[This one is a few days late! We're actually in Chicago right now, but ENJOY!]
As you drive east through parts of Montana, into Wyoming, and finally reach South Dakota, you come across some pretty quiet and lonely stretches of road. The white-faced mountains fall away behind you and become rolling emerald hills ahead, morphing finally back into the flat terrain of the Midwest we know so well. The landscape fluctuates between the green grasses and the brown, all the while dotted with black cattle here and there. The sky is the richest blue it can be, the purest air left after man started polluting it with our machines. At times the clouds are grey and heavy and seem to suffocate the land, and at others appear to be sleeping on a glass floor, their stomachs dark and flat while their heads puff and round upward in their lazy, graceful way. Beautiful, beautiful country.
The hospitality out here has equaled, if not surpassed, what we experienced on the West Coast. Suzanne put us up in her Livingston, MT apartment for two nights, and Mr. and Mrs. Mohler housed and fed us for another two nights in Rapid City , SD.
Once in the Black Hills of South Dakota, we pulled up to the Crazy Horse monument in a bit of confusion. Neither of us really knew what to expect, only that people had told us we had to see it. But when we arrived, all we could see was half a face on a faraway mountain. This is it?! Reluctantly we entered the visitor’s center and were directed to an auditorium for a film showing. I cannot impress how much that twenty-minute video did for our appreciation of the monument. It is to the Native American tribes what Rushmore is to Americans. And when you consider that forty-year-old sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski was invited by the Native American chiefs to construct the memorial and then spent the rest of his 74 years slowly carving away the mountain. And when you consider that it is over nine times bigger than Rushmore. And when you consider that seven of Korczak’s ten children are still living and working on the rock. And when you consider that Korczak was approached several times by the US Government with financial backing and refused every time because he wanted the monument to be supported by the interested public not the uninterested politicians. And when you consider that it’s taken over sixty years just to get Crazy Horse to where he is now, despite nearly round-the-clock work. We left with a redoubled admiration for the monument and a new sense of the word dedication.
In comparison to the unfinished, but still technically superior Native American monument, our great Mt. Rushmore seemed a tad small. My first comment was, “Teddy sure does seem a bit cramped back there, doesn’t he?” We were still irked by the $11 parking fee as we approached the past presidents. See, we paid $80 at the start of this trip for the Annual Interagency Pass, which so far has served us well. But the tiny lady at the welcome booth said this when I held up our National Parks Card: We don’t honor that. That covers your entrance fee, which we don’t charge. We charge a parking fee.” Semantics! It’s the same damn thing! Whatever lady, here’s your $11, now let us see those faces. In the end there was a bit of awe, seeing a thing in person, which is so often represented in other mediums.
The Badlands. Another National Park where we just say, Wow. We got a tip from our new friends about a magnificent back-roads view that would give us a different angle from which to see the territory. Pulling off the secret road, we exited the car and walked about a hundred yards up a short incline, seeing nothing so far that was very startling. Then the earth just fell away. In his book, Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck writes this: As I was not prepared for the Missouri boundary, so I was not prepared for the Bad Lands. They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding. A sense comes from it that it does not like or welcome humans. Well said, John.
For miles and miles along the highways of S.D. you pass signs and signs announcing the glory and grandeur of the Wall Drug Store. After so many advertisements, you get to the point where you just must see this place. Well, I was more impressed with the Gold Digger Casino and Bar across the street. The drug store was rather large, and was stocked to the brim with all those unnecessary souvenirs that are constantly being churned out at some child labor law-breaking factory in Southeast Asia. Yet with all of those signs and billboards I was expecting the facility to be complete with an arcade, bowling alley, shopping mall, mini golf course, laser tag center, ice cream parlor, roller coaster, and silver screen movie theatre. Much to our dismay, only cheap trinkets and pharmaceuticals.
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