There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a team when everyone wakes up in a different town. This week, Team 7UP wasn’t knocking on doors in a tidy cluster — we were spread across the map like pins on a corkboard. Parvin and Matthias were working Huron. The girls had set up in Watertown. Michael and Gabriel were out in Yankton. Three towns, one team, all of us doing the same thing at the same time: walking up to strangers’ doors and finding out what the day had in store.
It’s strange how that works. You’d think being apart would make the summer feel lonelier, but somehow it does the opposite. Every night, phones light up with stories from three different corners of the state, and you realize the whole team is stretching in the same direction even when nobody’s standing next to each other to see it happen.
The Stretch
Southwestern has a way of taking whatever comfort zone you walked in with and quietly dismantling it, one doorbell at a time. Working solo towns like this week does exactly that. There’s no teammate three doors down to lean on, no one to bounce a joke off between houses. It’s just you, the sidewalk, and whoever answers. And somehow, that’s exactly the kind of pressure that makes people grow. You get better at reading a stranger’s face in the first two seconds. You get better at recovering when a door closes a little too fast. You get better, honestly, at being alone with your own thoughts for long stretches of a hot afternoon — which turns out to be its own kind of skill.
Yankton: Michael, the Dogs, and a Home to Call His Own
Michael’s week in Yankton delivered one of those wins that makes all the walking worth it — he found a host family. Anyone who’s done this kind of summer knows what that means: a bed that’s yours for the stretch, a kitchen table, maybe someone to ask how your day went. It’s a small thing that makes a very large difference.
But if you ask Michael what he’ll remember most about Yankton, there’s a decent chance it won’t be the host family — it’ll be the dogs. For reasons nobody can quite explain, the dogs of Yankton took an immediate and enthusiastic liking to him. Not just a friendly sniff and a wag, either. Multiple dogs decided the best use of their afternoon was to climb into Michael’s lap and sit there, fully committed, as if he’d been personally appointed the town’s dog whisperer. There’s something very on-brand about a summer where the humans are a mixed bag of yeses and no-thank-yous, and the dogs are unanimous.
Gabriel, working alongside Michael in Beresford, had his own version of the door-to-door mental game. Somewhere in the long stretches between houses, Gabriel found himself deep in high-level self-talk — the kind of internal pep talk that keeps your feet moving toward the next door even when your brain would rather sit down in the shade. And when the humans weren’t biting, Gabriel gave the dogs a shot too, trying out a bit of conversation on Beresford’s canine population, with results about as clear as you’d expect from a species that communicates primarily through tail position.
Huron: A Family, a Barbecue, and the Nicest Police Officers in Town
Over in Huron, Matthias had a week that sounds like it could only happen on a door-to-door summer. Going house to house, he found his own host family — that particular relief of knowing where you’ll sleep tonight, found the old-fashioned way, one knock at a time.
Then came the barbecue. A pastor in Huron happened to be hosting one, and rather than send Matthias on his way, invited him in and sent him off with burgers and hot dogs. It’s the kind of unplanned kindness that this job seems to specialize in — you go out expecting doors, and every so often a door opens into a full meal instead.
Not every encounter was quite so warm, though. At some point, someone in Huron called the police on Matthias — which, if you’ve never had it happen, is a genuinely unsettling moment when you’re just a student trying to talk about books. But the officers who showed up were kind about the whole thing, which turned what could have been the low point of the week into just another strange story for the collection.
Meanwhile, the girls kept things moving in Watertown, putting in their own hours on their own streets, before everyone shifted again.
On the Move, Again
Sunday brought the usual reshuffling. Gabriel packed up and headed for North Sioux City. The girls left Watertown behind for Brookings. New towns, new streets, new doors — the map keeps redrawing itself, and the team keeps redrawing itself to match it.
We don’t know exactly how many more weeks of this the summer has left in it (we know). What we do know is that this job was never really about the doors. It’s about what happens after you knock — the dog that decides you’re its new best friend, the pastor who feeds you when you least expect it, the police officers who turn a scary moment into a kind one. Door by door, town by town, we’re getting braver, we’re building friendships that will outlast this summer by years, and we’re collecting stories we’ll be telling for a long time to come.
Team 7UP
SW Eesti 