The Crazy Horse Memorial

It’s been a while since I posted one of my vacation posts, but I still have pictures I would like to share. The afternoon of the day we saw Mount Rushmore, we drove to the nearby Chief Crazy Horse Memorial, which , like Mount Rushmore, is carved out of the granite of the South Dakota Black Hills. Unlike Mount Rushmore, the memorial is a private project, commissioned by Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear of the Lakota tribe and some of his fellow chiefs as a response to the Mount Rushmore Memorial. “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, also”, Standing Bear wrote to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski in commissioning him to begin the work. The monument is being continued by the Korczak family. At the present rate, I doubt the sculpture will be finished in my lifetime, but I find it powerfully evocative in its unfinished state. Just like Mount Rushmore, it gives the impression of the subject emerging from the hills, at once a hero and a force of nature.

The memorial as it is today

The memorial in background, model of what finished sculpture should look like in the foreground

A larger model of the sculpture

The memorial in background, model of what finished sculpture should look like in the foreground

Deadwood stage, in the museum area

While we were at the memorial, I bought my one souvenir of the trip from a sculptor at the American Indian Cultural Center: a horsehair pottery turtle. I arranged for it to be shipped home, and the sculptor gave me her mother’s contact information in case it arrived broken. After I got home, two weeks passed and no package. I called the mom’s number and got only an answering machine. Finally I managed to track down the sculptor’s Facebook page and send her a message saying my turtle hadn’t arrived and I was worried. She was thrilled to hear from me. Somehow she had sent it to the wrong address, it had been returned to her, and she didn’t know what to do next. I finally got the turtle, well wrapped and in perfect condition.

The shell is removable, so it can be used as a candy dish or to hold pins or other small items.

We also saw a Lakota historical interpreter in full costume, singing, dancing, and telling stories. During a question and answer period, he was asked if he got hot in his traditional clothing. He replied that he did, but that he found his Under Armor T-shirts very helpful in wicking away body heat.

Historical interpreter. The video below shows him leading the crowd in a snake dance.

The Whole Nine Yards

My brother and his wife left Saturday morning after a brief visit. I was anxious about the visit, because this is my younger brother, John*, the one whom I wrote about in the blog post Shredded. We haven’t been close since I left home for college, and I was not sure what I was going to do with him for the brief time he was here (two nights, one afternoon and one full day).

The visit is one my brother himself proposed, as part of a long trip they were taking across half the country. They drove from their home in Virginia to visit my oldest brother in Illinois and a cousin in Iowa, before driving to St. Louis for a conference my younger brother had to attend. From St. Louis they came to see us, and now they are on the road heading to South Carolina to visit their married daughter before going home. It makes my nine state summer vacation look rather serene by comparison.

We put a lot of thought into things to do in the brief time they were here, and decided on a trip to New Orleans to the World War II Museum, followed by a visit to the zoo if there was time. My sister-in-law, however, had an amendment to the day’s program planned: she wanted to see Bourbon Street. So we settled on the museum, followed by po-boys at Mother’s, a walk through the French Quarter with a stop for beignets and cafe au lait, then a drive around Uptown, including Tulane and the area where my husband grew up, before dinner at Mandina’s and then home. 

We enjoyed the day. The museum was, as my SIL put it, sobering, but they appreciated us taking them there. John took a long time going through listening to the many individual stories available to hear at stops throughout the museum. On his way out, he mentioned that hearing the stories gave him a new perspective on the stories my dad and uncles had told us over the years, and added, “This is really part of our family’s history.”

Part of our museum experience included the newest exhibit, Final Mission: The USS Tang Experience. While waiting for the session to start, we wandered the Boeing Building looking at WW II era bombers and fighter planes. It was then that my brother John told us the origin of the expression, “the whole nine yards”. The ammunition for each bomber, when assembled, made a row nine yards long. If you fired all your ammunition, you used the whole nine yards. I had never heard that before.

Despite the fun we had on our day in New Orleans and the new perspective I got on my brother during our trip, I still found some moments stressful. Both my brother and SIL are talkative extroverts, and since we usually found ourselves divided up into two groups, the two men and the two women, I found myself doing a lot of listening and trying to get a word in edgewise. I actually wanted to pretend to have fallen asleep on the drive home from New Orleans, but my lips were dry and I needed my lip gloss and then I needed to blow my nose and it’s pretty hard to pretend you are doing these things in your sleep.

