Holy Rushmore
After our joyride through the Badlands scenic loop, we began our way out of the park past dozens of signs for a place called Wall Drug. We’d already seen around 1000 of the damn things on our way out to the park the day previous and we were curious enough to see what it was all about, so we decided to do what all good Americans do: succumb to the incessant suggestions of obnoxious advertising.
Image via www.walldrug.com
So there we were in Wall, South Dakota, wandering around aimlessly in what can only be described as an Old West shopping mall. It had the exterior of a frontier town and the interior of a Disney World gift shop. The place wasn’t half bad, and we understand now that it’s rather famous, so it was cool enough to take a little detour through. Gabby bought me a pair of thermal moose-print socks and I bought her a mechanical pencil to do crosswords with, then we both had homemade donuts and a cup of Wall Drug’s famous five cent coffee, which actually tasted like it costs five cents. From there it was back out onto I-90, with our sights aimed at the fabled Mt. Rushmore.
And here’s your god-awful pics from the road:
The way out at first was just another streak of prairies, which had grown a bit drab after several hours of watching them rush by. Then, as if out of nowhere, we banked a right into rain clouds and began pulling up a mountain. We went winding around on a steady incline until we had reached the absolutely glorious little town of Keystone, which reminded me of upstate New York at its best. Suddenly we were mesmerized again. We pulled off a few times to try and capture the quaint beauty of this wonderful place but nothing really did it justice, and so it was on to our true destination.
This is the best I could do?
We drew a bit further up the mountain when, upon coming around a big bend, Gabby gasped as if we were about to run over a granny pushing a stroller. I looked up in a panic and saw…
…This.
Now, we had heard a lot of smack talk about that mythical four-headed megalith up in Keystone prior to our visit. Most of what we heard was that people were underwhelmed by its size and disappointed in the distance you had to keep from it. All that driving through the middle of nowhere in order to stare up at four dead white guys until your little brother complained his way into a piss break and a crappy souvenir. Well, this thing blew our damn minds.
The utter gall that human beings have to think they can deface a mighty mountain in order to honor their mortal heroes was just breathtaking to us, and then the fact that they pulled it off in positively dazzling fashion? Marvelous, man, absolutely marvelous.
This thing was created in the 1920s using mostly dynamite. How in the name of all that is holy is it even possible? The size, the scale, the detail in their faces. It was incomprehensible to two simple road trippers such as ourselves.
Look at it again!
I just don’t know how someone could gaze upon that and go, “Meh.”
You stare up at it and you think of the eons upon eons that the mountain stood perfect and untouched, then you think of those madmen who took it upon themselves to change that. Then you imagine the eons upon eons yet to come and how it stands to reason that those four venerable visages will long outlive us. You picture the next great race of sentient beings to rise up and of the utter profundity of the discovery when one of them finds their way into the mountains of what was once South Dakota and gazes upon George and Tom and Ted and Abe, the stony gods, for the very first time. It’s Easter Island, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, maybe even Atlantis. It’s the final scene of Planet of the Apes. Kind of.
I tried my best to snap a photo of it that captured its impossible glory for a good twenty minutes, all the while missing the grand metaphor that peered out over mighty America before me. I was looking up at a memorial to our forefather, George, on the very day that I’d lost my own forefather, George. It hit me. My eyes welled up as I thought of him, hoping maybe he knew somehow that the moment was not lost on me.
On our way down from the mystical scene, I read a comment from an old high school friend on an Instagram picture of Rushmore I’d posted when we first pulled up. He suggested checking out the Crazy Horse monument. We threw it in the GPS and it was rather close by so we set course for another spontaneous detour, the very spirit of Adventure herself glowing from within us both.
Upon pulling up at the monument we found that it was in fact unfinished. It was the peak of a towering mountain with a Native American’s grave and noble face carved into it, but the rest remained a work in progress. We thought we’d been led astray, until we went into the visitor’s center for a short film that let us know we’d come to the right place.
The man who began work on the Crazy Horse Memorial was Korzcak Ziolkowski, a Polish-American sculptor who worked on Mt. Rushmore. This cat was incredible in every clip they had of him, passionate and earnest and articulate.
I found one of the interviews they used on almighty YouTube:
Highly recommended viewing.
He was such a renowned sculptor in his day that he was approached by Lakota chiefs to create a monument honoring the Native American people. Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote him stating, “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.” Korczak agreed.
Work began on the memorial in 1948 and it is just massive; the face of Crazy Horse is large enough to contain all four faces of Mt. Rushmore. Korczak worked until he died in 1982 and his widow, Ruth, oversaw the work until her death in 2014. Today, their 10 children and 2 grandchildren continue the carving of the mighty monument.
The coolest part? Korczak was buried in a tomb at the base of the mountain.
That is dedication.
We left the monument, stunned, and with a newfound respect for and interest in the sad and powerful history of the Native American people. The sky had darkened significantly, and with a near six-hour drive ahead of us, Gabby suggested we find a cheap motel to crash at so we didn’t find ourselves scrambling for a place to keep the van in strange, dark Wyoming beyond midnight. I was hesitant, but eventually obliged when I realized it was my last chance at WiFi, and my next post, for the next few days and so we booked a night at the Roundtop Mountain Motel in Thermopolis, Wyoming and took to the road once more…
