From Julie and Dave Snyder’s ranch in the northern
part of the Black Hills, we went to Rapid City to attend
to Uli’s needs. I had finally found a dealership
with a short enough lead time to schedule around, so
we spent the afternoon at Liberty VW. The gentleman
marshaling the service department laughed at the load,
but said that if I liberated both front seats the technicians
would be fine. So I did and they were and Uli was pronounced
fit and happy.
Then we headed for Custer State Park in the southeastern
corner of the Black Hills. The park was founded in 1919
to honor George Armstrong Custer (yes, that
one), who led the expedition that discovered gold there.
The ensuing rush turned out to be the longest lasting
of all U.S. gold rushes; a huge amount of gold has come
out of the Black Hills, and production continues. When
Custer first arrived, a young Sioux called Curly was
living in the environs; Curly became a great war chief
called Crazy Horse, and the two men finally met at the
Battle of the Little Big Horn. It just goes to show
that the world isn’t getting smaller—it’s
always been that way.
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Rustic Charm
Dave had spoken well of Sylvan Lake Lodge, which did
indeed seem to be lovely; but it was non-smoking, so
I took a cabin for two nights. (Technically, the cabins
were smoke-free, too, but that information was conveyed
with a wink and a nod.) The cabins were not
lovely: Suffice it to say that the furniture was cheap
when it was new 30 years ago and the old PBX phone system
wasn’t up to modern standards, so I slept badly
and couldn’t dial out to get onto the Internet.
Now I can handle rustic charm, but not at top dollar.
Presumably South Dakota gets away with this only because
of the endless numbers of fishermen who will put up
with anything—and cheerfully pay through the nose
while doing so—in hopes of hooking the Big One.
(Note: If anyone considers this an
opportune occasion to once again encourage me to quit
smoking, please stifle the thought immediately. If my
parents can leave it be, you can too. But feel free
to write to the governor of South Dakota urging him
to upgrade state-park facilities.)
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Memorial Madness
I did stay for two nights, though, because the park
was beautiful and I wanted to visit nearby Mount Rushmore
on 9/11. So I spent Monday, the 10th, exploring and
visiting the Crazy Horse Memorial, another nearby mountain
carving. The memorial was designed by sculptor Korczak
Ziolkowski at the behest of Sioux Chief Henry Standing
Bear, who in 1939 wrote: “My fellow Chiefs and
I would like the White Man to know the Red Man had great
heroes, too.” The scale-model sculpture is gorgeous,
and certainly captures an ideal of the man who declared:
“My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
Korczak—as he is universally referred to in the
Crazy Horse Memorial cosmos—began work on the
mountain in May of 1947, and continued working on it
until his death in 1982. As he and his wife Ruth planned,
she and seven of their 10 children are carrying on.
It’s taking generations because of the vast scale:
When finished, the three-quarter-round sculpture will
be 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Crazy Horse’s
face (itself the height of a nine-story building) is
done, and work is well underway on the arm that points
out over his horse’s mane. But the monument is
as much a shrine to Korczak and capitalism as it is
to Crazy Horse.
The Polish-American Horatio Alger seems to have been
something of a control freak—among other things,
he built (and displayed) his pine casket, carved out
his tomb in the mountain, and scripted his funeral.
He also seems to have had a substantial ego. Of course,
neither the controlling nature nor the monumental ego
was necessarily blameworthy: Both have made possible
some of the greatest works of art, architecture, and
statecraft in human history. However, the general tone
at the memorial was worshipful, and the visitor not
only worshiped but paid for the privilege, too. Korczak
was clearly a gifted, driven man, but something about
him reminded me of medieval clerics, many of whom amassed
powers and fortunes for themselves and their churches
while feigning humility and poverty. I have nothing
against capitalism or monumental art; in fact, I’m
fairly fond of both. I just dislike wolves in sheep’s
clothing.
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Mt. Rushmore’s Facelift
Then it was 9/11, and I was at the smaller, better-known
Mount Rushmore. Gutzon Borglum, who carved the faces
of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, T.R. Roosevelt,
and Lincoln, was a man of considerable ego, too. If
his South Dakotan instigators had had their way, he
would have carved local heroes; but Borglum said that
if he was going to carve a mountain, he wanted to make
something of national meaning and importance. I gave
thanks for Borglum’s ego and vision and his marvelous
evocation of U.S. democracy.
I hadn’t been to Mount Rushmore since I was a
teenager, and although I had heard that a grand visitors’
area had been built in the intervening years, I wasn’t
prepared for the scale of it. There were interconnected,
multi-story parking garages and gleaming marble walkways,
benches, and buildings; a marble colonnade led to the
marble viewing platform, which overlooked the marble
amphitheater. The colonnade set the tone simply and
beautifully: Each side of each square column was engraved
with a state’s name and date of entry into the
Union, with the state’s flag flying above.
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Remembering 9/11
The presidents were also now lit at night, and every
evening there was a little lighting ceremony. But this
night was different: A 9/11 memorial service preceded
the lighting ceremony. The amphitheater seemed full
(the staff’s unofficial guesstimate was 3,300
attendees), and concessionaire employees gave U.S. flags
to everyone present. The Ellsworth Air Force Base Fire
Department Ceremonial Guard—which included a young
woman from a firefighting family—raised the flag
that had flown over Mount Rushmore on 9/11 and then
lowered it to half-mast; Technical Sergeant Robert Martin
sang the national anthem, and the bagpiper played “Amazing
Grace.” There was more music and a brief address
by the adjutant general of the South Dakota National
Guard, and a short movie about the monument and the
four presidents’ contributions to U.S. democracy.
And then the lights came up on the great heads etched
in relief against a black-blue sky.
It was a moving evening, and I felt privileged to be
there—short of being back in DC, Mount Rushmore
seemed like the best place to be on September 11, 2002.
No one acted cocky but everyone seemed proud of our
country and confident that it would remain strong. I
met a lovely couple from Illinois and another from Pennsylvania;
we all ended up there on that day by chance, but agreed
that we were very glad we did. As Erie, PA native Mary
Hall said, “Look how long it’s been here,
and we still come—so it’s got to mean something
to us.”
Apparently it means quite a bit: On September 6th,
the Rapid City Journal reported that the monument
set monthly visitation records from October 2001 through
July 2002. Although this past August didn’t set
another record, it was still a strong month—624,449
people visited (including 64,474 bikers from the Sturgis,
SD motorcycle rally), an increase of 7.2 percent over
August 2001. If visits continue at the current rate,
Mount Rushmore could break its annual record by next
month.
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Wading
the Mississippi
With 9/11 behind me and gray skies above me, I cruised
through the rolling prairies of South Dakota. By Friday
night I’d landed in a state-forest campground
in northern Minnesota, just south of Itasca State Park.
Home to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, beautiful
Itasca was established in 1891 to protect those waters
and the surrounding old-growth pine forests from logging;
as a consequence, Minnesota’s state-park system
is the second-oldest in the country.
In the superb new Jacob V. Brower Visitors’ Center,
I learned more about the park and its history. Jacob
Brower was a Civil War veteran and surveyor who was
commissioned by the Minnesota Historical Society in
1889 to survey and map the Itasca Basin; he became a
passionate advocate who fought to establish the park
(prevailing by one vote in the legislature) and served
as its first commissioner. In 1903, Mary Gibbs, the
first woman park commissioner in America, stood up to
a lumber-company crew that threatened to shoot anyone
who touched the levers that would open their illegal
dam. Although she was physically unable to open the
sluiceway by herself—it took six men to do so—she
put her hands on the levers and set in motion the legal
events that allowed the Mississippi’s headwaters
to flow freely once again.
The headwaters are a mere brook where they leave Lake
Itasca; children play on the stepping stones that mark
the outflow, and grandmothers trip across the one-log
bridge that spans the shallow water a few feet downstream.
Like everything else in these graceful northern woods
of pine, birch, spruce, andaspen, the river is strong
but gentle.
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A
Stoical Folk
The same can be said of the people. As Heat Moon noted,
it’s hard to strike up a conversation in these
parts; I thought of that this weekend as I talked with
the woman in the neighboring campsite. She was camping
alone but had friends at other sites in the campground;
she said it had been a hard while and she needed a break,
although she’d almost been afraid to leave when
her teenager started helping her pack. She was a quiet
woman who seemed to be both strong and vulnerable, but
so private and/or insecure that she almost shied away
from me; she seemed torn between wanting to talk and
thinking she didn’t know what to say. I thought
that there was a very interesting person in there somewhere,
but I wouldn’t meet her in a bit of casual chatter.
As Garrison Keillor chronicles with hilarious effect,
Minnesotans tend to be a stoical people. They are descended
from the true Northern Europeans (the ones with the
long, dark winters), for whom an even keel may have
been the only thing that could stave off the madness
of endless night; that ingrained spirit of self-preservation
doesn’t disappear with a few generations of light
bulbs. In a land where pickled fish is a salad-bar selection
and the Sons of Norway have pledged to clean up stretches
of roadway, one can’t expect miracles. One enjoys
the Danish kringle and the Norwegian flat bread and
the Scandinavian meatballs, and appreciates how nice—very,
very NICE—the people are, and leaves it at that.
Now that I’ve tasted the pleasures of walleye
pike, I’m off in search of other northern treats.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . .
.
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