Reflections from a Week in South Dakota

Our family took a week-long trip to South Dakota in July, and I tried to jot down a few thoughts about it when I got back. I've cobbled it together into what I hope are three coherent posts. The first, below, is some thoughts about fatherhood and my two daughters after a week straight of car time, a shared one-room cabin at a KOA campground, fatigue, picnics, and some of the best scenery on earth:

I don’t want to forget a few things about my girls on this trip, because I know how fast they change and grow, and there are pieces that I don’t want to drift into the shapelessness of vague half memories. 

For instance, how they made friends with every dog owner and dog they saw at our campground, primarily because they missed their own dog. Our cabin was about 100 feet from the little dog park at the campground; and we knew that if we weren’t sure where our girls were, we could look out and see them leaning against the fence, chatting up a dog owner about their trip, or stopped between our cabin and the bathrooms, leaning down to pet a dog that they would almost assuredly describe in terms of how similar or dissimilar it was to a chocolate lab.

Or their independence. Confident, sauntering independence, the kind that makes clear, “This is my campground. I belong here. I need no help,” as they marched off to the pool or the bathroom or the pavilion.

And the vacation journals, of course. The chatty, persuasive prose from the oldest; the descriptive, joy-filled highlights from the youngest filling pages regarding our excursions. Just when I thought I had seen Mount Rushmore from every angle, I was reminded that I hadn't seen it from the angle and expectations of youth. I was enlightened by many sentences from the pens of my daughters.

I hope to forget some of their more memorable violent mood swings, but maybe even those I hope to keep. For few things are more comical to Emily and I than seeing that our youngest is the very definition of the Snickers commercials – the ones where a raging, caustic complainer disappears at the first bite of a Snickers and the eater returns to their true nature. Give our kid some caloric encouragement and watch the rollercoaster speed immediately back to home base.

It was a relief to talk to a friend who had also been to South Dakota at the same time we were, who also had a child who loved to read in the car, a child he had to remind to look up every once in a while and take in what God gave you. I was not alone. Look up!!! You’re going to miss it!!! I wanted to scream this so many times, settling for a toned-down version of it instead, trying to win with the logic that books are about life and this is life, there out the window, life worth writing about yourself some day if you could ever capture it with words.

There’s a desperation in fatherhood to not raise entitled children. I’ve heard the word “privileged” used instead, but I abandon that one because it is privilege that I can’t avoid. My kids are privileged – there is no escaping it. They have been born to parents who love each other, who love God, who have read to them since they exited the womb, who love to travel, and who have the means to do. They have privileges that others do not, and I would not willingly take those from them. What I want to avoid is that privilege leading to entitlement. My girls will grow up taking at least one trip a year, if not two. We’ve been to Austin, Texas four out of the last five years. In the summers they’ve been on extended trips to Duluth, Colorado, and now South Dakota. We routinely go to Minneapolis and Kansas City. We have favorite destinations in our home state of Iowa. These are good places, most of them full of good people who we know and love.

But the danger for me is making travel a ho-hum affair, something to be taken for granted, just another day on the calendar for our kids. I find myself explaining to them often that I took one trip as a kid. One. And it was with four people crammed into the cab of a pickup designed for two. And we loved it. It was special, and I know I have not forgotten most of that experience. Will my kids remember South Dakota? Will they take in its harsh terrain and inexplicable natural wonder with desperation, starving for the visual feast before them? Or will they hear me telling them to look out the window as one loud (but ignorable) obstacle to reading more of their book or playing with a camera?

I remember riding the Cog Railway up to the top of Pikes Peak two summers ago, appalled at the young teenager a few seats over. She was sitting with her family, but she was not with them or the mountain. She was alone, buried in a book, letting the mountain air pass by unacknowledged and unappreciated. She wasn’t rude. She was just not there. And I prayed that someday I would not need to convince my children to soak in all that I had spent 30+ years not seeing, not have to talk around them while they endured some trite little excursion to some other place with some other thing that others strained their necks to see while murmuring distractions.

The struggle is real. But we will continue to travel, here in this privileged youth they are living. And I will continue to point, to speak, to demand page-free hours, hoping to protect them from entitlement and indifference.

What my children want, though, is not necessarily beauty they can see, but an adventure they can live. Rocks to climb. Boulders to conquer. Streams to splash. Wild mustangs to beckon. Gold to pan. Prairie dogs to tempt. It is the doing that excites their soul, and I recognize that better now that the trip is over. This is their awe – what they can experience that they had never experienced before. And I see that in their DNA now. I have felt it before. 

The mistake that’s easy for me to make is to want for them to understand and do what I understand and do now. But this is my stage, and theirs is theirs, and if they miss the grandeur that I take in now, perhaps when they are in their 30’s and taking their children across the country, they can take it in then. There was a stirring in my soul to take a full day in the 100 degree heat and hike a 10 mile trail on treacherous terrain in the Badlands. I wanted to go and do and conquer, too. I can only hope that I don’t lose that passion, or the physical ability to do so, when they are at an age where our desires match.

Until then, we will continue to travel, and we will come home writing about what we saw and did, in our journal or in our blog, and hopefully about what we learned about each other on the way.