America is Weird

Hello from Worthington, Minnesota -- home of, uh, a KFC, and some hotels.


So, since we last blogged, we've done the following:

1. Saw Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial.
2. Almost killed ourselves trying to swerve around a turkey that lept into the middle of the highway in Custer, South Dakota.
3. Ate perhaps the best burger I've ever had at the Firehouse Brewery in Rapid City, South Dakota (that would be me, not my non-meat eating wife).
4. Stopped at Wall Drug (excellent) and the Corn Palace (not so excellent).
5. Did some hiking around the weird rock formations in the Badlands in South Dakota (also excellent).

Since we last blogged, we did NOT do the following:

1. Go to Carhenge.

I won't go into the Carhenge thing right now other than to say that with missing out on Carhenge and almost killing ourselves to avoid hitting a turkey, it wasn't such a good morning.

It's kind of funny how the U.S. has this peculiar obsession with taking a pretty mountain and then blowing it up with dynamite until it resembles a series of historical people. I don't know if you've heard of this Crazy Horse Memorial that they're currently building, but back in 1949, the Native Americans asked this Polish sculptor to create a monument similar to Mount Rushmore as a tribute to the Native American people. The Polish sculptor said "Hey, I'll do this sculpture of the great Native American, Crazy Horse, riding his horse and pointing to his lands. I'll make it ten times the size of Mount Rushmore and, boy, that will be a great tribute to the Native American people."

Ok, I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So, anyway, here's the scale model he made to show his sculpture concept:


Very nice. Everybody loved it. So they started building the thing in 1949 on this mountain in Custer, South Dakota, and have been building pretty much non-stop since then. Today, after 57 years of tireless construction, the sculpture looks like this:


I guess you'd say they still have a ways to go.

The Polish sculptor died about 20 years ago, and his children have continued on with his life work, showing the remarkable determination and purpose that exemplifies the American spirit. That's what the visitor's center movie said anyway. (Actually, I guess it would really exemplify the Polish-American spirit, although the visitor's center movie didn't really make that distinction.)

You'd have to conclude at this point that the sculptor bit off a little more than he could chew, don't you think? I mean, I'm no sculpture expert, but it would seem this guy didn't quite think the whole thing through - no? You'd think he might have stopped for a second and thought "Let's see, Mt. Rushmore took 16 years to build, and I'm trying to building something 10 times as big and a lot more complicated -- that probably makes it a 200-year-long project at best -- maybe there's something more productive that could be done with 200 years worth of time and energy. Maybe I can build them a nice little fountain or something, and then devote my life to actually bettering the situation of the Native American people."

Oh well. Maybe he just really wanted to blow up a mountain a whole bunch of times.

I leave you with my favorite "Kathy is a Ham" picture so far, from downtown Rapid City, South Dakota: