RSR ~ ESSAYS

Toadstool Geologic Park sits at the boundary between grassland and badland.  It looks like something out of a Flintstones cartoon.  At the base of a curving cliff of hoodoos and fractured cliffs, a semicircle of six covered picnic tables and parking/campsites curves away from a restored sod house based on an original homesteader’s design for the first homes cheaply made in Sandhills settlement.  A chalky white trail slivers up and over sandstone shelves and around the capstone slabs on clay pillars from which the park gathers its name.

In the last half hour before sunset, I delay dinner and camp setup for the pleasure of a brief back-country ramble.  Prehistoric volcanic activity in the area periodically draped this landscape in layers of ash.  Weathered into cracks in the clay the ash eventually crystallized.  The softer surface material erodes, revealing glasslike gravel and the bones of primeval organisms.  The path curves and traverses an old stream bed.  Patches of this coarse mix of bone and silica appear where waters have worn them visible.  I pick up a fragment of ashen glass, picture in my mind’s eye the original fiery rain, the pressing concerns of centuries of sandstone deposits, followed by eons of watery cascades and caravans of wind, revealing this moment of Homo sapiens grasping a handful of the past within his present.

Around the corner, a self-guided signpost alerts me to the presence of prehistoric tracks.  Again I enter the crossroads of my imagination as I rest my palms into the shallow depressions that describe the path of some antediluvian organism.  On a balanced sandstone boulder off to my right, I note the tracks of a two toed animal across the ancient mud.  My imagination can neither confirm nor deny the evidence of an entelodont’s traverse. I must trust the paleontologist’s call on the passage of this prehistoric giant pig.

Further along the loop trail, I come across more entelodont traces, this time trailing two sets of other tracks.  My imagination fails me altogether as I read the guide’s story of two separate species of rhinoceros that had once followed this streambed.  Some Dick Tracy paleontologist had speculated that the smaller of the two had crossed the stream after the larger had just passed.  Perhaps spooked by the near encounter, it apparently sped off through the mud, leaving splash marks that stained time immemorial.[iii]

At the crest of the sandstone ridge I sit on an outcrop and survey the plain stretching south from the campground.  In the distance several telltale conical slopes suggest that volcanoes indeed marked time here.  From that far vista, sienna and tan grasslands stretch back towards me like a scratchy wool blanket rumpled by windstorm creases and flash flood gullies.  Nearer still, and off behind me lie the crushed and crucified badlands that tie all the way back north towards Badlands National Park in lower South Dakota.

At sunset, crisscross ripples of different and diametrically opposite layers of flows of cloud and color perfectly portray a landscape that has learned to hold contradictory forces in dynamic tension.  I let Sandhills earth and sky, spaciousness and timelessness, seep into my skin and blood.  There’s no one else nearby to verify what year this is, or to declare what organism will next round the rocky bend, or to debate with me what it would take to keep and restore this grassland cum moon crater.  Reflecting on the tracks of a now extinct archaic giant pig and a lumbering rhinoceros, our crafting of management plans detailing the denouement of native and nonnative species strikes me as somewhat absurd and hubristic.   By whose calendar are such things measured?  From the calcified perspective of the entelodont, we are all invaders here.

Arising early the next morning, I hike a stream-bed trail and up onto the plateau behind Toadstool heading towards Hudson-Meng Bison Bonebed.  In the early 1950’s ranchers Albert Meng and Bill Hudson uncovered large bones poking from an eroding bank and summoned scientific expertise.  Excavations revealed an extinct species of bison with stone tool artifacts dating some 8,000-10,000 years.  Archeologists surmised first an ancient bison jump, then a natural death event of unknown origins.  The mystery is yet being explored by archaeologists and visitors to the dig site.[iv]

Wind tosses the dry grass.  I stand on a high ridge with a 360 degree prospect.  I’m at a crossroads of dim past and uncertain future, equally inscrutable, recorded in stone but not fixed in time.  Who’s to say that tomorrow’s paleontologists won’t be excavating cattle ranches plumbing the secrets of bovine decline, or that either grasshopper or redwing will yet be here to watch over burgeoning blowout penstemon?   For all the apparent mystery, across the span of time, no land remains trackless.  Roaming the wind-sculpted hills of Lake Crescent, the eroded ash hoodoos of Toadstool, the airy sweep of this plateau, I glimpse traces of creatures past and present within these ancient lands.  On the trail of episodic migratory species, ephemeral plants, prehistoric tracks, and eternal wind, I feel more a shaman summoning fleeting spirits than a researcher pursuing scientific certitude.