I don’t normally do two blog posts for a park, but after I sat down to write the next one on my list for Theodore Roosevelt, I saw that I had written a post for it nine months prior. I just hadn’t gotten around to editing the gallery photos for the trip report, so it wasn’t published. The essays are so different, but I really liked them both and thought they told a good story together – the heat outside and the fire inside.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park is named for the conservationist and 26th President of the United States who found solace here while mourning the death of both his wife and mother on Valentine’s Day, 1884. The rugged landscape offered him “the romance of my life” and laid the foundations for his presidential bid years later.
In Roosevelt’s time, the area near Buck Hill where the Coal Vein Nature Trail now lies looked quite different from what we see today. Where we enter a depression leading to a staircase, he would have walked on ground level with the top of the stairs. Geology is on full display in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, with hillsides baring their multi-colored mineral layers with pride, telling their ancient stories to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. And this particular area has a fascinating story to tell.
Forces of Nature
In 1951, a 12-foot-thick layer of coal deep underground caught fire. With so much fuel and built-in protection from wind and rain, the fire took up residence there for 26 years. Until 1977, the fire glowed underground, evidenced on the surface with smoke and occasional flames. But it largely kept to itself, slowly eating away at the foundation of the land. As the fire burned the coal vein, the rocks above that layer became unsupported and the whole mass collapsed, forming the depression we see today.
During the fire, rocks near cracks in the layers baked like clay in a kiln and became harder red rocks known as “clinker.” They dot the landscape here and elsewhere in the Dakota badlands, a testimony to the forces that shaped this area. Over time, western chorus frogs found spawning habitats in the standing water from seasonal pools formed in the new low pockets. Since the fire burned out, grass and prairie plants have retaken the land and become home to a diverse ecosystem of life.
A Superior Theology
I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I visited this area and marveled at a fire burning for 26 years, I had a slow-burning fire of my own inside. Since first becoming an evangelical Christian as a young teen, my theology was actually a bit more progressive than many evangelicals’. I attribute this to a complete overhaul of its theology by the church I grew up in that transformed from a fundamentalist sect with a chapter in “Kingdom of the Cults” to a member of the National Association of Evangelicals (long story for another time). Suffice it to say that this overhaul meant I came into evangelicalism without a lot of the traditions and baggage many longtime denominations and believers have. In my very first election, I voted against California’s Proposition 22, which stated that marriage is between one man and one woman. In my freshman year at an evangelical college, I greeted my public communications class with an interpretive reading from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and later gave a persuasive speech on gay rights. My senior year, I smugly watched students in my biblical apocalyptic class wrestle with hearing for the first time that most biblical scholars don’t adhere to rapture theory.
In the decades since then, I have moved steadily more progressive in my personal theology – and also become much less certain (and smug) about whatever “knowledge” of the truth I think I hold. I acknowledged that I never did really believe in Hell as eternal conscious torment, and stopped thinking human death is the cutoff point for God’s eternal salvation. I started reading and listening to biblical scholars and historians like Pete Enns, Richard Rohr, Kristen Kobes du Mez, Beth Allison Barr, and Bryan McLaren. I found spiritual comrades in the likes of Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessie, Jen Hatmaker, and William P. Young.
A Burning Inside
But I couldn’t talk openly about the turns my theology was taking, at least not in my evangelical church (which I should mention at this point was a different one from where I grew up). I even found it hard to stand openly for things I had long believed that were at odds with the official church stance. I told myself that because these were non-essential issues to salvation, it didn’t matter in the broader Church context. I didn’t want anyone to stumble on my account because of my “dangerous” theology, so I kept quiet about it.
However, these “non-essentials” kept burning under the surface. Once in a while they would show themselves in a pointed conversation, but I always qualified my thoughts with statements like, “But who really knows for sure,” and never definitively owned what I actually believed. Eventually though, under the surface, the whole structure of my evangelical faith found itself unsupported, finally collapsing just like the land over what once was a vein of coal.
Issues like women’s place in the church, the sainthood of our LGBTQ siblings, what should (and should not) be required for baptism all came to the forefront and imploded when I could no longer hold my beliefs in tandem with the messages preached from the pulpit and in church communications and small groups. I had to find a new version of my faith that didn’t force the same tensions, whether in a new church or outside the church entirely.
The Aftermath
Gratefully, our family found a new spiritual home in an Episcopal church. Before we started attending regularly, we met with the (female) rector and told our story, including all of our “radical” theologies. She was unfazed and assured us that many in the congregation would agree. Slowly, the grass started to grow on the fallen hillside. Ponds filled with the jazzy chorus of frog song. And elements of my faith that were strong before, like my dogged assertion that Jesus actually meant his gospel of love, became as firm as clinker, forming protective caps over the softer minerals and ecosystems that live under its shade.
My story has turned out as beautiful as the landscape surrounding the Coal Vein Nature Trail. At least so far. I could have focused here on the depression following the collapse, and perhaps in the future I will because the grief was – and is – very real. But for this story, the reclaimed beauty is a joy worth sharing. Roosevelt came to the Dakotas to find himself again after unimaginable loss, and his time here inspired much of the conservation work that was a defining piece of his presidency. The changing landscape of this same place gave me starting point to reflect on my own losses and griefs, and to realize the goodness in the change they brought. The loss will always be a part of me, but I am who I am now because of it – stronger, wiser, and full of more grace than ever before.
Leave a Reply