Quick Thoughts from a Road Trip West: Icons on the Mind

As I hinted yesterday, we spent Sunday, July 14, touring South Dakota's Bandlands. It was a cool and damp day, which didn't fit the geography of that place well. But we were able to see most of what we wanted to see, and to take some short hikes into the eerie landscape created by eons of erosion's power.

Late in the day we headed due north to South Dakota's best-known town: Wall. We had to go there, having heard of the siren call of Wall Drug for most of our lives. Something eerie about that place, too...room after room of stuff for sale. How can there be so much stuff in the world, much less in one tiny SD town? I examined $450 cowboy boots and $3 refrigerator magnets and left the place with an ice cream cone. Didn't sit in the Traveler's Chapel (emptiest place there) or wait for the T-Rex to roar at me (which it does every 11 minutes, I believe).

Wall Drug is an iconic American success story, the kind people write books about. It's a family business going back to the 1931 when Ted Hustead came up with the idea of offering free ice water to hot and weary travelers. There's still free cold water (sans ice) in the "back yard," but I doubt anyone stops at Wall Drug for that nowadays.

We arrived at our B and B in Hill City, SD, Sunday evening, ready to begin two full days of touring the Black Hills. And icons suddenly struck me from every direction, around every turn. What is the American west if not "iconic?"

The icon that is Mt. Rushmore is awesome, and I use the word as I like it to be used: awe-inspiring. For one thing, how did they do that? Boggles the mind. Then, everything from the parking area to the entrance area to the evening program preceding the lighting of the faces is carefully coordinated to bring the visitor into the presence of the four great persons behind those stone visages. It's all like entering a holy space.

But the best-laid plans oft go astray: the night we went to see the faces light up was so foggy that when the great lights came on all we could see was...fog. As if heaven conspired to block from view four presidents who lived and acted in ways that seem larger than life. Yes, there really was a time when political leaders–Presidents and all–could act like that, and did. Bold vision, courageous decisions, game-changing policies, well-executed political strategies, faith, luck...of, by and for the PEOPLE. But I digress...

Our most moving view of Mt. Rushmore came late today as we were driving west on Iron Mountain Road, and stopped at the observation area at the top of whatever summit it crosses. There, in the distance, was Mt. Rushmore, visible within the context of the surrounding Black Hills, and we saw how it towers majestically over the landscape and how small those faces now seemed. Context allows the greatness inherent in certain people to flourish.

Another icon is the Crazy Horse Monument, some ten or fifteen miles west of Mt. Rushmore as the crow flies.  Its context is a very large complex of buildings devoted to Native American history, arts, and culture. The monument itself, also being carved upon a granite mountain, is barely begun even though the work has been in progress since 1949. Crazy Horses's face is complete, but his hair and his outstretched arm and the horse on which he rides are nothing but rough rock walls that have been exposed by innumerable explosive blasts. When finished–if it's ever finished–it will dwarf almost every other  human-made thing on earth, including Mt. Rushmore's four Presidential faces.   Are "they" trying to tell "us" something?

Clevelanders may be shocked to learn that Chief Wahoo did not seem to be among the many images of Native American leaders displayed in the Crazy Horse Monument's museum. I looked for him, but I was afraid to ask about him. Think his is an icon the first Americans could live without? Then why can't Cleveland's baseball fans?

(By the way, one thing I've wondered about the American Indian as icon is whether we've really come very far from the "noble savage" idea that the early European settlers came up with. How do you get to a real, unvarnished understanding of and appreciation for these people in all their remarkable richness and variety? Can we who are not they, ever?)

The night we went to the lazar light show projected on the unfinished Crazy Horse sculpture was crystal clear, and the show came off without a hitch.  Indians: one; US commanders-in-chief: zero.

Other icons I have seen these two beautiful days in South Dakota's Black Hills included Harley-Davidson motorcycles ridden and nurtured by men and women who dress that part, and the buffalo which I saw almost nose to nose in Custer State Park. Not to mention the sights and smells and sounds of the iconic pine forests that some say give this area its name.

Sadly, vast swaths of those pines are dried up and brown as the result of an infestation of insects. Our hostess expressed disdain for "tree-huggers" who prevented the Forest Service from spraying the trees before it was too late, which now it may be. I don't know the facts of that matter, but my heart is usually with the tree-huggers. Except sometimes what seems right can turn out to be just plain wrong. Icons are such slippery things.