Feeling Presidential: One for Mount Rushmore

 

My fist was curled firmly around the handbrake, my feet orchestrating a game of reverse musical chairs on the clutch, accelerator, and brake pedal as I attempted to maneuver the stick shift car up the incline through parking concessions and up to the drab, concrete parking deck of Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

After paying the $10 parking fee, rolling backwards a couple of times (but not nearly enough to hit the car behind me), I moved forward into the shadowy concrete expanse packed with cars from almost every state in the Union. Slowly, I rolled past license plates from Pennsylvania, Nevada, Nebraka, Florida, and Washington. I think I even saw one from Hawai’i.

I’d been driving for almost three full days now. It had been raining—hard—when I left Rochester, Minnesota that morning but the sun had come out again in full force as I sped across South Dakota. By the time I’d arrived at Mount Rushmore, pale gray clouds had rolled in again, obscuring every sliver of sunlight and blue sky.

No matter. Getting out of the car, I walked in the direction of the viewing amphitheater, foregoing a stop at the Visitor’s Center for now. The anticipation didn’t have much time to build as I could see the giant granite heads of the four immortalized presidents already from a distance.  I was guided into the amphitheater by an austere columned walkway adorned with flags from each of the fifty states and at the end of the walkway, the monument rose before me.

From that vantage point, the monument was smaller than I’d imagined it to be but oddly no less impressive when I recognized that these huge granite sculptures were not carved with a hammer and chisel, but with explosives. I slipped a quarter into the coin-operated binoculars and saw the faint indentations left by each dynamite blast, like tiny pockmarks on the massive, gray faces.

A passerby, seeing that I was alone, volunteered to take my photograph with the monument. I was so grateful, afraid I would leave with the solo traveler’s  curse—self-portrait, arm extended, misshapen face taking up most of the foreground. Good.

I entered the Visitor Center where many interpretive exhibits demonstrated different aspects of the artistic and engineering feat that breathed life into cold, hard granite. This was the real wonder for me: not the memorial itself, but the process of creating it. The delicate violence. The painstaking precision. All the small details from the inception of the idea in the sculptor’s mind to the forceful removal of granite using explosives to unearth the faces of the four presidents beneath. That one misstep might have obliterated a lifetime of work boggled my mind.

It was so refreshing to see families, young and old, moving respectfully through the park. Parents lifting their children on their shoulders to give their sons and daughters a better view; couples embracing each other in front of the rock face for a photo op. Things like that always move me. I don’t know why.

It was getting late and I wanted to get to my hotel before it was dark but I debated with myself for several minutes about staying for the night ceremony to watch the memorial be lit from beneath and hear an interpretive guide share the story of Mount Rushmore. But I was driving an unfamiliar car in strange territory, where the roads were steep and I not yet natural with the stick-shift, so I opted instead to head to my hotel for the night.

I left Mount Rushmore behind me, not without some misgiving and regret, and headed into the Black Hills of South Dakota at dusk. Another time, I’d like to visit Mount Rushmore again. Spend the day. Hike around the area. And stay the night to hear the story of the Memorial come to life beneath the night sky.