Degrees of Seperation

People always say "It's a small world". I've come to see that a little more as this school year as progressed. As I've talked with my St. Olaf peers about where I come from, my high school and my hometown, I keep running into this shrinking world. My Minnesota friends will know someone who went to a college in Illinois who now has a chemistry lab with someone who went to my high school. It's seems so unreal when ever something like that happens. You would think with the frequency of these incidents we would get used to it. Long connections like this end up being very useful; networking is a perfect example. It was through networking (kind of) that my friends and I got to go to Perkins one night. For a few hours we had my friend's sister's roommate's car so we decided to get off campus for a bit. That was kind of random, but I think it's a good example of long connections.


It was networking that led Neihardt to Black Elk; Black Elk had the distant connection to Crazy Horse and was able to shrink the world for Neihardt just a little bit.

Perhaps my favorite example of a shrinking world (that just so happens has to do with Crazy Horse) happened when my family and I were on vacation in South Dakota. When I was 13 my family and I loaded up the car and commenced the 15 hour car ride from Illinois to Mount Rushmore. While we were there, my family and I also decided to spend an evening at the Crazy Horse Memorial. It's kind of like Mount Rushmore (being carved into stone)but it's a work in progress (and has been for a very, very long time now). We read in one of those tourist brochures that after it got dark there was a free laser light show. Thinking it would cool to see, we planned on going to dinner then heading over to the show. After dinner, we got in the car and started heading down the highway when all the sudden I realized I left mt retainers on the table in the restaurant. We raced back, explained our situation, had a bus boy go digging in the garbage (we felt really bad about that but the restaurant wouldn't let us do it because of liability) and eventually found them. With found, and thoroughly cleaned retainers, we got back on the highway to go to the show. Just as we pulled in the parking lot my mom looks out her window and says "JIM! (my dad)WHO IS THAT?" All 4 of us turn attention to the guy walking across the parking lot and realize it's our friend Kirk. Kirk and his family live all the way in Illinois and we know them through mutual friends. Running into them all the way in South Dakota just blew our mind. We didn't even know they were planning a trip there that summer. It turned out to be really nice. They ended up staying in the park for the laser show with us that night and we got to make plans to see the dead lands with them the next morning.