South Dakota has a special place in my heart. It’s my childhood, my outdoors and nature, and some of my fondest memories. My grandparents on my mom’s side lived in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Hot Springs is a little town located in the bowl of red rocks and black hills. People always knew my grandma as a cat lover and would always leave cats at her house because she would always take care of them. At one point she had 16 cats that she cared for and sometimes on her daily walks, these cats would follow her. She told me about the time that all of the cats followed her and my grandpa on their walk around town, 16 cat tails straight up towards the sky like little shark fins cutting through the mesmerizing opal ocean tops. Despite this town knowing how nice and sweet of a person my grandma was, they didn’t know that she was actually more of a dog person. She was an animal lover. And from her love of animals, grew my mom’s love of animals and my own love for animals. Our hearts yearned for the wild and mine coiled itself deeply within nature.
Every year a mother deer would have a set of twins. She lived around the steep hill across the street from my grandparents’ house. She would cross the narrow road and lean over the fence to snack on the seeds in the bird feeder. She would jump the fence and enjoy the plethora of fruit and vegetables that grew within my grandma’s miniature forest and garden, plums, apples, pears, strawberries, tomatoes. My first direct encounter with her came as a surprise. I was entering the carport to get into my grandpa’s truck. I saw a small deer laying in the cool port to hide from the sun while it rested. It was peaceful but woke up and as I backed up to let her out, I heard a Swoosh and huffing. The little one went past me, but there was her mother, looking at me with the fierceness of a bull as if I were wearing red. She was towards the end of the road and started running towards me. I did the only thing I thought I could do, run. I know that running isn’t suggested, but she chased me for what felt like a few miles and I thought I lost her and started walking back towards the house. I heard her coming and ran until I could get inside and let her cool down. A mother will protect her young at all costs. Our bond was easily broken by the fear of her child. I thought we had this understanding, I thought I could speak towards the wild and nature, but it can catch you off guard.
My grandma and I would sometimes sit on the back porch and watch as the pink, orange, and yellow hues of the sun rose over the black hills filled with silhouetted forest green pine trees. The backyard was across from a pathway and the warm creek that was 80 ℉ all year round. One summer, we would see this man sitting by the creek underneath the tall trees with a bucket. A squirrel would crawl down from the tree and jump onto the man’s hand and eat from him. That was the summer that my grandma and I wanted to do the same. We sat underneath the same tree, saying, “Here squirrely squirrely”, but we didn’t have that same bond as the man. This was the day that I realized sometimes people can have a bond with the wild that others aren’t capable of.
Along this same riverside, I’ve run away from the black racer snakes, fear of snakes, fear of not knowing, fear of not understanding. Snakes are hard to read, they slither along and can only go in the direction they are facing, but South Dakota has areas ridden with rattlesnakes and their rattles only bring on this sense of fear of wanting to know where they are. They warn and say “stay away”, but what sense is a warning if they can’t be seen.
Wind Cave National Park is filled with wildflowers and wildlife. Buffalos are a tourist attraction, however, they are often not treated with precautions. The locals and people who have been around the wild Buffalos know that they are a part of nature in which the understanding is distance. You can look at them, covered in deep brown fluff, shedding their wintery past, beautiful in all aspects. However, you can not honk your horns towards them because the agitation will only cause them to ram your vehicle. You should not walk up to them and you definitely should not attempt touching their fluffy bodies or placing your child on top of them as if they were a tamed horse. Regardless of this, I’ve seen people, tourists who have attempted these various crimes of nature and crimes of wild. People who have thought that it’s a good idea to place their small child on top of these beasts! Where has this connection between a mother and a child or rather a parent and their child, this bond, where did it diminish? Where did those lines wash away and blurred became invisible?
