Encountering my Roots

Encountering my Roots

By Nate Bender

10/2/2015

Spanning a four thousand mile, two-week period I had memorable encounters with the lands of my ancestral roots, notably South Dakota and Iowa.  This story seeks to capture the journey, along with certain reflections gleaned from re-connecting with the environment and its people, which shaped my formative years in America’s heartland. 

I grew up in rural Iowa, where my first-generation German immigrant paternal side homesteaded.  I also had annual journeys to rural South Dakota, where my first-generation German immigrant maternal side homesteaded.  These two locales, separated by more than 300 miles, became places from which my horizons became expanded.  In other words, these settings prepared me for a life of adventure and exploration.

Sandra and I departed Mississippi on September 8, 2015 for the long road trip to western South Dakota and its Black Hills area, via stops in Little Rock, Arkansas; Kansas City, Missouri and the Truman Library in Independence; Sioux City, Iowa; and Pierre, South Dakota.   

We met up with long time friends Nancy & Ross Stevenson from Vermont in Rapid City, South Dakota.  Ultimately, we journeyed to a Custer rental house as our base for one week of touring and adventuring.  Our Custer encampment and accompanying adventures exposed us to Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, Crazy Horse mountain carving and The Badlands being the primary sights.  I had a special opportunity to keep up with these octogenarians (84 and 83), who seemed to possess the endurance and strength of mountain goats when hiking up and down steep trails!  

The Black Hills, as well as other parts of the state, has a long and tortuous history regarding Native Americans, as does every state for that matter.  The replicas, artifacts and stories stirred up in me a compassion for the ensuing struggles and displacement of these people, which often relegated them to secondary citizenship status.  The Chief Crazy Horse Mountain carving, albeit incomplete after more than 50 years of work, made a deep, sad dent in my psyche when learning of the battles and exploitations the U.S. government and its military Calvary imposed. 

On a positive note, I became engulfed by South Dakota’s big blue sky, spanning the expansive horizon.  Big Sky Country it surely is!  With miles and miles of sunflower fields, the state’s moniker as the sunflower state was in full, glorious bloom.  And then there were the people of South Dakota.  They are predominately open, unguarded types, often bringing to bear images generated by Garrison Keillor in his Prairie Home Companion stories.  This was quite a contrast to Mississippi, where caution often dominates new encounters.

At the conclusion of our Black Hills stay on the 19th, we journeyed more than 800 miles to far-eastern Iowa and the city of Bettendorf.  With eighty mile per hour speed limits in South Dakota, my Ram EcoDiesel pickup found its groove!  While the visit in Bettendorf was an over night stay with my nephew Reuben Bender and family, the impact was high octane!  Reuben and his wife April have co-produced exemplary versions of next generation ‘Bender boys three,’ in the form of Beaux, Grady and Drew.  All five of these family members received us with open arms, unlike any family reception in memory.  One of the first questions from Beaux was “are you taller than Jesus?”  These boys were captured by my height in ways I don’t remember experiencing!  With Reuben’s parents having passed into the great beyond, Sandra and I represent surrogate parents and grand parents, in a fashion.

In covering a good bit of the land of my ancestral roots, it became ever more clear that I no longer feel a deep connection to that land.  The land no longer houses smaller family farms.  Crop rotations and natural animal fertilization have been replaced with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.  Virtually every field is now essentially free of dividing fences and anchored in large industrialized operations with either corn or soy beans as the two major crops.  This reality saddens me and distances me from what was once a nourishing beginning of my life.  I now know more about why I had to leave, some 52 years ago.

Our two-day trip home from Iowa was uneventful.  Once we reached the Mississippi welcome center south of Memphis, it felt like I was home.  I came home to Mississippi in a way I didn’t feel in returning to my ancestral roots.