What's Good, Black Hills?

(and grasshoppers)

Take a stroll through any patch of grass in late summer and you are bound to kick up a jumping jamboree of grasshoppers. A nuisance to some people, grasshoppers can also be a soothing sensory experience, their songs can provide a soundtrack to your outdoor adventures.

Likewise, one of the many simple pleasures of living in the Black Hills is turning down for the night, windows open, a gentle breeze wafting into your room. Even though the days are hot, the temperature usually cools tolerably overnight. Due to the lack of light pollution so common to more populous areas, the nights around here are pretty dark. The more remote you are, the darker it gets.

Nights like these, you will hear crickets aplenty. Maybe there’s a big ol’ watery moon in the clearbright sky to help lull you off to your slumber. And just like the dark, the more rural you are, the more clearly you are able to hear the crickets’ mirthful song.

It’s one of those easily overlooked joys that falls from your mind when you are away from the Black Hills for a long time. But then if you ever come back, you hear it and think, “Oh, yeah. I forgot about the sound of crickets at night. I love that.” And once you remember, you are unlikely to forget it again. It’s one of the many knots on the cord that binds you here, even if you’ve only visited.

Many have been the nights where I have lain in bed, maybe gazing through an open window with the moonlight peeking in, listening to the dark. In college, when I would come back for the summer, my parents’ house was across the valley from the Homestake Mine in Lead. Before their move, we had lived a few miles outside of town, near the turnoff to Terry Peak ski area. I had grown accustomed to a nightly cricket summer symphony unspoiled by the noise of industry, beyond the odd motorcycle rumbling by. However, in my parents’ new place, I came to identify the mechanistic yawns and somnambulant sighs of the nighttime mine with a different, but no less powerful coziness. 

Those same summers I spent with my parents, the sound of crickets pre-dawn would accompany my dad and I all the way out to the jobsite, where they would cease only with the full light of day or the firing of the chainsaws we used for our work, whichever came first.

Very few things can summon that homesick ache like the sound of cricketsong. And now, many years later, when the feeling is right, those sounds sometimes come echoing back to me across the void of time. I am briefly overcome with a sense of nostalgia, both pleasure and pain. My heart hurts for the very time and very place where I now live—summertime, in the Black Hills.

And then there are those mornings as the season winds to a close, where you walk outside—maybe heading to work, maybe to going for a hike—where the crickets sing you to your destination and the grasshoppers take over and carry you on your merry way. 

If you find yourself in the area this time of year, don’t forget to focus your mind and open your ears. Let the crickets make that same impression on you, so that the memory of the Black Hills will stay ever in your heart.

There really is no other place like it. The crickets tell me so.

Now Go Forth! But Treat Lightly.