Fort Pierre National Grassland

Traveling through the West is one of the more soulful experiences I’ve had in America. It is vast, majestic, and still mostly uninhabited. I’m never more cognizant of the latter as I am when driving through South Dakota, which to me is the spiritual gateway to the West more so than Nebraska, Kansas, or Texas. For the longest time I couldn’t place it. It should have been obvious but it took a detour through the Fort Pierre National Grassland to clear my mind of the intellectual shackles of economics, politics, pop culture, and the rest of the exhausting enslavements of modernism.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. These thoughts weren’t foremost in my mind on the day I drove across the state line separating Minnesota and South Dakota on I-90. I was mostly thinking that this flat stretch of cornrows might never end. Not in the negative way that I think about it on I-80 in Nebraska. The state itself isn’t really the problem, though the landscape is a bit frumpy with its industrial-style farming. Rather, it’s the overwhelming number of semis hogging the road on I-80 and pushing contraband from one end of the country to another and then back again in an absurdly endless cycle of overproduction and overconsumption.

But never mind that. There was too little traffic on I-90 to be thinking anything but how enjoyable it was to see miles and miles of corn with only a few little bergs popping up off the interstate exits now and then. I was enjoying the flatness and straightness of the Interstate. The one thing that bothered me, though, was that I could see through my rear view mirror a car coming up to pass me at least three miles back. It was painful to wait and wait and wait until the car finally went by me. My cruise control was set and the same for most other cars so if someone going a half mile per hour faster than I was came up from behind me it took about 15 minutes for them to pass me. Yet, I couldn't take my eyes off the damn rear view mirror. I don't know why, but it was true. Anxiety would well up in me and I'd be thinking, "Come on, you motherfucker, get by me so I have the road completely to myself again. Fuck!" But if I set my cruise too fast then I'd end up always creeping up on other cars which was its own type of nightmare. The phenomenon was baffling to me. 

Perhaps that is why I took a detour to visit the city of Fort Pierre. That was my intention, anyway. But it was the Fort Pierre National Grassland that caught my intention. Not at first, but as I drove mile after mile through this completely undeveloped grassy wilderness I temporarily lost all memory of ever living in civilization. I finally stopped when I found a part of the shoulder of the road wide enough for me to park my car. I had passed no one on the road and there had been no one coming upon me from behind. I was alone in this wilderness. It was a major highway, the only highway connecting the Interstate to the capitol city of South Dakota, but no one was driving on it. I don't know if it was always that way, but on that day it was and I was grateful.

I got out of my car, walked across the road without even bothering to check for cars, listened to the low wind howl, and saw how the grass waved this way and that over a long and gradually downward running slope. The slope decreasing in altitude stretched perhaps ten miles, maybe more, and I could see that at a distant point it began rising again, gradually, far off into the horizon. It was impossible for me to gauge how many miles I ahead I was viewing, but it was unlike anything I had seen anywhere else in the country. One usually had to be on a mountainside or peak to get such an unencumbered view of tens of miles of landscape stretching endlessly before one's eyes.

One of the reasons this was possible was because there wasn't a single tree to be seen over the entire expanse of my view. All I saw was the grass waving off into the distance. Wonderfully, it allowed me to track the way the wind was blowing as it approached me. For long stretches the grass would lean to the northeast and then behind that stretch the grass would lean to the southeast. Sometimes the grass would be bent toward me, due east, and sometimes it appeared the grass was bent at varying angles to the west. This bizarre swirling windscape mesmerized me.

I walked out into the grassland, unencumbered by a single impediment. The grass was waist high, sometimes up to my chest and even my neck. I'd sometimes slip as it was impossible to see a divet or hole in the ground or a sizeable bump or small mound rising. I had to be careful as I walked. I looked back now and then and my car became less and less visible. The road had already disappeared. I wanted to keep going, at least until I could no longer see any part of my car; I wanted to be in a space where I could see no signs of civilization whatsoever.

After perhaps a hundred yards I finally lost sight of my car. It was disorienting. On such a relatively flat expanse my sense of direction was disabled. I knew vaguely that east was behind me but if I made my way back I might end up on the road a few hundred feet from my car. The sky was clear above me but it was late afternoon and somewhat dark. It was summer, though, so light shouldn't have been an issue. When I looked back to the west I saw towering purple thunderheads rising above sizable hills, possibly mountains, the Black Hills far, far off to the West.

I stood still, alone in the waist-high grass. I closed my eyes and only the shifting sounds of the wind surrounded me, whistles and whips and howls. I felt communion with the universe melting away my individuality. I became a sense of awe and humility, an existence realized in the vast emptiness of the grasslands and of the infinite empty space of the universe, my consciousness no more than another whisper of wind. I didn’t see myself as separate from the grass I walked through or the ground I walked on or the air I breathed. I understood what a vital role all of the universe’s energy played in creating this landscape and my body within it.

I felt a potent obligation to respect and appreciate the universe as a whole and each particular temporal manifestation of energy around me, be it plant, animal, rock, or air. What a moment. It’s no wonder the Native Americans called us the white devil when we came storming through the plains, shooting buffalo, blasting mines, cutting down vast woodlands, and building monstrous forts on otherwise pristine lands. Standing alone in the silence and solitude of the plains I understood it was a choice for humans to be either constructive and destructive. There was nothing predetermined.

