There is a wide plaza leading up to the view of the sculpture, lined with flags from every state, and the approach is almost as dramatic as the carvings in the mountainside.
And there they are, a picture I have seen all my life. We linger for a long time in these high mountains. It is a cool morning, and the conifer forest reminds me of special places in the Appalachians, like Mount Mitchell, Clingman's Dome, and Mount LeConte. The surrounding mountain are as beautiful as the carvings; if you gaze on them long enough you begin to see other shapes and perhaps even faces.
From Mt. Rushmore, we take one of the most spectacular roads we have been on thus far, a long, winding, two-lane road over the Black Hills, complete with many hairpin curves and tunnels, known as the Iron Mountain Road. It is the perfect road for Mini Coopers, and some of our fellow drivers are in such a hurry to tear around the curves that I pull over and let them go by. We have the top down and we are drinking in the beauty. This road is as well-known in these parts as "The Tail of the Dragon" in Deals Gap on the North Carolina-Tennessee line, popular with sports car and motorcyclist enthusiasts, and we can see why. It is such a joy to fly around these corners and climb these long, narrow grades. We have a sticker on our rear window that remembers it all:
17 MILES
314 CURVES
14 SWITCHBACKS
3 PIGTAILS
3 TUNNELS
2 SPLITS
4 PRESIDENTS
Then we come down out of the mountains into high meadows, sunny and sweet-smelling, and we see this fellow standing right by the side of the road.
The Monarch of the Plains - seen earlier in a herd on the way to Pittsburgh, but this one is wild and unafraid, out on the open prairie. It probably weighs 1400 pounds, about half the weight of our Mini.
We have been climbing higher and higher, and by the time we reach Custer Memorial Park we are at 5200 feet. Horse ranches abound, a small herd of golden palominos especially memorable. The range is fenced in now, and there are sparse cirrus clouds up on the huge sky; this looked like a Chinese ideogram for some reason.
There are strange rock formations our here, too, unlike those we have at home: gulches and bluffs and draws and box canyons; Zane Grey landscape. We cross into Nebraska on our way to Wyoming, change drivers at the entrance to a big farm, and talk to a farmer who has stopped to see if we are all right. Everybody looks out for each other out here, and we briefly talk about the wheat crop he is harvesting. He sees our "Defy Hunger" decal and we tell him about the money we are raising for local food banks. This farmer straight from America's breadbasket says he is not doing well at all - prices are what they were in the 1920s. But he doesn't seem to blame anybody; that's just the way it is. He belongs nowhere in this country other than out here farming on this wide open land.
On the way to Cheyenne, we pass another Roadside Attraction, created by a Brit now living in nearby Alliance named Jim Reinders as a memorial to his father. He had lived near the Salisbury Plain and wanted to create this peculiarly American take on Stonehenge, although I doubt that locals like the practical farmer we just talked to would gather here to dance and celebrate the solstice (I pictured him more as a Farmers Almanac-Weather Channel-Local Farm Report kind of guy).
Our evening event is held at Terry Bison Ranch just outside of Cheyenne - plenty of ribs being grilled outside, blue smoke rolling across long tables of food, the delicious pungent aroma in the air. And another touch of Britain way out on these plains, advertising Real Estate.
We sit on bleachers and watch a rodeo that has been arranged for us. The announcer is spectacularly funny, almost as entertaining as the riders and calf ropers (we witness some great horsemanship). I don't think I have every seen a rodeo this close before, and it is a wild and dangerous sport. These horses are absolutely crazy, genetically bred for their ability to buck, we are told, and once they rid themselves of whoever is crazy enough to climb on their backs, they continue to buck and gallop wildly around the ring inside the fence, wild-eyed and terrifying, throwing up clods of dirt until they are roped. Two young riders last only eight or nine seconds each, but that is a good time on one of these horses.
Afterward we see them strolling through the crowd, looking for some of those ribs, I suppose, and much younger up close. And we see that one of them is really hurt, his elbow bleeding. The other young man is also walking a little gingerly, and I notice that he is wearing braces.
And then, at the end of a long day, remembering the faces of those great presidents carved into a mountainside, we learn that Donald Trump has been nominated. I suddenly hear the voice of the Ghost in Hamlet:
"Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts—
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce!—
. . .O Hamlet, what a falling off was there!
But this blog is only a little about politics so I will end it here for today.
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