In South Dakota social traditions have always involved people coming together for celebrations with our families and our communities. While the current situation has changed, South Dakotans are adapting. This week’s Dakota Life Digital Edition features a long time annual Easter egg hunt that has reimagined itself this Easter season and a rural church that has found a way to bring its congregation together at a distance. We give you an update on what’s happening at South Dakota’s State Parks, and take you on a trip to Window Rock at Custer-Gallatin National Forest. We’ll also see how, despite their disrupted concert season, the South Dakota Symphony is finding new ways to reach out to the community.
Socially Distant Safe Easter Egg Hunt
by Melissa Sievers
Spring means the arrival of flowers, birds, green grass and the Easter bunny. Celebrations look quite different this year, due to social distancing amidst COVID-19. Holy services include communing with others from the comfort of our sofas via live-streaming services or perhaps a drive-up church gathering.
Pierre is one community that has worked to provide an alternative to its annual Easter egg hunt. Steve Wegman, who has chaired Pierre’s Easter egg for 35 years, says this is only the third time the city has had to make accommodations to the festivities. “I only moved the hunt two times,” says Wegman. “One for blizzard and one when the constructing the new [Governor’s mansion]. In the 66 times we have done the hunt, this is the first time we had to morph a change. I was brainstorming as I watched the virus spread around the world.”
In March it became clear, unfortunately, life would call for Plan B, C and sometimes even D.
Wegman and Pierre’s Elk Lodge #1953 had to come up with a new idea for the egg hunt that typically occurs on the Governor’s residence property.
A coloring contest was devised. All children in Pierre and Ft. Pierre were invited to print, decorate, and hang their eggs in their windows for people to “find” while out walking or driving. To enter the contest, photos of the eggs must be posted to Pierre’s Elk Lodge #1953 Facebook page by April, 11, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/PierreSDElks
Wegman encourages Pierre residents to enter, no matter their level of artistic talent. “The community loves the idea, but I have only seen a few eggs colored and posted. So, sad,” says Wegman. “I made the rules simple and easy. I am not looking for van Gogh nor Georgia O’Keeffe. Just some simple art work.”
Easter egg coloring page templates are available online for children and young at heart. Pierre’s Elk Lodge #1953 shares this page for kids in South Dakota’s capitol city interested in participating in the contest.
If The People Stop Praising, Even The Rocks Will Cry Out
by Tom Dempster
Amidst the Covid 19 pandemic in South Dakota, the parking lot of the Preston Township Christian Church on Sunday, April 5th was jam-packed. But standing on a flat bed trailer outside the church was Pastor Tim Smith conducting the Palm Sunday service, broadcasting to his parishioners' FM radios in their pick-ups and cars. Members were asked to keep the windows in their cars rolled up. The church bulletin and songs were sent to church members' phones. During the service in this church near Bruce, SD, members sent in prayer requests via text-message.
State Parks Remain Open, Fishing Conditions Good
by Nate Wek
There are restrictions on business activity around the state to reduce transmission of the coronavirus. However, state officials say South Dakota’s parks and outdoor recreation areas are open.
South Dakota Game Fish and Parks secretary Kelly Hepler stated they’ve modified some of the park operations.
"We don’t have people manning the stations, so we’re letting people go in, don’t need a park pass. Once we are back up and running again, come back in a buy a park pass, so this is a grace period. We don’t have our comfort stations open, but we do have all our potties are open for people to use," explained Hepler. "Certainly all the trails are open. Around here in Pierre we have the shooting range and archery range, and that’s true in a lot of the places around the state. We don’t have some of the popular places like the outdoor campuses. Those are closed, just for the benefit of the public."
Hepler said it’s also a great time for fishing in South Dakota. He said anglers are catching walleye and pike. He reminds people to abide by the CDC guidelines - to minimize numbers and avoid groups.
The agency is actively cleaning the amenities at parks, like picnic tables and bathrooms. However, people are encouraged to regularly wash their hands and use good hygiene if they are spending time in the outdoors.
A Hidden Window to Another World
by Michael Zimny
Everybody knows about the Castles in Harding County — they are a designated National Natural Landmark — but what about Window Rock? If landforms is what you're after, the South Dakota units of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest has got 'em.
