First Day/Last Day
This was supposed to be a 10-year reflection, but it turned into something else.
Dear friends,
On my last day in North Dakota, I got lost. This is amusing because my first day in North Dakota 10 years ago, I also got lost.
I have several definitions for lost: One is for when I know I've taken a wrong turn and haven't quite gotten back on track or can't quite find my destination. That's what happened on my first day in North Dakota 10 years ago, when I tried and failed to find the exact spot where my great-grandmother filed her homestead claim nearly 120 years ago. That day a decade ago, I nearly mired my rental car in the mud on farm roads in a remote spot in the northwestern corner of the state.
My other definition for lost is when you are really lost, which is what happened recently after I strayed from a trail in the Badlands and it took longer than I expected to find my way again.
When I got lost, I was about a third of the way into a 10-mile hike in the remote Badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. I panicked a little—my heart was racing and I was alone. Cell service was spotty to nonexistent in this part of the park. The trail was shadeless and the day was dry and warm, although not hot. There were rattlesnakes and herds of bison. And although I have a good eye, I had missed a way-finding post that would have directed me upward from a muddy coulee and over a rock formation to a prairie plateau.
Instead, I followed a cow path for about 10 minutes—a bison trail, more accurately—until it petered out. When I realized I'd made a wrong turn, I backtracked to a place where I thought I had drifted off trail, and tried another way. But once again, I followed the wrong path. So I backtracked yet again; as I returned, I could finally see the signpost I had missed before.
Once I was back on track, I scrambled up the rock formation to the plateau, and then paused to catch my breath. From there, I watched another hiker make his way down and then up the coulee to the plateau. When he arrived at the top, I greeted him, and then told him I had watched as he hiked up to make sure he didn't get lost, like I had.
"But you look like you know what you're doing," I told him. Unlike me, he had an emergency satellite beacon clipped to his pack; I had a $6 whistle/compass. We both had Peak Design camera clips attached to our daypack straps. He noticed mine.
"You look like you know what you're doing, too," he said, pointing to my camera clip.
I didn't say what I was really thinking, which is that I craved contact with another human after my mishap. Perhaps he sensed it, because we walked within distant sight of each other for the next five miles, both of us stopping for photos, ocassionally passing one another on the trail before he disappeared on the horizon in the final few miles.
"If you see me stopped again, tell me I've taken plenty of photos already," the hiker said, as he overtook me a final time.
"Promise!" I said.
I was resting in the prairie at that moment, next to the trail. I had grown so exhausted it felt as though I couldn't take another step. I was walking too quickly, I realized, too eager to get back to safety. And although I didn't feel hungry, my fatigue signaled I needed fuel and rest. I squatted next to the path for a moment, trying to catch my breath. Then, I allowed my bottom to drop to the earth. I sat in the prairie eating cheese, crackers and grapes, replenishing my reserves.
From my seat, I observed the prairie, everything from the rust-colored spiders meandering in the scratchy grass to the gamey smell of the soft bison fluff I found on the path. I scribbled my impressions in my notebook. I watched the same sort of cloud formations I'd marveled at during my very first day in North Dakota, 10 years earlier. That first night ever in North Dakota, I had dreamed of those billowing clouds, set against skies as big as I'd ever seen. Resting in the prairie 10 years later, I thought to myself: Maybe I will dream of such clouds again tonight.
The hike through the Badlands was intended to be a farewell walk to celebrate 10 years of working in North Dakota on the project that led to Windfall. It's a moderate hike that has as its chief features a long walk through prairies and the fossilized evidence of a 55 million-year-old forest. I had long wanted to see the petrified remains of Dawn Redwoods, and this was it, this was the day I was doing it. I had set aside time to walk and think—I intended to write something about what I'd learned over the past decade. I was determined it would be profound! And I am a seasoned hiker who has tackled far more challenging terrain—or so I thought. This hike was nothing, 10 miles only.
But the Badlands easily make fools of humans and our expectations, and all the backtracking rattled me. Instead of using the hike to map out an essay full of insight about a decade of working on a personal project and what I hoped to do next, the experience left me considering my vulnerability and insignificance in a vast landscape. I doubted so many of my past decisions and worried about what felt like ever-narrowing future options. A sense of despair overtook me. What was a 10-year project in the face of millions of years? Or billions? How would I find something equally captivating? I wrote in my notebook: Maybe we get just one love affair like this. When it’s over…
That night, I did not dream of cloud formations. Instead, I dreamed of one of my first solo cross-country journeys, when I was 19 or 20 and on my way back to college on the East Coast after summer break.
I awoke the morning after my hike thinking about that journey, when I drove through Arizona during a heat wave at the end of August, in a car without air conditioning. I stopped in Tombstone—even then I had a minor obsession with Old West landmarks. I wandered around. I bought a big bottle of water. It might even have been Evian, because that was what you bought back then if you had to purchase a bottle of water. I didn't have a water bottle, other than one of those cheap plastic ones that clipped to my bike. Back then if we were thirsty, we drank from the water fountain at a rest stop, or bought a soda at a gas station. Maybe we were constantly dehydrated in those days; maybe we own too many water bottles now.
On that trip so long ago, I stayed in cheap hotels I found in the AAA guide—but not the too-cheap ones that might invite trouble. Each night I sat on scratchy bed covers and phoned my parents on their calling card to check in. I stopped at the recommended places in the guide, such as Mt. Rushmore and Tombstone and a stretch of Route 66 not too far off my planned route. I don't even know what I ate back then for meals. Probably Wendy's burgers for lunch and definitely Burger King Cini Mini's for breakfast. At gas stations, I bought M&Ms and bubble gum and discount classic rock cassettes to play on my car stereo, all to fend off boredom. My sleep those nights was the dreamless recovery from driving 500 or 600 miles in one day in the heat, with the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac on repeat.
I didn’t dream all of those details—but I recalled them the next morning when I awoke. My main impression of the dream was that it was my innermost self reminding me what it was like to travel places with the fresh eyes of my youth, when I was seeing everything for the first time.
That is all I want next, I thought the morning after losing my way in the Badlands, and in the days following. To see again as though it is for the first time.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
Windfall is half off at Barnes & Noble! Now through Sept. 4 at the store’s annual Book Haul sale. It won’t be out in paperback until March 2024, so this is an excellent time to nab it for $13.49 for holiday gifts.
You’re going to want to read this book about homesteading. By Rebecca Clarren, a Friend of The Windfall Dispatch. Pre-order now!
Another FOTWD, Erica Berry, wrote about why she brings up climate change on first dates.
For Stateline, I wrote about efforts in states to consider “destination stewardship,” a form of sustainable tourism.
A reporter kept a diary of her plastic use. It was soul-crushing.
Yikes! Don’t wear certain types of yoga pants during an MRI scan.