“World’s largest Mountain Carving - NOW in Progress” Crazy Horse Memorial Leaflet
What can be the reasoning behind the location of American out of town shopping malls? It was a question, among many others, that occupied my mind as we headed through the rain that had followed us west from Chicago. You pass them from time to time as you drive through the middle of nowhere, even as you drive through the flat and boring outskirts of nowhere as we were doing. They consist of acre wide expanses of concrete car park surrounded by Wal-Marts and K-Marts and Radio Shacks and a dozen other national chain stores. Usually the buildings have a shoe box architecture that goes way beyond functional reaching for grotesque. Ignoring how they look though there remains the question of why exactly they are there? Are there towns that lie hidden behind some nearby hill, just out of sight? Do people perhaps get into their cars and drive fifty or a hundred miles to buy a washing machine or a camera? Wouldn’t it make more sense to site them somewhere were people actually live?
Its amazing the strange turns your thoughts take when you have nothing to do for two days except sit in the bus and watch the world go by. That’s the problem with America, one of them anyway, it’s just so big. Coming from England where you can’t drive for twenty minutes without going through a town or city the fact that you can drive for days without passing a house is a little disconcerting.
There are distractions though, mainly in the form of random questions such as the shopping mall puzzle. Another that occurred to me was the reason for the numerous bizarre museums that are signposted every time there is an inexplicable dusty side road leading away from the highway and vanishing in the distance. Do they even exist or are their roadside signposts simply a joke to take the gullible off on a side trip into the wilderness only to find that the museum itself is a figment of someone’s over active imagination?
What exactly, for example, would I have found if I had taken the side road that led down to the ‘Circus Museum’? What sorrow, I wondered, was commemorated by the ‘Heartbreak Journey Museum’? Most bizarre of all was the indication that along another track from nowhere to nowhere I might find the ‘Astronaut Deke Slayton and Bicycle Museum’. I knew that Slayton had some connection with the Mercury program but what on Earth could his relationship with bicycles be?
I was destined never to find out. All of these wonders would remain a mystery to me as we had no time to take side trips away from our set route. Sometimes I wished that I was travelling solo so that I could explore them although I had a sneaking suspicion that for most of them the name would prove more interesting than the reality.
From time to time, usually at the farthest possible point from a shopping mall, we passed towns. In one of them - Chamberlain, Dakota - we actually stopped to buy provisions for our evening meal. It was a small dusty place that other than a few housewives at the supermarket and two men drinking beer on the steps of the pool hall appeared to have no people in it. While the cooks did the food shopping I went into the ever present branch of Radio Shack and bought an adapter to allow my mini disks to be played through the bus speakers. It was an essential expense - five days into the trip and I was already fed up with hearing the Offspring Album. If I heard the songs ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’ and ‘Pretty Fly for a White Guy’ one more time I was convinced my head was going to explode.
Along the way though we did have some stops at places that broke the routine. Two of them were at what are either enduring tributes to the grandeur of man’s vision or magnificent glorious follies that are a tribute to his eccentricity. It depends on how you look at it.
Everyone knows the Mount Rushmore Memorial although my spot poll of half a dozen friends revealed that they all know that it’s ‘Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and er.... somebody else”, and that it was “in that film, you know the one with Cary Grant”. No-one seems to know that the fourth head is Andrew Jackson or that it’s in South Dakota. The other thing that no-one I’ve asked knows is that South Dakota has another giant mountain carving - the Crazy Horse Memorial. Until I went there even I hadn’t heard of that one. It’s not surprising though. To describe it as ‘only partially completed’ is a giant leap of faith. The leaflet shows a visitors’ centre with a road leading down through the leafy campus of a University and on past a Museum complex dedicated to the lives and cultures of the American Indians to a 385 foot high statue of Crazy Horse riding a white stallion. This, it turns out when you read the caption, is a “painting..(of the)... humanitarian vision for the Memorial as a vast educational and cultural centre.” There is no denying the boldness of the vision but the reality is a little different. The visitors’ centre is a much scaled down affair, the University and Museum do not exist at all and the sculpture at the moment consists of Crazy Horse’s face, a tunnel that will go under his arm and a rough outline of a stallion’s head drawn on the rock. Considering that they have been at it for the last fifty three years if they stick at it for another couple of thousand they might finish the job. Still you have to admire anyone with that kind of overreaching ambition and although the original artist, Korczak Ziolkowski, died in 1982 his family have continued the efforts. As it receives no government funding, relying on visitors contribution and the sale of genuine bits of rock from the blasting, it’s remarkable that it goes on at all. If I live to be a hundred and fifty I must pop back and see how they are getting on.
