Today in History: November 2, 1889

North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted to the United States as the 39th and 40th States.

I drove across the country with my boyfriend years ago. We went to many many states. We saw many beautiful things. We went through mountains and plains and prairies. But the states that touched us the most – the states that, frankly, blew us away … were the Dakotas.

Weird, but I don’t remember the two of us even SPEAKING to one another as we moved our way through the Dakotas. I know we did. But there was something about the landscapes there that struck us dumb. With wonder? Awe? Yes. But something else. Perhaps an awareness of our own smallness. We LOVED the Dakotas.

My memories there are rich, sensoral, and just snippets:

— Heavy grey clouds pressing in from horizon to horizon … watching the lightning occuring miles and miles away …

— The wet highway stretching out before us to the vanishing point

— An isolated gas station surrounded by dun-brown fields as far as the eye could see – the neon sign of the gas station gleaming through the rain – desolation – but poetry

— Rich fields of sunflowers on either side of the highway. The late afternoon light falling across the bobbing yellow heads of the flowers … the rich dark-brown soil

— The two small white-headed children we saw sitting on top of a fence – in the middle of nowhere – no grown-ups in sight – and in the paddock (also in the middle of nowhere) were about 10 grazing buffalo. The buffalo being watched over by these small gleaming tow-headed children. Odd. My boyfriend and I talked to them for a while. In blunt simple language.

Something about the landscape in the Dakotas made language seem unnecessary.

And here’s an old post I wrote about one of my favorite memories of all time. It’s from an experience we had in one of the Dakotas. It says it all. Hovering over this piece is an enormous silence. The silence of the surrounding land, the enormous sky … It didn’t press in on us, it wasn’t suffocating … but it wasn’t exactly liberating either. The landscape and the sky FORCED us to be contemplative. FORCED us to BE with ourselves. The silence persisted. Filling it up with silly chit-chat would have been useless because the silence was too big.

My love for the Dakotas is piercing and sensoral – and I was only there for 5 days.

Dakota post below:

Standing on a high windy plain with my boyfriend as a thunderstorm gathered on the horizon and the light got low, and sickly-green, and so charged with potential you nearly wanted to scream. Waiting for the release. We had been hiking for hours, watching as the day changed, as the sky got more ominous. There had been a massive wind, whipping the tall grass on its side, nearly carrying me away with it. We got some incredible pictures of the approaching storm (we had no business being up on the high plains watching forks of lightning jag their way towards us, but whatever, it was gorgeous) … but the pictures cannot convey the feeling in the air itself . The hairs on my arm rose up, to meet the electricity in the molecules.

There were no people out there but us. (For obvious reasons. We were idiots.) Just a huge sky, changing on a moment to moment basis, getting fuller and fuller, lower and lower, and GREEN – not black, not purple … but GREEN … the sound of the wind in the grass … the feeling that we were about to get caught out in something pretty enormous and spectacular.

And then, I’ll never forget it:

For a brief whooshing moment, everything went still. The wind stopped. As though a giant hand had turned off the wind machine. Hush. A sudden alarming hush fell over the land. My boyfriend and I both stopped, feeling the change. We paused … holding our breath …

We were having the time of our lives. We were watching the storm unfold as though it was the best movie we had ever seen. We kept looking at each other, wordlessly, like: hoooly shiiiiit …

Silence covered the plains (this was the real calm before the storm, turns out – when everything came to a sudden sharp stop … took a breath … and then the heavens opened up) … and in that silence, we heard a sound. Something that, to be honest, I’ve only heard in movies.

The thundering sound of horses hooves … galloping horses … the galloping sound of MANY horses …

It has got to be one of the most exciting sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. Even though I’ve only heard that sound in movies, when it came to my ears, there was a rush of familiarity, and love, and knowing: Yes. That is that sound. I know that sound. Something in my DNA knows that sound intimately. It was thrilling.

We were on the edge of a large dip in the land, a bit off the trail, and the sound came from far below. We walked over to the edge, in the middle of the eerie stillness, all the grass suddenly straight, still, motionless, and looked out over the dip in the land. And there we saw them – we had only heard about them and heard that it was rare to get a glimpse of them – but there they were – a herd of wild horses, racing along the bottom of the plain in a massive herd. There were about 20 of them, galloping like mad things, freaking out because of the storm … their manes and tails flying, their hooves churning up the dirt … neighing and whinnying in alarm, bucking and kicking and running …

I have never seen anything so beautiful, so moving, so unbelievable in my life.

They were fierce, savage, a bit scary, almost mythical. I’ve seen wild horses like that in my dreams. My fantasies.

We got no pictures, obviously. We couldn’t have captured it. We didn’t need to capture it.

I love horses anyway, but … to see wild horses … and not to see them grazing on a hill … but to see them AS wild, to see them running … Oh my God. Like Marlowe said: “the wondrous architecture of the world…”

Boyfriend said to me after we gaped at their frenzy far down the plain for a while, “We should get the hell back to the van. They know something we don’t.”

And we RAN off the plains, as quickly as we could, as the wind started picking up again, alarmingly, this time cold – a whoosh of cold … and we made it back to the van before the gods unleashed the torrents upon us in a thunderous crash. Hell broke loose. Massive wind/rain/electrical storm on the high plains.

But I am glad we took the risk. To see those horses. Those spectacular wild horses.

You know how you see something and you don’t know why but you know you are somehow forever changed?

That’s what that moment was like.

Photo I took in North Dakota below – which pretty much captures the magic of the place for me: