When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
According to Lakota tradition, Wind Cave is where their people's souls emerged from the earth before their creation event. They held the site as sacred, aware of its existence long before brothers Tom and Jesse Bingham stumbled upon the natural entrance, an inexplicably windy hole in the ground, in 1881. By 1903, it had become America's first cave designated as a national park.
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