In search of awe

BROOKINGS — There are only seven plots to a story, or so the cynical view goes. And the singular most popular of all, from the time of the ancient Greeks until now, remains the hero’s journey.

We all know the beats — whether it’s the Odyessy, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings: The hero and his friends leave home on a great journey, encounter the worst of a world they did not create, but emerge triumphant thanks to a combination of friendship and inner strength they gathered right where they were born.

Now, this archetype is useful, but it’s also reductive. That’s what bothers English scholars, who would tell you that there are as many different plots as there are people. And that’s what bothers Stacy Bare, who would tell you the heroes don’t always come home, and the ones who come home don’t always overcome. Sometimes, the ones who don’t ever leave home face the toughest battles and fight without fanfare.

“It’s crazy to talk to someone from Brookings again,” Bare said in an interview with The Beacon. “Because now I am flashing back to being a kid from Brookings, and being told by, like, kids from smaller towns that I’m from a big city. And just not even being able to process how small and rural that mindset can be. And I think the last stat I saw rural America has 3.4 times the suicide rate of the general population. And it’s that BS notion of rugged individualism that is killing America right now.”

Bare — a BHS grad, a seeker, a combat veteran and no stranger to trauma and demons himself — will speak about mental health struggles on Feb. 19 on the SDSU campus here in Brookings. He’ll talk about how he made it through his own suicidal ideation — by getting outdoors and by trying to restore a sense of awe in his life in the mountains, and in the small, quiet moments.

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America is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Particularly among men. Particularly among rural men. It’s an almost perfect inversion of the narrative from most of the 20th Century, where smaller, more isolated communities were presented — for better or worse — as closer, more tightly knit. While our entire nation seems to guzzle the methadone of social media as a replacement for true interaction, the cracks seem to be showing first and worst among those with the least actual human contact. Soldiers trying to transition back from overseas. Farmers who struggle alone to hold on to the farm. Men who have been trained to say, “I’ll figure it out. I always do.” And nothing else.

“And you know, in many ways, the cities are actually, in some ways, better set up than rural communities, and that’s a complete switch from 100 years ago,” Bare said. “Rural communities don’t know each other.

So I’m going to be there to talk about, you know, I’m from here. But how do we fix this? Work together, build community, and don’t accept what you don’t have to.”

Bare speaks from experience. He grew up in Brookings and left — on a hero’s journey of sorts that was more than just interrupted.

“So I left Brookings in 1996, used the Army to get out of town, ended up at the University of Mississippi for four years, which was awesome. Live music, great food, amazing literature. And I was also the president of my fraternity. But, I mean, you don’t have to talk about that dark moment, khakis and polos,” he says with a chuckle.

“And then I was in the Army. I was stationed in Germany, and then I spent four years in conflict zones from ‘03 to ‘07 Bosnia, Angola, former Soviet state of Georgia, and then Iraq — left Iraq went to graduate school in Philly at Penn, thinking that I was gonna I get my Master’s in urban design or city planning, thinking I would go back to places like Baghdad and help rebuild it. But that’s really when the full challenges of what would later be diagnosed as PTSD came roaring back.”

It was here that the outline for Bare’s story seemed to play out. He developed a pretty significant drug addiction. He finished grad school. He wasn’t sure what he should do next. He wasn’t sure who he was in his own story. He took a job in Colorado.

“I expressed suicidal thoughts to a friend that I had been stationed with in Baghdad, who lived down in Colorado Springs. I was telling him, I think I either want to disappear, you know, take my own life,” Bare said.

“Or maybe rejoin the Army, because I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know who I am, right? A lot of identity formation stuff. And he said, ‘Well, put it off a couple weeks, and I’ll find some rock climbing shoes, and I’ll take you rock climbing.’ And so he took me up to Flatirons, and I had what I now know as a somatic experience at the top, just shaking and crying, and he repelled me down. And I was like, man, if this is so good for me, how good could it be for others?”

It was then Bare decided he needed to devote his time to helping other people who ended up at that same crossroads he had. People who might not ask for help.

“Because I think, growing up in South Dakota, you never really think you deserve the help, right? But other people do,” he said. “Like I haven’t suffered enough, but other people need it. And I think we all witnessed this growing up, right? A lot of people we grew up with, as long as you’re serving other people, you’re fine, and you don’t need to help yourself.”

Bare started a nonprofit called Veterans Expeditions, where he worked as a job through the Sierra Club for seven years. He had one goal in mind: Get people to see what he had seen on top of a mountain.
“I did a bunch of research on the benefit of the outdoors, and our goal was, if we can find the key ingredient to the outdoors, maybe we could convince insurance companies to pay for outdoor apparel and guided trips, what people needed to get outside. And so we focused on the emotion of awe.”

And that’s what Bare will talk about on Feb. 19 on the SDSU campus as part of the CommUNITY series of meetings. His presentation is called The Power of Peaks: Adventure as a Path to Healing. He’ll be speaking at the Student Union in 253 Pheasant & Crest at 7 p.m.

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According to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control, suicide rates have been on the rise in the United States since 2000, barring a brief dip in 2020. In 2023, more than 14 in 100,000 Americans killed themselves.

Those rates are particularly high among men. Males make up 50 percent of the general population, but 80 percent of suicides.

Among U.S. military veterans, those numbers spike to crisis levels, with nearly 35 in 100,000 vets killing themselves in 2022. The only other group with numbers near that high are farmers and agricultural workers, whose suicide rates have steadily been around 30 per 100,000 over the past two decades.

