The Badlands Loop Road was deserted during my visit in February 2022. I only saw a handful of cars over the 2+ hours spent driving through from west to east, and encountered no humans on the trails. The landscape is barren and infertile. Steep, with few ridges to stand firm upon or to shelter from the constant grind of extreme natural elements. Millions of years of geological history exposed in layers of eroding dry ground. Nature subjugates everything here. I spent about 3 hours on the drive and walking near the overlooks, and more than a few moments in the wind. I reflected on the nature of good vs. bad for hours in solitude, mostly what is bad? And is nature comprised of bad elements, or entirely neutral being labeled by me as bad?. It was easy for me to label this land as bad because of the harshness of the natural landscape and forget the essential – and equalizing – essences of nature.

Grassland surrounds the Badlands, where deer grazed in the snow before sunset during my visit. The animate beings, in a more fertile location and seemingly unbothered by mechanized intrusions, gave rise to feelings of good through experiencing nature in ways that I can’t when in Chicago. I didn’t try to find offsetting attributes – the bad lands – for the pleasantness in my mind. I sort of had an elongated “moment of nature”, similar to the segment on the Sunday Morning tv show. The grazing land becomes the Badlands at points on the horizon, but like any horizon, the separation between here and there is not fixed.

If asked how I enjoyed the Badlands, I might have responded “Good. I took a slow drive and saw some deer.” Although the majority of my time was spent in the narrow valleys contemplating the deep nature of good vs. bad, I saw some deer.

Location: Badlands, South Dakota
Date photographed: 09-Feb-22

In many ways, the Badlands is an analogy for parts of my life. When I find myself in a bad land, I don’t always remember the choices that I made to enter the bad lands. When the winds of life howl, I tend to focus on the wind in my face rather than the potential reprieve over the next hill. I notice starkness and supposed separation between two states rather than the subtlety of the intersection of a complex Venn diagram. When I focus on the bad lands, I lose sight of the fertile ground just over the next hill.