But a tornado can’t choose when to form, where to go, what areas to avoid. It’s all determined by physics. Even for animals, their genetic codes determine whether they fight or flee. It’s humans alone who have the capacity to choose to combat physics and genetics. It seems that as the Europeans and non-native Americans spread out over the Americas they invariably chose to control and manipulate the environment rather than live humbly in relative harmony with it as the Native Americans had attempted to do, to varying degrees, for centuries if not millennia.

Those thoughts came later, though. As I was standing in the grasslands, my thought wasn’t so abstract. My senses were fully engaged in the environment, my ears buzzing from the whistle of the wind, my face flushing in the warmth of the sun, my eyes wide taking in the approach of those enormous purple thunderheads, my nostrils sucking in the musty scent of the moist grass. I was fully engaged with my small area of the universe. To say I was alone would be the grossest miscalculation. I was not in the company of other human beings, but I was most certainly not alone. There was energy all around me. The grass was, like me, organic, but I was as fascinated and engaged by the inorganic as I was by the grass. The wind and the daunting storm clouds were lively companions. I had no shelter about me to isolate myself from their presence. I welcomed them both as friends and they largely treated me as such, though I did head back for the car as the thunderstorm was almost overhead.

I was tempted to stay outside and be overwhelmed by the torrential rain, the howling wind, and a possible bolt of lightning, but I decided at the last moment against spending my last moments as a conscious entity at that spot at that moment. At times I feel that was a mistake. Not because I wished to take a chance with my life out of any lack of love for it, but because I can’t imagine a better moment to end my human life than when I’m at total peace with the land, with the natural earthly environment. From my point of view, I took a real risk getting back in that car, a risk that banks on the hope that I’ll be at peace with myself and in harmony with nature at that stage when prolonging my life is no longer possible. I also took a risk that I’ll have more intimate moments with nature.

At first I just walked back to the car, occasionally turning around to look at the approaching thundercaps. They were advancing rapidly and I could see the winds of them whipping the grass far off in the distance rather violently. I continued walking, not sure exactly if I was heading in the right direction as I'd lost sunlight; the clouds reached into the sky perhaps thirty thousand feet. As I turned again, I saw the shadow of the thunderstorm advancing quickly across the grasslands. I saw the rain coming down, a purplish curtain that blinded any vision through them. It was at this point that I realized I might not make it to the car. I started running ... fast. I tripped once, difficult as it was to run through chest-high grass. I looked back and it appeared I had less than a minute until it would be on me. Who knew storms could move that fast! I finally reached the road, about 50 feet south of my car. I darted up the middle of the road, my feet grateful for a solid surface, fumbled with my keys like a character in a movie who is being hunted by a serial killer, and finally opened the car door, slid inside, and closed the door. And locked it. Within seconds the rain started pummeling the car and the wind sounded like a jet engine roaring. I couldn't see anything out the window. It looked like I'd been submerged underwater or as if I was in a car wash gone out of control. The car itself rocked back and forth and I seriously worried it would be rolled over by the wind.

It rained like that for five minutes and the wind kept at it as well. When it finally settled down I could see through the window and I looked to the West. The last of the purpleheaded clouds had past and there were only wispy strands of white clouds stretching across the expanse of the blue-green sky. The sun was low enough to light up the edges of the clouds with fluorescent pinks and neon oranges. It was beautiful. I noticed the grass was still. The road was soaked but because it was on a gradual slope there was no flooding. It dawned on me how bad it would have been to have remained in the grass while that storm passed. I'm not sure what would have happened to me, but it wouldn't have been good. I had a sense, for the first time, what it must have been like for settlers crossing the plains in the mid-1800s. It must have been awe-inspiring and terrifying. No one wonder so many died. I sat in my car for a long time in shock, awed that I had experienced such a thing. I eventually started my car again and made my way back to I-90 on my journey out to Montana.

Moments such as those in the Grassland have been fleeting. There are few places in America so natural. Most spaces are filled with the noise of industry, cars, and distracted, chattering people. The West, particularly the Northwest, is special in the sense that it holds the last few spots of undeveloped land in America: I’m including mining, timber, and oil drilling in my definition of development. Despite the fact that I despise the abstract notions of economics and politics and really all of the fundamentalist dogmas of systems and institutions, I feel I may have to waste part of my life engaged in these ridiculous abstractions in order to preserve what little land, air, and water remains unburdened by human construction and destruction.

I’m grappling with the notion even at this moment. Why waste my precious moments of consciousness in what is likely to be a futile attempt to save nature’s few bastions of independence. Would it be a better use of my time to return to an unencumbered space and create new moments of joyful communion? On the other hand, such spaces will likely be destroyed without advocates willing to muddle through the unnatural constructions of political and economic ideology in order to create systems more respectful of human nature and the environment at large.

My desire to save the environment isn’t based on some idealistic belief that the land needs me to be its steward. The earth will continue to exist long after humans cease, even if we set of ten thousand nuclear bombs. It may take millions of years for the earth to recover, but it would. Maybe life would cease permanently, but probably bacteria and other simple life-forms would live on and perhaps even eventually start evolving into other life forms again. But even if we as humans don’t cause the land, water, and air to become inhospitable to life, our dying sun will eventually do it billions and billions of years from now.

As such, my desire to temporarily preserve these spaces in our environment is not derived from an unrealistic idea that the earth’s life-support systems can be preserved in the long-run or even that I need to save the trees or the mountains from human defacement. My desire is fueled by the recognition that those unencumbered spaces are physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually nourishing for humanity. It’s my love for myself and for humanity as a whole that compels me to even consider delving into the drudgery of political discourse. I can see no other way of preserving lives worth living than to speak out about the contributions those spaces make to our health as a species.