Badlands…Desolate Wonderlands
And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Eerily beautiful, these ancient canyons of loose rock and mud were called “Badlands” by the Lakota, or “mako sica.” Theodore Roosevelt first visited this otherworldly landscape in North Dakota to grieve the loss of his wife and mother, both of whom had died on the same day in 1884. The land was vast enough to hold a man’s grief and visions, for it was here that Roosevelt first imagined seeking the presidency.
After miles of cruising through the infinite grasslands of western Dakota, my sister Eileen and I suddenly glimpse these bedazzled formations of brown and pink and red created millions of years ago. It is like seeing the Chicago skyline emerge like a mirage, from suburban lowlands. Or the magnificent Chartres Cathedral sprout up from wheatfields. Suddenly I am crying. Partially from the sheer fatigue of having driven 20 hours (counting gas, bathroom food stops) from Chicago to Medora, but mostly from awe. Had I landed on Mars? It is easy to understand how this landscape could wield so much power over the soul.
I remember a friend once describing the Badlands as a mini-Grand Canyon. Since my only view of the Grand Canyon was from 20,000 feet on a flight from Los Angeles, I am a pilgrim with limited vision.
I had been in the Dakotas once before- thirty years ago when I participated in a women’s spirituality conference in South Dakota with my then six-week-old daughter Abby. We had stayed in the Blue Cloud Monastery, where Benedictine monks would take turns cradling my baby daughter so I could eat, and she could keep the sacred peace during the silent meals. At the Rosebud Reservation, Lakota women taught me to do a two-step dance to soothe my baby’s protests about resting in the 90-degree heat. On the way to the monastery from the airport, I remember driving for hours through silent grasslands.
Unlike the soothing and gentle grasslands, the Badlands were exotic and bewitching, inhabited by otherworldly rock formations. My vocabulary expanded. I learned that a hoodoo is a large pillar of rock that stands like a Cathedral column. A caprock is the petrified wood or fissile that sits on the caprock like a bottle top. Cannonballs are formations of giant cylinders that emerge from tock after erosion acts like nature’s sculptor. I learn that this ancient rock is already holding these formations deep within, like baby teeth waiting to cut through gums.
The famous French novelist Eugene Ionesco once observed, “Explanation separates us from astonishment.” I am still astonished.
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Bison- the park ranger estimates there are about three hundred in the herd- graze in front of a massive butte. A line of cars are parked to witness the scene. It is easy to point out the males-they are the ones with wooly beards and halos of thick black hair. Eileen and I hold our breath as one enormous bull lumbers within five feet of our passenger side window. Tucked among the adults are babies affectionately called red dogs. Somewhere in the crowd there is a female in charge, waiting to lead her herd to its next pasture.
Because it is mating season, the males are growling and making clouds of dirt as they roll in the earth. Next to the herd is a town of prairie dogs, who have dug entrances to their tunnels, marked by dozens of circular piles of earth. When a lone coyote ventures too close, the prairie dogs stand on their hind legs, singing a high-pitched alert. In a just a few minutes, the coyote slinks away, deprived of a meal.