Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo

you include Hawaii and Alaska. It’s too far north and west to be anything else.”
    We looked across the fence at the pile of rocks. You couldn’t walk up to the actual Center of the Nation because, apparently, this was private property and the owners didn’t want just anybody treading on a small piece of their ten-thousand-acre, next-to-useless land. After all, what if someone tripped, broke a finger, filed suit? What if, thanks to some weird clause in the law, letting a few dozen tourists a year walk to the actual spot ended up leading to the de facto loss of a few hundred square feet of property? What if, years down the road, some Hollywood type wanted to make a movie here, and would pay for the privilege, and the owners had forfeited that right?
    That, too—lawsuit mania, selfishness, obsession with property—was America, though I decided not to explain it to my companion.
    â€œThis place has a very spiritual feeling,” my sister said, and I agreed. Once you got off the highway you felt some kind of good spirit breathing there, in the stillness, the quiet, the space. Time seemed to shimmer rather than move. It seemed reflected in the small breeze, just a breath really, that touched the tops of the alfalfa plants. You felt presence rather than movement; you wanted to
be
more than
do.
I imagined myself making a three-day retreat in an isolated cabin here, if such a place existed.
    Shelsa trotted up and leapt into my arms. I hugged her close and swung her in a circle, the smiling faces of her mother and father passing in and out of view like planets, like moons. I thought:
This is the center of your nation, of your world. Hold this moment. Appreciate this.
And I did.
    WE STOPPED FOR LUNCH at a lonely, general store/café outpost, run by a couple who were trying to sell it. Fox News was on their TV and so everything was bad there—a dip in consumer confidence after a six-year high. The stock market going down after a long rise. The NSA listening in on phone calls. Egypt and Syria exploding. I sat with my back turned to the television and ate my turkey and onion sandwich and shared a bottle of chocolate milk with my niece. There were times of late, many times in fact, when I wanted to tune out all the news—Fox and otherwise—and focus on the little slice of life over which I had some small influence. I worried that with our demonizing, our penchant for conflict, our knee-jerk angers, we were moving too close to 1920s Germany, too many of us marching under a righteous banner, too much hatred for each other, too much divisiveness, a craziness loosed upon our world. I looked at Shelsa. I remembered what Seese had said about her. I wondered what it would take to save us.
    We decided not to make an offer on the middle-of-nowhere grocery/deli. We went on through the humble city of Belle Fourche, past darkly forested hills,
mok
games in the back seat, the road winding and climbing to almost five thousand feet, a brief temptation to visit Mount Rushmore, and then, at four p.m., after a quick descent, we pulled into Deadwood.
    Deadwood, South Dakota, turnaround point for my sister and Shels, is a National Historical Landmark and bills itself as an authentic Wild West town—complete with casino gambling. We found the hotel my sister had chosen—the Silverado-Franklin—without trouble. Four floors, brick front, sloping concrete patio with wood columns holding up a low roof, it looked to be something right out of gold rush days, which, in fact, it was. Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft had stayed there, then Babe Ruth, John L. Sullivan, John Wayne. In 1929 the hotel went bust, along with the rest of the country, and then, in an ironic twist (wasn’t it gambling, of a sort, that had made the country go bust?), when South Dakota legalized gambling in 1989, the Silverado-Franklin was reborn.
    We had barely made it through the front door—held open by a friendly doorman—when