South Dakota has this really intense policy of putting a sign up for every driving death, or maybe every drunk driving death. I never got a clear sense of it, and couldn't find anything googling.
Basically, every awful turn or anywhere else that there was a traffic fatality, there was a sign which said something like "THINK" on one side, and "DON'T DIE" on the other, with some finer print about the dangers of drunk / reckless driving.
There would be some curves with a half dozen of these signs in a tight row. Worse around the reservations south of the Badlands, or on smaller roads in the rural south-central region.
The clearest explanation I got from a local while passing through the summer before this past one was that they had a really amazingly high rate of driving fatalities, due to a high statewide speed limit (75?) and a low age for licenses (15?).
I found it to be a fairly sobering reminder that someone else had fucked their shit up on that same road.
The crosses and flowers tend to effect me less. Like if there's a personalized commemoration it's this statement to some effect that the person who died, who is being memorialized, was not responsible for it.
edit: here it is, then: from
a blog post relevant to the thread as a whole, via roadsideamerica.com:
Quote:
Part 3: South Dakota’s Highway Fatality Markers
We continue to be fascinated by the official and unofficial markers of highway deaths. The unofficial tributes, called descansos, were rarely observed in South Dakota. But there were plenty of official signs erected by the SD Dept. of Transportation, part of a program started in 1979. Diamond in shape, one side says “Think,” and the other side says “Why Die?” Both sides have a red “X” painted on them (definitely not a Christian cross), with “X marks the spot” in small type.
Multiple fatalities are depicted as individual signs in a line spaced ten feet apart -- we assume this was to avoid the visual horror of signs sprouting from one spot like some abstract fatality flower.
The signs stay until they fall apart or are displaced by construction, and are not replaced unless the deceased family makes a special request.
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