A Lifelong Conversation with the Land

 by Penny Costello

In 1972, Nebraska Public Television first aired a conversation between Ron Hull and John G. Neihardt, Nebraska’s poet laureate and author of “Black Elk Speaks.” Neihardt was 92 years old when this interview took place. Hull was 42. As a producer at NET Television (now Nebraska Public Media) in 2015, I had the pleasure of producing a retrospective series of shorts called “Ron Hull Remembers”. One of the gems we pulled out of the archive for that series was the Hull-Neihardt interview.

“Do you feel that there is a special relationship between people that love the land and the land?” Hull asked Neihardt.

“Oh, indeed. Indeed. It’s a mystical relationship. It’s a religious relationship, in the true sense of religion,” Neihardt responded. “There’s something divine about the earth. The earth is our mother, and we depend on the earth for everything. We don’t live with spiritual ideas so much, although the times are changing. There is far more interest now in spiritual matters than there was 50 years ago. It’s the mood of the time that determines what people will think.”

I remember being struck with that response, having had the great fortune to experience that mystical relationship with two South Dakota ranches our family owned and managed, one just eight miles east of the Black Hills on Elk Creek, and the other thirteen miles east of Scenic in the Badlands National Monument. The Elk Creek place had been in my father’s family for four generations. My grandfather acquired the Badlands ranch in the 1940s. When he died in 1965, the two ranches were passed down to my father and his brother and sister. 

My parents, my two older brothers and I lived on the Badlands ranch until I was around five years old. That land was my dad’s soul place, and his dream was for it to be his one day. But that would not come to pass. When Grandad Costello died, the two ranches remained a partnership between his three children. And those three children went on to raise a next generation of seven children.

I remember those early years in the Badlands. Our house was built up on the side of a hill, and had big picture windows in the living room and in the kitchen. The vistas out of those windows were wondrous. There was a remoteness to that land that, for some, may have felt desolate and lonely. But, in my memory, it always felt more like freedom. When my brothers were at school, or out helping my dad, I had the company of our dogs and cats, my imaginary playmates, and my mom. Much of my time was spent outside exploring, connecting with the land and the animals that lived there with us. Cattle, horses, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, prairie dogs, jackrabbits, snakes, snapping turtles, that’s what I remember.

Neighbors helped each other gather cattle for branding, or drove them on horseback to a rail yard a few miles away to be loaded onto rail cars headed for the sale barn. And, while the partnership between my father and his siblings may have had its challenging moments, what I remember about it was having a lot of time with my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and my grandmother. It was a good life.

And those were only my first five years. After that we moved up to the place on Elk Creek. The Elk Creek Valley was beautiful and lush, with the Black Hills and Bear Butte on the horizons to the west and the north. The craggy Badlands buttes were replaced by green rolling hills, cottonwood trees, and alfalfa fields. These were the ancestral lands of the Lakota people that John Neihardt wrote about in his book, “Black Elk Speaks”.

People talk about sense of place. Sense of place includes all of that, the land, the climate, the skies, the people, the animals, the whole spectrum of experience that nurtures and shapes whoever is living in that place. There’s an energy exchange between the people and the land that is palpable. Our sense of place is synonymous, really, with our sense of self. It’s how we know ourselves in that place, and that place in us.

While the Badlands ranch was my dad’s soul place, the Elk Creek place was mine. There I had gained the autonomy, relative maturity and skill to be out on my own, riding horses, hanging with our dogs and cats, playing by the creek, and being on the land. I grew from a small child into an adolescent, and then into a teenager on that place.

I wanted to be out helping my dad make hay, working cattle, being a rancher. But I had two older brothers, and a couple of boy cousins whose fathers felt strongly that it was good for those boys to be out helping on the ranch. At that point in time, during the mid-60s and into the 70s, the only time female children would be tasked with things like driving tractors and doing ranch work would be if they were the oldest child, or the only child, and their dad needed the help. Otherwise, we were ranch wives in training.

Fortunately, my mom saw me for who I was, and after I fulfilled pretty minimal expectations to help with housework and other “womanly duties”, she pretty much left me to my own devices outside with the animals and the land. I am eternally grateful to her for that.

Our family sold the ranches in the mid-1970s. My dad and his siblings had gone through the past decade struggling to make it work with three partners, and they foresaw the difficulties of keeping it sustainable and fair to that next generation of seven heirs. With that sale, we were no longer a ranching family. That sense of place, of identity was gone. Well, not gone. The place was still there, and always would be. It just wasn’t my place anymore.

It has taken me all these years since to come to terms with the grief, the loss that came with the sale of those ranches. If it were up to me, those places would still be in my family.

Along the way, though, some both delightful and troubling synchronicity has occurred. These striking and sometimes bizarre so-called coincidences have caused me to question if anything is truly coincidental, or if perhaps something more mystical, or spiritual is at play. Here are a few examples:

·       In 1978, I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I had an incredibly vivid dream one night of going back to the Elk Creek ranch, and trying to find my brother and the house we lived in. But the whole place where our house used to be had become a cul-de-sac full of condos and townhomes. To this day, that dream is still a vivid memory.

·       In November of 2019, I was back in the Black Hills for a visit. I decided to buy the Rapid City Journal while at a gas station. I don’t regularly buy the newspaper when I go back there, but something compelled me to do that. As I looked through the paper that night in my hotel room, I came across a full-page advertisement for Creekside Estates, offering two to five acre lots right next to beautiful Elk Creek. As I looked closer, I realized that the lots were located in what used to be the pasture just east of the house I grew up in. And the potential development of more lots pretty much encompassed the main body of the Elk Creek ranch.

·       Two days after that, back at my home in Lincoln, I spoke to my father on the phone for the last time. Two days after that, I was on a plane to Phoenix, where he had been living. I got there in time to sit by his bed and hold his hand as he passed. In compliance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered over Lost Dog Canyon, one of his favorite places in the Badlands, adjacent to the ranch.

·       As I reviewed the Hull-Neihardt conversation in preparation to write the intro to this piece I was struck by a couple of things. First, John Neihardt was 92 years old when that interview occurred. Ron Hull is 92 years old today, as I write this. Then, Dr. Neihardt said, “There is far more interest now in spiritual matters than there was 50 years ago.” That piece originally aired in 1972 – 50 years ago. And I think it’s safe to say there is even more interest in spiritual matters today.

 

Over the years, I’ve gone back to the hill that provides a beautiful overlook of the Elk Creek valley, a few times blatantly trespassing on the current owner’s property to get down closer to the creek and reconnect with the places where I played and explored as a child. I have also driven up to the house on the Badlands place, and just sat there for a bit. In one sense, I felt like a trespasser. But in another, that same familiar palpable energy emanating from the land carried with it a sense of belonging, as if the land recognized me and welcomed me back.

I’ve learned that a connection with a place has nothing to do with a deed, title, or ownership. While I cannot live there anymore, that place will always be in me, and I can visit. When I do, if I keep my heart and mind open, and listen with my soul, the land will speak to me. It may be through a dream, or even through a newspaper ad, but if I’m paying attention, that place and my connection to it will endure.

 

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