NEDAR INTERIOR, S.D. — I’m writing this on my phone around 2 a.m. inside a Coleman four-person tent pitched on the edge of the endless prairie within Badlands National Park.

 

My eldest daughter is awake in a second, much larger tent for the women of the family, holding its hinges against the wind so it doesn’t collapse. Again.

At this moment nylon is pressing in on me and my two sons from the south and west. If I had to guess, the sustained breeze is 10 to 15 miles per hour and the gusts that really whip the tent over 30.

About four hours ago we got a gale that lasted several minutes and bent the tentpoles inward as I vainly tried to hold them back and act like everything was perfectly in hand. At that point we all evacuated for a time to the Ford Transit that has safely delivered us to this otherworldly landscape.

It’s only a few days into my family’s first Western adventure, and the car’s just about the only thing to go right.

 

THE FIRST WESTERN ADVENTURE

I’ve always wanted to see the West unfold before me at ground level. Dropping in out of the sky doesn’t have the same effect.

Flying to some new-to-you region of this country doesn’t make its landscapes any less striking, but it does obscure how America the beautiful is knit together. This country isn’t merely a collection of cities and tourist destinations. It’s also everything in between.

If we had flown into Rapid City, for instance, we would have missed how the rolling and rugged Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa differs from and fades into the prairie of southern Minnesota. And we would have missed how South Dakota changes from Midwestern flatlands to big-sky Western vistas the moment you cross the Missouri River.

This is something remarkable about the United States: it’s a continent-spanning nation that will always be, at its heart, a country meant to be experienced by road. Nothing else really does it justice.

The purpose of this trip was to finally experience this for ourselves.

 

BABY CAMPERS

We’re baby campers, all things considered. Neither my wife nor I grew up in outdoorsy families, but our oldest kids caught the bug and passed it to us. After a few experiences close to home — Raccoon Creek, Cook Forest — we decided, like so many Americans before, to test our limits out West.

After staying the first night in a hotel near Madison, we arrived a little late to our secluded campsite in on the banks of Plum Creek outside Walnut Grove, Minn. We all apparently forgot the part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder story where the whole family comes down with malaria. So we frantically made camp and prepared dinner while the mosquitoes had us for dinner.

By lunchtime on Monday, however, the experience had already transitioned from a disgusting reality to an amusing memory. And by 5pm local time, we knew it would be nothing more than an unfortunate prologue to the perfect trip we’ve planned for nearly a year.

That’s when we entered the Badlands.

 

HOPED FOR CONDITIONS

We’d been tracking weather forecasts for weeks, and the conditions when we crossed the threshold of the National Park were everything we hoped for.

The majestic and forbidding rock formations, more elaborate and imminent than any travel book or YouTube video could possibly portray, were silhouetted against a cerulean sky crossed by wispy clouds.

And our campsite was perfect. Right on the edge of the campground, nothing but prairie and badlands beyond. We pitched our tents, executed our dinner plan — quesadillas on the camp stove — and started to wind down. The sunset was partially obscured by heavy clouds in the horizon, but that was hardly worth complaining about.

Then someone, I forget who exactly, saw the lightning.

 

DIFFERENT AIR

What I noticed most, even inside the tent, was how different the air suddenly felt before the winds began — cooler and crisper, as if one atmosphere were being ushered out and a new one swept in.

The storm only skirted us, and the boys tent was nearly asleep when the second wave arrived — no water, just violent air. It folded the girls tent like an umbrella, and while ours held fast, it didn’t seem like it would. It took all my powers of parental persuasion to get the boys back into the tent after the gale subsided.

* * * * * * *

I’m writing this the next morning. Around 3 a.m., I fell asleep phone-in-hand. Conditions had improved until around 12:30, when the wind blew again for more than two hours straight. I awoke around 6:00, surprisingly rested, early enough to a magenta sunrise beyond the badlands pinnacles.

It was all as perfect as it had been the previous evening. And I realized that if you really want to experience this country, and not just look at it, you also have to accept its imperiousness, its fickleness, its awesomeness.

But one night was enough. Around 2 a.m., I used the little bit of reception I had to book a hotel for tonight.

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