Honeymoon Road Trip Part 5: The Black Hills

At first glance, the Black Hills don't seem particularly dramatic. There are no Über-Mountains to draw visitors, like McKinley, Pike's Peak or the Grand Tetons. There are no hot springs , monstrous valleys or sweeping canyons. The tourist, lightning rods are the socially-acceptable, monoliths of environmental vandalism known as Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain, plus the dubious history of Deadwood. The Black Hills need more than a first glance. They hold peaceful, dramatic treasures that most tour buses rumble by with nary a glance.

Mount Rushmore is where the exuberance of flag-waving nationalism is wrapped around a scarred mountain that has been carved into the likeness of four, United States presidents- Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln. My first sight of it came as a jolt, as all great icons do. It is an image I'd seen hundreds, if not thousands of times, over the years without ever having the context of the real thing. The national monument visitor center underwent a wholesale renovation and the new façade had a hushed, reverential quality about it. A very clean, grey-stoned processional led us to the lookout point. Below stood an auditorium space where I could almost hear the patriotic tunes being hammered out by the United States Army Field Band as fireworks explode in blue, crimson and shimmering white...

There was a great, boardwalk path that took only a few minutes to negotiate and carried us to the base of rubble that extended from Presidential collarbones to the base of the mountain. With my video camera in hand, I could zoom in to Lincoln's pupils and watch nesting birds dart from his eye, arc beneath Jefferson's nose, and come to rest on the rim of Teddy's glasses. It was impossible to not be impressed by the scale of the monument. It was huge- four heads of dead Americans towered hundreds of feet above me. Still, as we pulled out of the parking lot and turned back towards the bulk of the mountain range, I couldn't help but feel a little bad for the mountain. Sculptures of that size outstrip such phrases as 'vanity project' and 'defacing nature'. I was just left with the nagging question of 'why'? Really. Why?

As I gazed out over the Black Hills from a small picnic area, just west of Rushmore, I began to realize how beautiful and different the Black Hills were. A sea of evergreens undulated before me as huge, grey rocks jutted above the treetops and held up the sides of hills. It was a landscape I had never, quite seen in passing, and it was amazing. The legendary storms-from-nowhere I'd heard about came to us on our second night of camping. Although we had secured a campsite only a few yards from the tree line, we found ourselves, at 2 in the morning, feeling the roof of the tent pressed against our faces as the wind howled relentlessly. Miraculously, our tent held and our spirits were lifted, as we had achieved confirmation that our camping skills had not been completely eroded by years spent in the Big Apple.

When we reached the outskirts of the Crazy Horse monument, I couldn't care less about seeing it- my desire to see industrial-sized sculpture had already been satiated. Unlike Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument is completely maintained privately. Korczak Ziolkowski, the sculptor who began the monument in 1948, refused to accept government donations as a protest against the atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. government against the American Indian. Exactly when the monument is supposed to be finished is anybody's guess but, when the Crazy Horse Monument is completed, it's supposed to become the largest sculpture in the world. Take THAT, world! However, it does beg the question of what the average, American Indian, in Crazy Horse's time, would have thought of taking a mountain in their sacred range and carving it into a enormous pile of rubble... and a tribute. Just a thought.

Deadwood, the last stop on our journey through the Black Hills, was barely a stop. The town was small, pretty touristy, and bared little-to-no resemblance to the illegal mining village that gutted the hills of gold at the expense of promises and peace treaties made with the American Indian. Now, if I ran the circus, I would restore Deadwood back to its heyday. Yank up the pavement, stick everybody in ramshackle shacks, make everybody ride horses and walk through muck, then bring back hookers and cheap booze. Now THAT would be a town worth touring. Alas, I wasn't running the circus and I suspect that the locals would rather reap the tourist dollars without the health code violations and VD.

Fucking wimps.