Badlands of South Dakota

The Badlands of South Dakota serve as a temporary family destination and a striking backdrop to a summer camping trip in All My Puny Sorrows. The Von Riesens go there because a few days remain before they can move into their new house; the trip’s mix of inconvenience, danger, and shared time gives the place significance beyond scenery, setting family habits and tensions beside the narrator’s recollection of Elfrieda Von Riesen’s defiant independence.

Setting and family stay

During an exceptionally hot summer, Jake Von Riesen and Lottie decide that the family should camp in the Badlands while waiting to move. Their new house resembles the old one, but lacks the long covered porch Jake had built with careful attention to detail. The temporary stay therefore falls between two homes, and its unsettled quality is echoed by the family’s repeated work of putting up and taking down camp.

Elfrieda objects to camping as an exhausting exercise in mere survival. Lottie answers that the experience is meant to alter their perception, while Elfrieda suggests that Paris or LSD could do the same. Lottie redirects the exchange toward the practical fact that they are together and need to cook. Their disagreement makes the campground a small arena for contrasting outlooks: Elfrieda resists the imposed routine, while her mother tries to make the shared inconvenience into family time.

Mishaps and activities at the campground

A faulty propane stove causes a fire that chars the picnic table. The narrator calls for the family to move away, but no one initially does; she fetches water in a half-empty Rainbow ice cream pail and throws it on the flames. Rain and hail then arrive, and the family is safe from the fire. The incident interrupts the routine of camp life and reveals a contrast between the family’s momentary stillness and the narrator’s practical response.

After the storm, Jake and Elfrieda attend a campground lecture about the black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, followed by a talk on dark matter. Elfrieda cannot explain dark matter fully, but tells her sister that it cannot be seen and that its effects can be felt. While they are away, Lottie and the narrator stay by the tent and play What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf? The separate activities place scientific questions and childhood play side by side within the same evening at the campground.

The return journey

The family leaves the Badlands and spends two and a half days driving in a direction that takes them away from East Village before Jake says they should return. The journey home is quiet. Looking through the open car windows at the dark rock formations of the Canadian Shield, Jake describes them as unforgiving; Lottie hears him and responds without conviction. The landscape encountered after the campground extends the trip’s mood of uncertainty beyond the Badlands themselves.

In the back seat, Elfrieda reads Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino and tells her sister that, if she were not reading, she would be thinking about a revolution. When asked what she means, she says her sister will understand someday. She then says the family should not go back. Nobody responds, and the wind continues to blow. The Badlands episode thus ends not with a resolution but with a wish voiced on the way home, giving the camping trip a place in the family narrative of distance, reluctance, and the desire for change.