In the spring of 1985, my parents bought a beige and maroon Chevy conversion van and in the summer my two brothers and I staked out our territory in the back of that van and with parents piloting, we headed West. Our destination was Yellowstone National Park with only the best stops along the way. It was to be the adventure of a lifetime. I was Eight years old.
I remember very little of the first half of the drive. The fields of the midwest made an impression on me with their great expanse and the license plate game held my attention for a few days with the names pressed into steel of states as alien as any foreign country. We had no TV’s or i-pods, we had boredom and fights and constant questions...oh yeah, and Dad would turn on the CB radio now and again to listen to the truckers conversing, but it wasn’t long before a curse was uttered and the CB was turned off. I remember my brothers reading Bazooka Joe comics late into the night by the light of the rear cupholders. We listened to the radio wherever we went, not having CD’s, and the song “American Pie” came on nearly every day and thus became our anthem for the trip.
We camped several times staying near the Mississippi on July 4th hearing fireworks late into the night. Mom cooked beef stroghanoff over the propane stove and it might have been the best thing I’d ever eaten. I don’t remember much more about camping. After our tent poles melted in the Badlands of South Dakota I think we stuck to motels and cabins. The Badlands was also where we saw our first Buffalo, which I insisted on calling by its proper name, Bison. I was adament about this and would get upset if anybody called them buffalo. I really set myself up for frustration having 13 and 15 year old brothers who loved to point out the buffalo!
It was an amazing trip and sharing such a journey with my own wife and children has been one of the highlights of my life. Seeing the country through their eyes is an even more joyful experience than the first time around; what a gift.
The sights have not changed very much, though Old Faithful has slowed down a bit and the Buffalo, ahem, Bison are much more prevalent, and the presidents carved in stone are still looking presidential. Still there is one monument that left me breathless. In 1985 we stumbled upon a mountain being carved by the children of a man who had passed away only a few years before. His name was Korczak and his legacy was a mountain with a four hundred foot tall outline in white paint of Crazy Horse, the legendary Native American, riding his horse, arm raised, finger pointing to the black hills. Before he died, Korczak had removed a huge amount of rock and succeeded in putting a hole through the mountain through which a bulldozer could drive. My eight year old mind could not fathom such a dream and while I cannot speak for the rest of the family, the general feeling was that the project was more of fantasy than reality. How could such a feat ever be accomplished!
Well I am extremely happy to report that I was completely wrong. The face of Crazy Horse has been brought forth from the rock with incredible skill, standing some ninety feet high from chin to crown, and work has begun on the horse’s face which will be over two hundred feet high. A large visitor center, museum, store and Indian Cultural Center have been built at the base of the mountain and the sight now receives millions of visitors each year. A majority of Korczak’s ten children are working on the project, and a grandson is finishing his studies in geology and engineering and will be taking over as head of the project very soon. There is a great energy alive at Crazy Horse and the feeling now is not whether it will be finished, or even when it will be finished, but a joy and satisfaction in the fact that the work is ongoing. I feel lucky to have seen the progress of over twenty years of hard work.
The kids promised to bring their own children to this sight some day. Who knows, maybe it will be completed as the sculptor Korczak had planned, but there is no hurry. The work is the exciting part, the travel, the growth, the change: this is where the life is, in the progress, not the perfect finish.
We dig and chip away, day by day, sometimes seeing no progress at all. One shovel-full might appear the same as the last, same as the next. But if we look back now and then, and sometimes it takes the eyes of others to truly see, perhaps the fresh gaze of a child, we are surprised to see that the thing has begun to take some kind of shape, that maybe the dream wasn’t as crazy as we thought.