South Dakota Home

No trip to South Dakota would be complete without visiting Mount Rushmore. So on day six of our vacation my wife and I got back in our car and drove a mere fifteen minutes to one of the world’s most famous attractions. I realized I was excited to finally experience in person those four presidents’ heads I had been seeing since I was in first grade. Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington. I also realized once we arrived that I had been operating my entire life under the false assumption that a visit to Mt. Rushmore entailed parking your car on the side of the road and strolling around on the tops of the heads. I had even gone so far as to picture a staircase leading down into an ear. Perhaps I had extrapolated it from my experience at age five of entering the Statue of Liberty and ascending towards her crown.

The reality was much more regimented and mundane. It involved first parking in the underground parking garage for eight dollars, and then walking with a crowd of sightseers with gift bags through a gauntlet of flags, billed as the Avenue of Flags—a flag for every state and territory—as if this construction in itself were some sort of major achievement, and then finally coming out onto the Grand View Terrace where five hundred feet in front of me—maybe a thousand feet—were those familiar heads rising out of the mountain, each staring off in a different direction. The heads looked exactly the same as any photo I’d ever seen of them, and considering we could barely get any closer I wondered if the fifteen minute drive had been ill spent. I watched with irritation as a young couple took a grinning picture of themselves with the heads as backdrop.

“I’m disappointed,” I said softly.

There was an audio tour “wand” that you could rent at the Audio Tour Building for five dollars. An organization called the Association of Partners for Public Lands had apparently selected it as the winner of the 2007 Media and Partnership Award in the audio/visual division. Karen and I rented it.

“They gaze over the landscape as if sentinels,” a man’s voice intoned in my ear as soft music played in the background. “A living memorial that speaks to us, listens to us, and challenges us.”

The voice was firm, gentle, and wholly optimistic.

There was a concrete path that ran around the base of the mountain and we were instructed by the voice to follow the path, which we did, stopping when it told us to stop and pressing the next number on the wand when it told us to press it.

“To learn about the transformation of Mount Rushmore from a roadside attraction to a national memorial press the pound key.”

This was how five minutes of viewing Mount Rushmore became three hours. This was also how I learned almost everything there was to know about the sculpture, the mountain, the Indians from whom the mountain had been stolen, the artist—Gutzon Borglum—whose idea it had been to carve the mountain in the first place, his son—Lincoln Borglum—who took over after his father’s death just months before it was finally completed in 1941. A lot also seemed to be made of the fact that, while the heads were already gigantic—each the size of a six-story building—they were actually scaled to a figure who would stand four hundred and sixty-five feet tall, and that that figure, if it had ever been sculpted, would then be taller than the Statue of Liberty.

By the time we reached the end of the audio tour, number twenty-eight on the wand, Karen and I were more exhausted than when we had walked through the prairie. We lay down on a bench and listened numbly as recordings of everyday people described what Mount Rushmore meant to them.

“Symbolism.”

“Awesome.”

“Provocation.”

“Understanding.”

“They’re not eroding,” Karen said.

“What’s that?”

“The heads—they were carved in granite so they’re not eroding. I read about it. One inch every ten thousand years. That means even a million years after the Badlands are gone they’ll still be here.”