Okay, this is a little embarrassing. I'm three months removed from the end of the road trip and still three (maybe four) posts away from finishing the recap. At some point, I'm going to need to have a conversation with myself about accountability. I'll get around to it. Promise.
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One of the benefits this trip provided -- and really this could be said for any trip -- was the juxtaposition of all of the presumptions I had about places as abstract, faraway ideas with the fine, textured immediacy of their reality. As a kid, it was easy to write off much of the Northern United States as an unremarkable, vaguely brownish landscape with harsh winters and a mountain where some kook had long ago carved the faces of four former presidents. And can you blame me? My education on much of what the United States looked like, outside of the things I saw on TV and in movies, was limited to cartoonish maps hung up in elementary school classrooms with only a couple of "defining" characteristics drawn within the boundaries of individual states. I can imagine kids who grew up on the east coast picturing California as a tableau of palm trees, surf boards, and the Hollywood sign, all hanging out underneath a generically cheerful sun wearing sunglasses and a shit-eating grin.
And so it was deeply satisfying to arrive in South Dakota and find dense pockets of strange, unexpected landscapes, tucked in the folds of, sure, an unremarkable, vaguely brownish backdrop, but nonetheless vibrant with its own history and character. We passed through most of the state on the same day we left Minnesota, taking I-90 across to the southwestern portion, where the Badlands National Park awaited. The park, and much of the land in the region, served as important hunting grounds to various Native Americans tribes throughout the centuries, most recently and notably the Lakota tribe. Their years of forced relocation by and open warfare with the U.S. government in the 19th century are well-documented, as are the struggles that they continued to face in the 20th century and beyond. Despite these struggles, today the tribe co-manages the Stronghold District of the park -- a large swath of land used as a gunnery and bombing range by the U.S. Air Force in the 1940's -- with the National Parks Services. Its plains are rich with life, both fossilized and wild, and stretch to infinity in the same way The Lion King made you believe the earth could stretch.
However, the Badlands gets its name not from its prairies but from its coarsely barbed, craggily tumbling expanse of spires and buttes. The same erosion that shaped the rugged, broken beauty seen today will eventually wipe this patch of earth clean. On the scale of the earth's geological life, this place is a blip, no more than a zit in the course of planetary puberty. But today, it's a god damned sight to see.
There (and back again?).
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