“Sometimes a house can seem like a prison…that’s the time you got to get away.”—from the song Get Up and Go by Leftover Salmon (Vince Herman)
The Black Hills of South Dakota was our destination, roughly nine hundred miles from our home in western Illinois. Before crossing the Mississippi River at Gulf Port, I looked directly into the mid-morning sun rising over the distant bluffs, for one last look at Illinois. The air was humid, still, and hazy over the river’s six mile-wide bottomlands as a farmer plowed black dirt fields, getting ready for spring planting; songs of various migrating birds sounded out from a nearby patch of woods. The scene was calming, but familiar; so I turned back to the car recalling the main reason we chose the Black Hills for our trip: a road journey to fire our imaginations and breathe new life into a long dormant wanderlust.
My wife Julie and I were going “out west.” But where was the West? And how would we know when we got there? In a way, we already were in the West, as someone east of the Appalachian Mountains might say. And yet, Illinois is widely known as being in the Midwest, which I’ve always thought was a boring term: neither east nor west, inoffensive, not taking a stand; not hot or cold—lukewarm. Illinois, though, or at least central Illinois, has strong ties to regions west of the Mississippi River, just as southern Illinois, with its cypress swamps, cottonmouths, and black vultures is the South; northern Illinois is the North with its remnant stands of white pines and paper birch; and eastern Illinois’ beech forests tie it to North America’s eastern deciduous forest community that reaches to the Atlantic coast.
Illinois, in fact, is connected to the West through the vast grasslands of central North America, which are recognizable on a global scale (biome), roughly resembling a large triangle flipped on its side, with its base stretching from southern Saskatchewan to central Texas throughout the Great Plains, and its apex—the Prairie Peninsula—pointing eastward through the northern three fourths of Illinois with part of southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Indiana. This was how it stood for thousands of years, with the boundaries of the grassland triangle and degree of interspersed woodlands changing as the climate and interactions with fire and humans dictated. Even though most of the original grasslands and savannas have long been converted to modern agriculture, pasture, and urban developments, I knew that remnant natural areas still exist, more so the further west we traveled. And throughout our trip, I would pay close attention to the lay of
land itself, for subtle clues that help explain what I would see in the context of what once was there.
(Image downloaded from the Internet)
Part of the Prairie Peninsula at Goose Lake Prairie Natural
Area in northeastern Illinois.
(Image downloaded from the Internet.)
In Illinois, I learned to read the landscape based on how the land had been influenced or not by glaciation during the Pleistocene Epoch, which ended about 10,000 years ago. Only small portions of southern and northwestern Illinois escaped being covered by glaciers at some point during the Ice Age, and these areas have much rougher topography then the rest of the state. Western South Dakota, where the Black Hills are located, also escaped glaciation; and these rocky hills, mountains actually, rise above the surrounding grasslands as a forested island.
These thoughts combined with memories of several previous travels between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains fueled my imagination as we drove on the Great River Bridge crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, Iowa. Then we were greeted with towering, rocky cliffs bordering the river valley, and I had a sense of being far from home, although we had logged only fifty miles at that point. My mind began to fill with images from other trips west of the river: southern Iowa’s rolling pasturelands with deep, wooded ravine systems, which escaped the last two major glacial advances (the Illinoian and the Wisconsinan); extensive prairies on high bluffs bordering the Missouri River valley in western Iowa’s Loess Hills; a large buffalo herd at Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska; prairie dog towns; golden eagles and Swainson’s hawks further west; treading water attempting to canoe upstream against the Missouri River’s current; eighty mile-per-hour speed limits on South Dakota’s interstate highways, a speed where the car handles much differently and demands a lighter touch than when driving on much slower rural two-lane highways near home. I recalled that Native Americans are more of an obvious presence on the land west of the Mississippi than in Illinois, and I expected that we would talk about that quite a bit, especially in the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), considered sacred ground to the Lakota.
A lone bison grazing in the Black Hills, South Dakota.
Pronghorn at Badlands National Park, South Dakota.
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Well into my seventh decade now, I’ve begun to view traveling on long trips as a risky undertaking, not being as enthusiastic for adventures of the road as I once was, finding the safety of home more of a comfort than a restriction. But that same comfort is an enabler to closing off and becoming set in ways of living and thinking. Of course, dangers on the road far from home are real, unpredictable, and potentially deadly: accidents that could result in multiple car pile-ups, tired semi drivers weaving back and forth over two lanes, road rage maniacs on the loose, criminals at rest stops, vehicle breakdowns in remote areas, and driving through severe weather. So it comes down to a choice between accepting risk with its promise of new knowledge and experiences and giving in to fearfulness for the sake of being safe. I wonder if feeling safe loses it meaning after a long time of low-risk living? The answer is one I hope I am never up to pursuing.
References
Pielou, E.C. 1991. After the ice age: the return of life to North America. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Taylor, C.A., J.B. Taft, and C.Warwick (editors). 2009. Canaries in the catbird seat - the past, present, and future of biological resources in a changing environment. Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication 30. Illinois Natural History Survey, Champaign, Illinois.