I had never realised that Mount Rushmore is also incomplete. The models and original sketches in the museum show full torso figures rather than just heads and under the mountain, started but never finished, is a complex that was intended to house a giant Federal Archive and Library. If you look closely at the mountain below Lincoln’s head you can just see a vague suggestion of his left hand clutching his lapel. Difficulties with the rock as well as the funding led to the work being stopped with only the heads completed. Nevertheless it remains one of those things that everyone has seen pictures of which is much more impressive when seen for real. You approach it along the Avenue of Flags where the flags of all the states and territories billow in the constantly gusting wind and there is something about the experience that is quintessentially American. Even arriving on a grey and wet day just lends it some additional atmosphere and character, turning the mountain into a sombre and brooding presence on the other side of the valley. As I looked a helicopter circled in front of it and for the first time I appreciated the true scale of it. As at the Crazy Horse Memorial even as you are investigating the museum, looking at the photographs and displays that show it’s conception and construction and wondering why on Earth it is there at all you cannot help admiring the effort and the achievement.
Two large American men with loud East Coast accents and louder shirts were walking ahead of me around the trail that takes you for a slightly closer view.
“Sure is big.” said the first.
His companion agreed but added
“Yeah and there’s room on the end to put another head.”
The other thought about it.
“Who’d ya put there? Clinton’s a lecher, Reagan was a clown and Nixon was a crook.”
“George Bush ?” suggested his friend.
There was a brief moment of silence as they both considered the prospect.
“I guess four is enough really.” said the first.
“I guess.”
In Wyoming the scenery for the drive changed although the weather remained as unpleasant as ever as we gradually climbed through the mountains and crossed the snow capped ridges on our way to Cody. Cody was, I thought as we entered it, a town designed for tourism. Of course at that stage I hadn’t had either of my two visits to Jackson so I had no idea of just how touristy a town can become in America. With the sole exception of the standard issue Wal-Mart virtually every building in Cody had that phoney ten minutes old authentic wild west look. Take down the petrol pumps, telephones and a few signs and cover the ground with dirt instead of concrete and tarmac and it could have been a movie set.
We were in town to visit what is - along with Baseball, Mickey Mouse and Rock’n’Roll - one of America’s great contributions to world culture - a rodeo. When I first saw the town as we drove in past the Buffalo Bill Historical Centre I was convinced that this would be something staged solely for the tourists but once again, as so often when I’m overly judgemental, I was wrong. The rodeo was reasonably well attended but certainly more than half of those there were either local or at least genuine enthusiasts. The tourists were well outnumbered by denim-clad, cowboy-hat-wearing, 'yehaw'-shouting fans. The full range of events was on offer - bareback and saddled bronco riding, steer roping and wrestling, bull riding. The locals whooped and hollered their way through three hours as their particular favourites stayed firmly on horseback and their rivals went sprawling in the dust. It looked a lot more dangerous than I had imagined it would and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to try it for myself although it was a novel and diverting spectacle. I couldn’t imagine wanting to go regularly but there are lots of things that people devote their lives to that I can’t imagine doing regularly. I have friends who love the Opera, others who spend days watching Test Cricket and one I know who spends every spare minute ticking beers off a computer printed list of real ales at beer festivals around the country. Each to his own. One more inexplicable compulsion on the list is neither here nor there. Afterwards we returned to camp and went across the road into Cassie’s Bar where most of the people from the rodeo had also ended up. Everyone apart from us was in their finest cowboy gear. There were white Stetsons, brand new jeans, embroidered shirts and silver belt buckles by the hundred and it was debatable which showed the greater co-ordination skills, the high stepping, thumbs-in-the-waist-band dancers or the waitresses with trays of drinks threading their way between them. Of course the fact that I didn’t join the dancing was solely due to my being with four clearly underage drinkers and not wanting to draw unwelcome attention. It had nothing whatsoever to do with my often repeated mantra that by the time I’m drunk enough to be prepared to dance I’m far too drunk to be able to stand.
On stage was a band who, even though I would have said it impossible, managed to out-cowboy the audience in appearance. They were running briskly through a set of country rock covers from the likes of Lynerd Skynerd and the Eagles before bizarrely launching into a thundering rock rendition of Aerosmith’s ‘Dude Looks Like A Lady’. The baffled audience gyrated unevenly to a halt and stood still for the first time and scratching their heads in puzzlement. Chastened by this sudden lack of enthusiasm the band abandoned their brief experiment and slipped quickly back into Kenny Rogers territory for the rest of the evening as we returned to the camp site to drink a little more discretely before anyone thought to check on my companions’ ID.
