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Badlands, Good Park

Unless you were born in North Dakota,
or have had the bad luck to break down there,
you have never head of Medora.  Medora
is the gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park,
perched on that part of the Badlands. 

Under Teddy Roosevelt's determined leadership,
huge sections of this country were set aside as parks.
Anyone with the vision and determination to do that,
today, would be called a socialist, an enemy of
private ownership and oil development, and probably
also a budget-breaking, capitalist-hating, left-wing,
wrong-minded, foreign-born, gun-hating, fascist!
It is the kind of country that a Half-Governor of Alaska
would want to fly over just to hunt coyotes. 

But there it is!  Prairie dogs, and scrub-treed,
and rock-ribbed, and absolutely beautiful! 

We stayed in the only motel we could find space in,
right in Medora.  They had space in the "Bunkhouse",
across the street, we were told.  The room in the Bunkhouse
was a tad small, but it was clean and unexpectedly quiet.
We had been warned that it might not be entirely peaceful,
since the walls were a bit thin.  Actually, there were
almost thirty bunkhouses, over there, across the street,
and about half a mile down the road.  Each bunkhouse
had eight rooms.  Ours was number five-hundred-something.

Early in the morning we drove up into the park,
oohing and ahhing and chirping to the prairie dogs.

The horse manure on the road should have informed us, but we thought that was evidence of horseback riders.  There are herds of wild horses in the Park!  They are doing well, we were told, and the herds have to be reduced, the horses going to people who have to agree to keep them together, because they really are wild.  Only a few domestic horses have found their way into the herds; else they are survivors of escaped Spanish horses, of Indian horses, from long ago. 

There is beauty everywhere!  And here and there, there is also vision.  More there than here, more then than now.

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