Tag Archives: prairie

An American Adventure: Part Seventeen

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Cave Tour and Home Again

You’re a sixteen year old boy who has just moved to South Dakota in 1890. There’s a cave in your backyard…and your mother is still in Iowa. What would you do? Grab a candle and some string and start spelunking! Alvin McDonald spend three years exploring the cave and keeping a daily journal of his discoveries. While presenting his findings at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he contracted typhoid fever and died at the end of the year. He was just 20 years old.

This cave’s natural entrance is only about ten inches in diameter. Depending on the pressure difference between the outside air and the cave air, it is either “breathing” in or out from this orifice. This Spirit Wind figures prominently in the creation story of the Lakota people. How were you breathed into being?

This cave differs from the others I’ve visited (Mammoth Cave, KY; Carlsbad Caverns, NM; Cave of the Mounds, WI) in that its formations are mostly boxwork, rather than stalactites and stalagmites. Boxwork is kind of like what you’d see if you built a castle of sugar cubes and mortared it with cement. The sugar cubes dissolve, and what is left is a kind of honeycomb of borders, criss-crossing each other. The calcite “mortar” that filled cracks in the limestone and dolomite is what remains. These structures were formed at the genesis of the cave, and not later by the action of dripping moisture, so they are speleogens rather than speleothems. (My new word for this section of the trip!) The ranger asked us what we thought it looked like. My first response was “a Jackson Pollack painting”.  

They also rather resemble cobwebs, giving the dimly illuminated cave interior an aspect of Gothic horror. Creepy and fascinating!

Cave tours are absolutely spellbinding, but they don’t make good photography hikes. Watching my head and my footing, looking around at the surroundings, asking questions and trying not to hold up the single-file line of tourists took too much concentration for me to get many pictures.

I was reminded of the phenomenal bat program at dusk at Carlsbad Caverns, but learned that Wind Cave doesn’t have one. The number of bats is far less and the egress far smaller than the natural arena at Carlsbad. (If you’d like to read about that experience and see a photo of the natural entrance at Carlsbad Caverns, click HERE.)

So, early the next morning, we headed home across the tall grass prairie of South Dakota, past Badlands (which we will return to see), through Minnesota, across the Mississippi River, and back to our Wisconsin home on the conservation prairie. The lawn hadn’t been cut yet this year and was absolutely lush and about waist high. It made us almost giddy! A good old Midwestern thunderstorm washed my car of all the insects and dirt we’d accumulated on our trip.

Five thousand miles, eight National Parks and Monuments, five hundred photographs, and four new brake pads later…I’m back at the computer, dreading the news about what is happening to our public land. I am so glad to have had an opportunity to walk in those places, to breath, to see, to sleep under the stars. I hold a hope in my heart that my children and my future grandchildren will have the opportunity to get to know the America that I visited on this journey, and that it will endure in its character. I may never know what they will inherit, but I will try to do my part to protect it.

An American Adventure: Part Sixteen

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Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota

We drove north from Interstate 90 across tall grass prairies and into the Black Hills the next day. We stopped at a small town museum, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Buffalo Gap National Grassland ranger station to collect some information about the area. There are a LOT of tourist attractions here, including Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument. We were not interested in seeing how people had carved up the mountains, however. We were interested in exploring the ecosystem on top and the caves beneath these sacred hills. 

We decided to stay in the Park campground for two nights and take a long hike in the morning and a cave tour in the afternoon of the full day in between. The campground was in a stand of Ponderosa pine, nestled in the grassy, rolling hills.  We heard coyotes at dusk both nights, yipping far off somewhere. The camp sites were, thankfully, not crowded at all. But the Visitor Center sure was! The cave tours are very popular in the summer, one reason being that the temperature in the cave is a constant 53 degrees Fahrenheit year round. Probably most tourists are seeing other attractions and sleeping in town, only visiting the National Park for a few hours to tour the cave. We saw no one on the six miles of hiking trails that we covered. But we did see buffalo, prairie dogs, dung beetles, an elk pelvis, and lots of other signs of a vibrant biotic community.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Quest

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questAt this point in my life, I am Over the Hill for sure. The sun is setting – how rapidly is anyone’s guess. Anticipating the unknown sounds like an exercise in futility. Any build-up is likely to increase anxiety. I think what is more important is simply practicing being the character I want to be. I am not on a quest to challenge my mortality, but to be at peace. I am looking forward to moving to a more rural part of the state in a month, on 56 acres of restored prairie that’s owned by the Conservation Foundation where I work. My quest will allow me to spend more time in Nature and more quiet time writing.  We’ll see how rapidly that sunset arrives. I’m not looking to jump on any fast trains to get there. 

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Quest

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

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Pema Chodron writes in a book called “Comfortable With Uncertainty”:

According to the Buddha, the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction.  Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are.  The first mark is impermanence.  That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence.  We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this.  Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact.  It means that life isn’t always going to go our way.  It mean’s there’s loss as well as gain.  And we don’t like that.  …We experience impermanence at the every day level as frustration.  We use our daily activity as a shield against the fundamental ambiguity of our situation, expending tremendous energy trying to ward off impermanence and death. …The Buddhist teachings aspire to set us free from this limited way of relating to impermanence.  They encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change.”

 

Much of my life and energy of the past 10 years has been spent trying to cope with change, as I watched my husband’s health deteriorate and my children grow from an innocent childhood into a difficult adulthood.  Five years ago, my husband died at the age of 47.  In my most agonizing moments of wrestling with impermanence, I would take myself for a walk.  Two blocks from my house was a place I liked to call “my prairie”.  It was a place where “relaxing gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change” came naturally.  At that time, I’d never heard of Pema Chodron and knew very little about Buddhism.  But I could see change all around as leaves turned color, decayed, and returned to the soil where new shoots would eventually spring.  Cloud formations came and went, as did the warmth of the sun.  Paths mown in the prairie grass grew indistinct and were redirected.  Small animal carcases seemed to melt into a puddle of fur and bones until even those were carried off or disappeared.  Change was constant and friendly, not the scary beast I was beating from my front door every day.  

“My prairie” became a very special sanctuary to me.  This is where I went on September 11, 2001 to think.  This is where I went when I returned to my old neighborhood after moving in with Steve in 2011.  This is where I will wander following the Bridal Shower my daughter’s best friend is throwing for her in June.  I bring myself and all my changes into this sanctuary, and I feel immediately embraced by the bigger changes of the Universe in its course.  All the impermanence, egolessness and suffering of my life seems to settle down into just What Is when I am here.  I feel at peace.  It is my pleasure to introduce you to my picture of Change…

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine

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What do we really possess?  What possesses us?  What is “me” all about? 

For years I called this place “my prairie”.  I do not own the land; I think it belongs to the village park district.  I cannot even claim to own land in the neighborhood any more, as I moved out of state almost 2 years ago.  But I associate some of my deepest “me” moments with this place.  I walked into this prairie, with a feeling of reverence and retreat as if I were entering my personal sanctuary, on a regular basis while I was living nearby.  I was in the midst of raising 4 children, nursing a dying husband, and striving to grow mature in those 20 years.  My sense of identity, my sense of spirit and of sanctity and of God were all shaped by the time I spent here.  I felt the place “talk” to me, as changes in weather, flora and fauna taught me to observe and ponder the significance of transience and transcendence.   I cannot say that anything here is “mine”, really, but much of me will always belong with this place.