Crazy Horse

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I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.

We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”

Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.

I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.

When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.

Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.

(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)

So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.

My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.

We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.

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My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
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