EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to Resilient Goshen, a recurring column exploring the people, places and natural systems that shape our community. Written by Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley, the City of Goshen’s director of Environmental Resilience, the series offers insight into the forests, waterways, wildlife and landscapes that make Goshen unique and the shared stewardship that helps them thrive.
By AARON SAWATSKY-KINGSLEY
Traveling makes me think about time. Not so much the immediacy of my own movement from here to there. A cross-country trip makes me wonder about larger spans of time. How long ago was that farmhouse built? When did this little town come into existence, and what was it like in its heyday? How long did this river take to carve its floodplain? When were these wild rock formations created?
We are leaving the Black Hills in South Dakota. For people from northern Indiana, like me, these look and feel like mountains: sharp peaks rising from the prairie, visible for miles because of the pine forest covering them and giving them their black appearance. I have been wondering about the first people who encountered these hills thousands of years ago.
What must they have thought as they approached them, wandered into them and contemplated their mystery and might? I’m wondering, too, about the people for whom these hills have been sacred, whose ancestors returned here for generations in search of essential sustenance. How long did it take them to memorize every rise and fall, every opening and closing of these immense hills?
Deep Time Is Written Across the Landscape
I also think about how long these mountains have stood, tens of millions of years since they were pushed upward, and about the slow changes in plants and animals that waxed and waned across them. Not long ago, millions of buffalo migrated through these ravines, canyons and peaks. I wonder how long people will continue migrating by road and car, like us, to catch a brief glimpse of their beauty.
Heading east, we briefly cross the plains before descending into the Badlands. Here, it feels as though time is on display. The Badlands are sedimentary rock formations, all that remains of the bottom of a vast inland sea that covered North America between 66 million and 100 million years ago. These formations have been eroding ever since that sea disappeared.
Layers of the ancient seabed are exposed in bands of red, yellow, orange and gray, forming massive outcroppings and deep cracks where it’s difficult to see the bottom. It’s hot and dry, 98 degrees, and nothing grows on the bare faces of these crumbling cliffs. But where the eroded material settles, where wind and water have broken apart the ancient seafloor, grasses, cactuses and even trees have adapted and continue to grow.
How long will this process continue, this slow trickling away of sandstone and limestone? When will the sea return? What will it find when it does?
Landscapes Shaped by Time
The next day, we turn south, driving through the Rosebud Reservation and into the Sand Hills of Nebraska. I’d heard about this landscape from my friend Kendel, who recommended we drive through if we had time.
The famous cranes are named for these hills because they stop here during their annual migrations, 500,000 strong. They stop because, despite the arid landscape, the Sand Hills hold vast wetlands in their valleys.
The hills rise and fall in endless swells, reminding me of a rough ocean, wave after wave of rolling hills cresting higher before diving into long, winding valleys. Here, the water rests, much of it hidden beneath dense wetland vegetation, though sometimes it shines in open pools before disappearing from view.
Today, the hills are covered in grass and prairie plants and have been for a very long time. But during drier eras, this land was desert, its sand exposed and blown into immense dunes that shifted and tumbled across the landscape.
We turn east again at the Platte River. Before long, the hills disappear, and we roll across the plains and prairies. Everything seems to become corn, stretching across Nebraska, Iowa and into Illinois. We are moving so fast, 80 mph, that it’s difficult to comprehend the landscape rushing past. Somehow, that makes time feel longer.
Why is this taking so long?
Then I imagine crossing this land on foot, in a wagon or by boat along its rivers. For those travelers, time was measured by seasons and the subtle changes that signaled them. For us, time is a chore, a minor nuisance. We just want to get home.
Returning Home to the Forest
By the time we reach the western suburbs of Chicago, I think I notice the change in the landscape I’ve been anticipating. It’s difficult to tell because of the urban sprawl, but trees begin filling open spaces and arching over neighborhoods.
Once we make it around the city and into Indiana, the shift is unmistakable. We have entered forestland. There are still farms, industries and wetlands, but trees stand at the edge of everything. They are always pressing in, even as people push them back.
I think about time once more. How long would it take for the forest to reclaim these human-made openings? I even wonder whether that day will come. As we arrive home, the trees welcome us, surround us and pull us in. I’m grateful for where we’ve been, but I’m also grateful to be here, right now.
Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley serves as Goshen’s director of Environmental Resilience and joined the City as its first urban forester in 2006. Readers can find this column bi-weekly on Saturdays in The Goshen News.
