As COVID-safe lunch locations go, Wind Cave National Park is pretty tough to beat.
Outside is safer, after all. And Wind Cave offers 33,970 acres of outside, where those with a creative spirit can easily find a place to have lunch together, safely.
For our purposes on Wednesday, the perfect location was a piece of grassy high ground with a small parking lot along Highway 87, in-between the park headquarters and Custer State Park to the north.
There behind an interpretive sign explaining the seasons of the elk, 15 people brought lunch and drinks and chairs and plenty to say, settling down in well-spaced pairs and a few singles as the sun shone and the temperature worked its way into the middle 60s.
On the ninth day of December, no less.
I was there at the invitation of Jackie Gericke to observe and learn a bit about the group and this regular lunch gathering, which has become more important through months of social isolation caused by COVID. The lunchers themselves were there to continue a group relationship that began 25 years ago with a Thanksgiving Day celebration for a bunch of Wind Cave employees.
They include Gericke and her husband, Rich, who first felt the pull of the Wind Cave spirit when Jackie took a job as an interpretive ranger there in 1994.
They’ve been in nearby Hot Springs ever since, going to Wind Cave regularly.
“We fell in love with the place and the people,” Jackie says. “And almost everybody who came to lunch here today was working at the park when we came here.”
Some in the little lunch group still work at the park. But all are connected to it in one way or another, including volunteer work to make the place and its programs better.
So, when COVID concerns clamped down on up-close-and-personal relationships, it simply made sense for them to meet at the park for socially distant lunches aimed at maintaining people-park, people-people connections.
So much has been lost to COVID-19, most profoundly and sadly the more than 1,100 human lives here in South Dakota alone. But living human connections have been lost, too, or at least disturbed and disrupted.
The lunches with old friends who have a common park connection fight all that and restore spirits.
“Human relationships have become even more important now because of the virus and the separation,” Jackie says. “I’m just so grateful for this group and the human connections we have. Like me, these people just love the southern Black Hills. So, when we can be together in this environment, it enriches all of us.”
I felt a bit of that enrichment myself, just tagging along and sitting on a borrowed chair for an hour or so as the conversation started with greetings and updates on who had done what lately. From there, it moved to COVID news, political commentary, postponed Ohio State University football games, and checks for radon levels in basements.
Interesting stuff, often entertaining and sometimes informative. And for a guy who made a professional career out of in-person listening to the thoughts of others, it was a pleasantly textured, harmoniously presented song of significance.
It said something to the world and especially to the virus: “We are still here. Still talking. Face to face, with a reasonable bit of breathing room in-between.”
That’s something that needs to be said, regularly and safely, as long as COVID curtails our lifestyle, and beyond.
The age range for the lunch group was roughly the mid-50s to the mid-70s. So it was a comfortable place to sit and listen for a 69-year-old blogger and columnist who loves to meet new people and chat in person but hasn’t had much of that in the last nine months.
As I sat there and listened and eventually joined in, I realized how much I’d missed such gatherings. The most human kind.
Phone calls work. Emails and texts are useful. Facetime helps. Zoom will get it done.
But there’s nothing quite like talking face to face, even if the nearest face happens to be 10 feet away.
