The Badlands, At Last

Yesterday I wrote about a holy site I wasn’t able to visit. Today I want to tell you about one where the timing was just right.

Badlands National Park in western South Dakota is one my favorite places on earth, despite the fact I’ve had some miserable experiences there. I’ve visited the park at least ten times, usually in the height of summer when the temperature is in the 90s and the prairie wind feels like a giant blow dryer. At mid-day its terrain can be almost lunar in its dry, desolate bleakness. I’ve also driven through the park in the winter when the temperature hovered at 10 degrees and a fierce north wind kept me from stepping outside even briefly.

I keep coming back because even at its harshest, there is an ethereal, transcendent beauty to the Badlands, particularly at sunrise and sunset. That’s what keeps bringing me back, despite the heat, despite the bugs, despite the fact you have to drive forever to get there.

But after ten visits to the Badlands, I finally got it right. When my husband and I visited last week, the temperature was in the 70s. We took a long hike on the park’s Castle Trail, which winds among the buttes and across the prairie. As we walked, one stunning vista after another unfolded, as meadowlarks serenaded us and hawks soared overhead.  The air was cool and unbelievably fresh, and we realized as we walked that it was a primeval landscape. If humans had never evolved on the earth, this place would still be the same. Other than a few roads winding through, it was essentially as it had been for millions of years (though each year, of course, the rains and wind erode a bit more of the soft rock, gouging the formations a little deeper and sharper).

In the evening we enjoyed one of the spectacular sunsets for which the Badlands are rightly famous. A glorious, luminescent, slowly changing palate of color spread across the darkening sky, vividly illuminating the Badland’s peaks. There were maybe 50 other campers watching with us, all of us in lawn chairs or sitting on the grass, quietly watching, hardly anyone talking much as we simply enjoyed the panorama. At one point a park attendant drove by in a pick-up truck and leaned out his window to visit with us for a few minutes. “I get that show every night,” he said, nodding in the direction of the sunset.

So if yesterday’s post was about not being ready to visit a holy site, this one is about finally, after ten tries, being in one at just the right time. I enjoyed my other visits, but this one was exquisite, blowing away the cobwebs of too many days with too much to do. Our day and night there filled up a deep reservoir within me that I didn’t even realize was empty.

There are times when the best, most authentic, form of worship, I’ve decided, is simply to set up a lawn chair and watch.