There are medieval castles and tufted hoodoos, grassy plateau islands adrift in desert seas, bulbous earth mounds pushed up from under and pierced through by jagged landwarts.
Then, rising from a valley surrounded by these wonders there's South Dakota's own, sandstone Ziggurat of Ur, except less accessible than Iraq's, which according to Google Maps is just a thirty minute drive from the Nasiriyah Mega Mall.
Ours was built by nature not Ur-Nammu, but both have made lasting contributions to the order of how it all goes down (capital punishment — still a thing). The Mesopotamian ziggurats were a kind of proto-Brutalist architecture in their sheer hermeticity, imposing and terrifying like the Buffalo City Court building (Buffalo, New York not South Dakota). Whatever openings existed on the upper terraces — probably temples which have been lost to time — must have held heavy visual significance.
The window appears to have been sculpted by metaphysical forces. Geologists say wind and water are the sculptors of landforms (to which others may reply same difference). Wind and rain flagellated our ziggurat over eons, washing streamlets of sediment into the creek below. More water hunkered in the cavities created, froze in winter, and expanded fractures in the sandstone, breaking away layers until the window was gradually opened.
Was the window in the very DNA of our ziggurat, waiting for nature to draw the curtain? Jiri Bruthans, a hydrogeologist at in the Czech Republic researched the role played in arch-formation by pre-existing stress fields in sandstone, created by downward pressure. His team found that as parts of a sandstone structure under low stress erode, stress increases on remaining load-bearing portions, making them stronger, more erosion-resistant. “Erosion gets material out, but doesn’t make the shape,” Bruthans told Nature. The forms the sandstone eventually takes are innate.
The window was always a window. There was just some lag time between the geomorphological affirmation of its window-ness and the construction of our ziggurat.
At sunrise, Window Rock's pale naked sandstone sponges hues filtered through the golden grasses and pink and purplish fog puffs slowly ascending over the valley. As the seasons change and light flickers through green grass and cottonwood leaves, blossoms of echinacea and sunflower and prickly pear, the colors will brighten like the belly of a meadowlark as it creeps up on little larkmaking age.
The window in Window Rock functions differently as a window. As our species is groomed for a boxed, sunless existence, we feign an escape into small windows. Held close to the face, they fill our field of vision while narrowing its focus, diminishing our inner worlds enough to make our physical cubbyholes suffice — like staring through a telescope at a globular cheese puff and calling it Venus. Our sightlines could be drawn as two cones joined at the base.
The Window works inversely — the cones are stacked at the vertices. We can't press our faces to the paneless fissure in the Rock. You can stand at a distance in the magnitude of this strange, brutal place and your unconfinement will catapult you through the passage right back into holy bigness.
To get to Window Rock, you take SD 20 to Forest Service Road 3124 (it shows up on Google Maps as North End Road), less than half a mile East of the Reva Gap Campground and views of the Castles. FS-3124 winds steeply and bumpily upward through ponderosa pine forest. The route is muddy now, but even when it dries out I wouldn't try it in anything not a high-clearance four wheel drive. You could also park and walk about five miles, it's worth it.
You'll reach a high prairie that drops steeply to the southwest, and know Window Rock when you see it. I parked at 45.57270, -103.20853. From anywhere in that general area you can weave your own path (about a mile) down and over grassy hills stippled with juniper, stepped terraces and naked mounds of soil crusted with ashy layers of alkali.
A silty talus slope at the base of the east-facing wall seems impassable. There is no elongated stairway to the upper chambers of our ziggurat, even for priests. You can find ways to scramble to near the top, but I shouldn't recommend it. The Rock is at 45.56671, -103.21664.
Dakota Life Virtual: Quartet in D minor
by Paul Ebsen & Kevin Patten
Delta David Gier discusses the disrupted South Dakota Symphony and Ensemble season and some of the ways he, the musicians and staff are reaching out to the community. This episode also features, flutist William Cedeño, cellist Robert Erhard, bassoonist John Tomkins and oboist Jeffery Paul and their performance of the Quartet in D minor by Georg Philipp Telemann.
Credits:
Photography by: Michael Zimny