companies, and Martin had met the two of them at the Scania booth. Scania had brought out a completely new truck, a new cab with a wedge-shaped design and much more work done on aerodynamics. The new Scania was called Scania Dynamic, and it had come out as an electric variant as well.
They had revealed to him that the Scania was already running in the simulator, which meant it would most likely be coming into the game soon. The next day, on Saturday, they told him the same thing about the MAN TGX, the new TGX, which was also already in the game at the trade fair booth. Both must have been very far along in development if they could already drive them in the simulator. Andreas Marte, known from their stream with Volvo, had told Martin that he did a lot with Volvo and that there was a lot to expect there.
For Volvo and Renault, quite a bit could be expected in the near future. They had certainly been busy with the vehicle team, with the buses and the cars for ATS. The gas price cap came up, and the peculiar work of the federal government. Americans were also having massive problems with gas prices right now.
The price of gas in America had risen just as much as elsewhere, which, given American cars, American fuel consumption, and the distances covered, weighed even more heavily. The American President had decided to ban the export of gasoline and diesel, because American refineries were exporting fuel to other countries and making a ton of money from it. Banning the export would naturally make the supply higher, and accordingly, prices should drop. But the oil companies had already signaled that they were not prepared to lower prices, and at most, if they had to cut capacity, one must assume that this would lead to shortages because they would simply reduce production.
The Americans were suffering just as much from high oil prices, even a bit more extreme in terms of the impact. They paid significantly less in tax, only they also used double the fuel, which in the end didn’t make it any cheaper. They crossed into Missouri, and Martin could not contain himself. It was awesome, simply awesome.
The little scenes you had here and there made it interesting, and on the other hand, there were the truly amazing landscapes. The state was split in two: a typical agricultural state in the east, like throughout the Midwest, and in the west, really great scenery. The Black Hills looked really good with their forests, and the Badlands looked really cool. There were mountains, there were peaks.
Where did you have something like this in American Truck Simulator? There were a few spots in the Rockies with twisty roads, but this was a really awesome thing. Yes, please, could somebody leave the cat alone? The little details on the side were what made it so fun: pheasants in the field, cowboys riding their horses with their dogs.
They had figured out by now why most of the cattle here were black. Such beautiful little things. The ride continued, with talk of the Midwest. It was a typical Midwestern landscape with rolling hills, and South Dakota just had a little something here, a little something there, right up Martin’s alley.
They were in the east of South Dakota, on their way down to Yankton. A question went out to the Farming Simulator specialists in the chat. The Midwest had only really been settled around 1800 to 1850, and the problem was plowing under this prairie grass. For that, a plow was invented here, specifically a steel plow that didn’t get clogged up with dirt.
Similar to a Teflon-coated pan, it was the first one capable of keeping the soil from sticking to the plow, allowing the soil to slide over it. Who made this groundbreaking invention of the steel plow, which actually made it possible to settle the Midwest? The answer came from the chat: John Deere. That was exactly right.
The real, truly great achievement of John Deere was actually this steel plow. All the tractors, mowers, combine harvesters, and so on, those came only later, and he had largely bought those in. But his own invention was this steel plow, which ensured that the Midwest could even be settled at all. Martin explained what it had been like.
When they settled the Midwest, there was a law that allowed everyone to stake out 63 hectares of land and call it their own. In the beginning, they were out there with oxen or horse teams. With 63 hectares, you can imagine these huge fields; sometimes it wasn’t worth it for them to go home at night. They would go out for three, four, five days to plow the field and stay overnight in it.
It was unimaginable. In the actual Midwest back then, there were no trees. It was just prairie grass. They were planted only later.
The first huts that were built here were built of clay. They formed bricks out of clay and dried them in the sun. And now came the big trick: they dried them in the sun, used them to build their huts, and then watered the huts. Since there were still prairie grass seeds in this clay, they sprouted, and the prairie grass practically grew out of the bricks.
This prairie grass bound the bricks together, making for a rock-solid construction. The grass held everything together, made it solid, and above all, protected it from the storms. Wind protection was very important in the Midwest because you only had flat plains and you could have a lot of wind, sometimes even too much wind. South Dakota had been settled relatively early, though not for agricultural purposes.
What they settled was rather the northern part, the mountains, because mines were found there, and those mines were worked in a partially wild manner. The mines weren’t authorized, because it was actually Native American territory. They simply shot the Indians, then they had room, displaced them accordingly, built the mines, and those were the first settlers. That was why South Dakota, just like North Dakota, was settled relatively early.
The tornadoes came up, as they always did, because South Dakota was in Tornado Alley. They had tornadoes regularly, and there was a good reason why. If you looked at the USA, there was a regular airflow from the Pacific over to the east, pulling right across the entire Midwest. It went over the Rocky Mountains, cooled down in the Rockies, but remained a mild draft moving from west to east.
On the other hand, cold air came down from Canada and Alaska, cooling this mixture accordingly. Now, warm, humid air came in from the Gulf of Mexico, pumped into this cold air. And coming from New Mexico and Arizona, hot desert air moved in as well. So here you had cold air, here warm, moist air, and here hot air, and the meeting point was roughly this whole area from Oklahoma up to North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
Naturally, the weather became quite lively. Summer temperatures here reached 85 to 95 degrees, and in winter, they definitely had temperatures of -5 to -15 degrees, sometimes down to -20 or -40. With flat terrain and no mountains, the highest point in Iowa being a gigantic 500 feet high, there was no wind protection, which meant blizzards, real snowstorms. It was quite a party.
No reason to be surprised about tornadoes. They drove on, and Martin reflected that America was the most religious country in the Western world, for a simply historical reason. The nearest neighbor was almost a day’s ride away. He didn’t just happen to run into someone.
If he wanted to meet someone, he had to travel to the next town. So for most people, it was actually important to go out on the weekend and drive to the nearest town, and there was a really good reason for that: the church. This whole area was a total disaster: in summer +100 degrees, in winter -15, -20, -40 degrees, plus blizzards, plus tornadoes. You could easily lose all hope here in the Midwest, and a church was, of course, an important source of comfort.
Then there were other problems with Native Americans, bandit gangs, and random gamblers searching for mines. That was also the reason they had churches here at regular intervals. The Anglican Church was primarily the decisive one here, and it was very, very powerful in America. There were two presidents who did not belong to the Anglican Church.
The Anglican Church had originally come from England and were basically the extremist church followers. There were all these currents: the Baptists, the Mormons, the Catholic Church, which also played a big role, but not like the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church was the most important church in America. The Baptists were really just a subgroup of the Anglican Church.
There were two presidents who were not Anglican. And so the morning rolled on, through the rolling hills of the Midwest, past the little scenes and the big landscapes, down toward Yankton, with the cat still looking tortured and everyone insisting they were innocent.
