Final Reflections on a Week in South Dakota

After much delay, here are some final thoughts on our trip to South Dakota:

One of the benefits of life in a campground is the general removal of all the distractions that don’t matter. News for instance. I don’t want to say that the news and the general events of the country and world don’t matter, but it felt so good to not hear the sky was falling for a good long week. And my not hearing about it didn’t accelerate or delay the rate at which it is falling in the least bit.

Television too. There was none. And it was marvelous. I went to bed at the same time as my wife every night, tired or not, because that’s what there was to do. I didn’t stay up too late because I was too tired to get off the couch and turn off the television and go to bed. I didn’t wind down with mindlessness. We played hard all day, made supper at night, washed some dishes, and went to bed. And then when I’d wake up before the others, I’d simply lie next to my wife in a smaller bed, holding her, appreciating the day before and the day to come and the long minutes of half wakefulness that we could share without a job to do or news to watch.

What is becoming clearer and clearer to me is that in all our busyness, some of the greatest demands on our times are the luxuries we’ve invented and convinced ourselves improve our lives. It seems the real luxury is the absence of stuff, the absence of distractions, and the forced proximity that allows you to feed each other’s souls rather than check the calendar for the next event to run to.

Also, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to be in awe every day. On most days, in multiple ways. The beauty of a wild mustang rambunctiously challenging his peers. The unspeakable ruggedness of the Badlands. The enormity and precision of the American vision cast into granite by ideals, a visionary, and a host of blue collar men feeding their families. A herd of buffalo, and the singular beauty of each one inside of the herd. A sky so big that. . . Words fail. Pictures fail. And to stand in front of something and know that, know that you can’t even talk about what you’re seeing, knowing that you’ll regret turning your eyes away as soon as you do, feeling powerless to take it all in – to do that over and over across a week is to be reminded that the news matters little, the television not at all, and the swelling of gratitude for all of it that accompanies is to feel good and right and true.

It does not take vacation or the natural beauty of National Parks to feel this. For the month and half since we’ve returned, I have a heightened receptiveness to the awe sparked by home. This morning for instance: a silent sixty degrees at sunrise, with the smell of August corn and a light fog settling over the waterways, pedaling over the blacktops of rural Iowa, I soaked in all manner of gratitude at the beauty here. Or the sheer pleasure of breakfast on the patio. Or the way the hymn the noon church bells here in town play stays with me all day, reassuring and uplifting. Or seeing my wife’s eyes light up, any time, and the swelling ache of gratitude that washes over me, knowing she is mine to treasure. Or every second reading aloud with my girls.

I am keenly aware of these blessings, and I am more prepared to see the awe in the every day after being confronted with it every day in South Dakota. There are few feelings I would trade for the wonder of being in awe. It is a better way to live.

Reflections on a Week in South Dakota, Part 2: National Character

With the visiting of Mount Rushmore and several state and national parks, I felt a heightened sense of responsibility to talk about our national character with our girls. About what the American spirit is. Or was. I’m not sure where they get that now – certainly not from the news. From education? I don’t know. I just want them to feel grateful and understand the perspective and perseverance that was required from generations to provide them what they have today. I want them to feel the grandness of this idea and the protections put in place against the folly of fallen humanity and its lust for power. Mostly, I want it to be true.

I want an American spirit that believes primarily in sacrifice and the common good. Is it in us? I am jealous of other generations, jealous of their sparseness. Jealous of their struggles and dangers. Is that a crazy thing to say? We have not been asked to conserve for the war effort. We have not been asked to serve. I’m not sure anyone even tries to use the phrase, “Your patriotic duty,” anymore, even in the most idyllic of settings. What are we made of, now? How would we respond to crisis, aside from attempts to alternately deify political leaders and then damn them when we don’t get what we want? What do we want, now? What is worthy of our efforts?

We have no West to conquer and explore. Our biggest aims are to find shinier and and quicker and more self-serving tools of distraction, or at least to make enough money to buy them when someone creates them and tells us our personal value depends on our ownership of it. We are sanitized from the wars we fight as a nation, and rather than responsibility to our soldiers we speak of war fatigue and our disinterest in the world’s affairs. We know more about Netflix and Youtube than the plight of humanity, and we’d prefer to keep it that way.

I lean to John Steinbeck on this one. If anyone has captured this transition better than him, I have not read them yet. Steinbeck understood the lostness that would occur when the big challenges went away. He saw and wrote repeatedly about how what would harm us the most is what we sought with greatest vigor in the mid-Twentieth Century: comfort, security, and luxury. And here we are, overfed, overspent, and in overdrive, chasing nothing and worn out from doing it, managing to lift our heads and scream only when our personal comforts are not immediately met.

My wife said during our trip that a visit to Mount Rushmore is one of the closest things we have to a national pilgrimage. It felt like one. And I felt a stirring of hope that pieces of the American spirit that I tried failingly to speak to my children about were still left in us when we sat together in an amphitheater after sundown with 2,000 other people and paid tribute in unison to those who had served in our military while a beam of light amplified four iconic presidents. We were unified in our respect for sacrifice, service, and a proud history. I did not want to leave.

Of course, pieces of that hope died while watching a percentage of the audience rush out before the military recognition in an attempt to avoid the discomforts of traffic. . .

It is hard for me to know whether the national spirit is merely our history, or if it is reality shielded by weak leadership and the noise of consumerism. I know that whether it is myth or mystery, I am complicit. But gazing on the Presidents, and visiting state and national parks that have been protected and valued for the common good of all people in all generations to appreciate, even for a mere couple of days, is enough to spur the desire to personally claim it as our legacy and to want to participate so that it does not die.