As a South Dakotan, a veteran and a survivor himself, Bare feels those statistics in a very real way. And he also thinks the things that helped him — getting outdoors, getting back in touch with physical exertion and getting his mind back in balance — can help people in those categories.

What Bare experienced at the top of a mountain — using his body like he once did as a soldier, but also placing himself somewhere remote and towering — renewed what he soon realized was missing from his post-service life: That sense of awe.

Someone who grew up here, learning to appreciate the January noon sun shining off a fresh layer of snow, say, or the way the prairie gives way to rolling hills, markers of ancient glacial retreat, near the middle of the state — and someone who has moved away, and tried to explain those things to people who have never been: That person has a good perspective on how to find awe when it’s missing.

“Growing up in Eastern South Dakota — and by the way, how many times have you told someone who isn’t from there you’re from Eastern South Dakota and they’re like, ‘Why is the Eastern important?’ I think one of the things, growing up in South Dakota, is that one of the cool things about awe, you can train yourself to see more of it — and more beauty,” Bare said. “And I feel like, for those of us who grew up and find the beauty in South Dakota — you’ve got to be a little bit more patient in South Dakota to find awe sometimes. But the more you train yourself to see beauty, the more you will.”

But sometimes just flipping that narrative — just changing the conflict from man vs. himself to man vs. nature — is enough of a crack to start pulling someone through. It was for Bare. He went from falling through those cracks to trying to guide others out.

“That was a whirlwind, but I had the opportunity to be a brand-sponsored ambassador and athlete for the North Face. And I went back and I skied in Iraq. I skied in Afghanistan. Made a bunch of outdoor films, and then the pandemic happened,” he said.

Bare now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is Executive Director of the nonprofit Friends of Grand Rapids Parks.

“The work that I do now, rather than trying to convince people that I can show them the best time outdoors, just building more infrastructure for outdoor recreation, building more trails, planting more trees, working on conservation,” Bare said. “But I’m still super involved in some ways around mental health. A lot of that’s come through veteran advocacy. But if it’s good for veterans, it’s good for everybody. I’m a disabled vet, and a big part of that is PTSD as well as, you know, my legs and back. But I think the biggest message that I’m hoping to share with folks is when you’re young, it’s great to go off and explore the world, but you’re only really ever going to be successful if you find that community, right? Find the people who are going to help you out.”

“For a long time, my thing was, the time outdoors was great because it replicated the best parts of war, which was camaraderie, sense of purpose, physicality, and you kind of learn your role, right? And that was a big push,” Bare said. “And I think as I got older and kept doing it, I realized that actually war is attractive because it’s a shadow side of what you can find outdoors, or in other things, it’s just that it’s a lot harder to access the outdoors than it is war. And so there is, from a backpacking perspective — or backcountry skiing, bike packing, that idea of chop wood, carry water. But I think as I’ve gotten older, it’s more about finding those moments of beauty.”

Bare never lost touch with his hometown, either, and when the chance came to speak at SDSU he jumped at it. Brookings, after all, is a place he knows has a deep sense of community.

“So that’s how I got here, and along the way, I’ve had some harrowing moments around addiction and my own suicidal ideations, and I’ve made it through a lot of really dark moments. And I think those dark moments — I have always been made it through because I had community to rely on, or I had community checking in on me. I had community making sure I was okay. And I think, if I had to boil it all down to one thing, it’s that identity formation, right?”

He links the different high risks for suicide in the Upper Midwest with identity formation. After all, when a soldier isn’t a soldier, anymore, or a farmer loses a farm, the fragmentation of self concept can be debilitating in itself.

“And I think when you’re looking for dignity, you’re looking for your identity to be reaffirmed, and when you don’t have that, and you don’t know who you are anymore,” Bare said.

“But now here we are, and so what’s the world we want to create for the people who are still here and who are coming up behind us? And I think that’s what my hope is, for me, it was the outdoors,” he said. “And I think for everybody, they can find something in the outdoors. It may not be climbing peaks, it may not be traveling to Iraq to ski. Maybe it’s just, you know, golfing at Edgebrook.

“But whatever it is, it’s about doing things in community. It’s about taking care of one another. It’s about pushing yourself to be, at least for a moment, the best version of yourself, or do the things that you’re really excited about, like turning your dreams into action and not judging your dreams for necessarily being too big or too small.”

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Most of all, Bare wants people to know, whatever their story is, it isn’t stuck on one plot — and there are chapters left to write.

“And being a veteran is great, but it’s not — being in the Army is not the greatest thing I’ve ever done, and I think we get stuck on that, sometimes,” he said. “And a lot of the talk too, is really around this idea, the idea of the hero’s journey, that there’s like, you know, the apex, like you’re moving to the apex. You go through the abyss, and then you like, return to the throne, and Joseph Campbell tells us, just like, repeat it, right?”

Instead of seven stories, there are trillions. And history doesn’t repeat itself, even if it rhymes. A young man leaving the Upper Midwest with curiosity in his heart ending up in Iraq carrying a gun is one story. Him going back to take veterans skiing there is another story, entirely. Except when they’re Stacy’s story.

“It’s so linear, and I think that’s where people get stuck too. Is that if you think you’ve had your high balance, or that success can only look a certain way, then life gets really, really hard. But if you begin to realize life is in context,” Bare said. “A hero’s journey is great, as long as it’s not the only thing you’re trying to do.

“That’s part of where I’m coming from too. Figure out what you want to do, and then realize that things change, right? I’m not chasing peaks anymore. I’m trying to build the infrastructure so other people can chase peaks now.”

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@@gmail.com