It occurred to me a few days after they left, with many thanks and promises to stay in touch, that the problem between me and my family has always been that I’m an introverted loner and that they see that as rejection; and that furthermore, their preferred technique for trying to pull me back into contact with them is to keep talking, an action almost guaranteed to leave me wanting to run screaming out into the night. The good thing about family is that they love me anyway.

Besides, I reflect further, do I really understand my family members any better than they understand me? Do I even try? It came as a surprise to me that my brother’s favorite part of the museum was the oral histories, and that he had apparently managed to tease more World War II stories out of my uncles than I ever had.

They want us to come visit them once they are settled in their new home near the beach in South Carolina. I love the beach, so this is not a hard sell. It will mean more difficult conversational moments, but maybe I will learn something if I actually listen to the conversation instead of tuning it out this time - the whole nine yards.

*Yes, I have a brother John and a husband named John. I also have a brother named Frank and my sister’s husband is named Frank. Family get-togethers are fun.

They Have to Come from Somewhere

A few days ago I came across Libby Anne’s response to this post, FYI (if you're a teenage girl). I’m not going to write another response to FYI, because there have been many excellent responses made already, and I doubt I can improve on them. Libby Anne links to some in this post, and Fred Clark links to posts containing more links here.

Today, however,  I ran across this gem on Pharyngula, Kronar Writes, linking to this post, which comments on a PUA ranting about how he doesn’t share his seed with just anybody.

Some choice quotes:

It takes more than a nice curve of the ass or a bat of the eyelashes to earn my seed. . .

My salty essence and genetic code is a gift from my father, and his father, and his father, and on it goes.  Its the sticky genetic code of self-sufficient men who have protected and provided for family, women and children.  Its the haplogroup of men who built civilization.  I have the genetic lineage of warriors, business owners, firefighters, blacksmiths, farmers, herders, poets, politicians, soldiers, artists and even chefs.  Hard jobs that help build the world, thinking jobs that help build a culture, they’ve all been done by men in my bloodline.  My ceiling for accomplishment is limitless. . .

I’m not some average guy begging to give my seed away.  My seed is valuable and I know it.Men of lesser genetics may be able to afford spraying their seed anywhere; I allow myself no such atrocities.My sperm could populate an entire society of strong good looking altruistic people and any girl who takes it in would be lucky to be a vessel towards that new world.

I didn’t click through to read the original, by someone calling himself LaidinNYC, but I did follow this link to hear it read in a Saruman voice. That was a treat.

So what does this have to do with the FYI post, you wonder? Nothing directly. It’s just that I have a strong suspicion that Kim Hall’s boys are all going to end up as some verson of LaidinNYC in a decade or so.

After all, this attitude of entitlement, narcissism, and female inferiority has to come from somewhere, and if having a parent who rescues her sons from the dangers of looking at their friends' pictures instead of teaching them how to control their own behavior and attitudes doesn’t inculcate it, I don’t know what would.

Where Was I?

Getting older has some nasty consequences, one of them being it takes longer to get over ailments that a younger me would have shaken off in a few days. I came back from my vacation with a cold. I didn’t expect it to be a big problem; I often catch colds on plane flights. I had one coming back from London last year.

The week I got back from vacation, I had an appointment with my rheumatologist’s PA, who noticed my husky voice and asked if I had seen anyone about it. I explained I had only had it a few days and expected it would go away on its own. A week later, I also had a hacking cough and a persistent, mild headache, not a migraine, so I went to the urgent care center and got a diagnosis of bronchitis, prescriptions for prednisone and Tessalon Perles and the advice to rest, after I mentioned that I hadn’t been coughing at the Y the day before. I have had bronchitis before and it’s annoying but not deadly, so I figured I would be okay in a few days.

What happened in a few days was that I developed a nasty crackling sound in my breathing and a plugged up ear. I called the urgent care center back and was given a prescription for an antibiotic and an inhaler. A few days after that, I was still crackling and saw my PCP for an X-ray. I did not, as I feared, have pneumonia, but by this time I had been sick for 3 weeks, had lost several pounds, and was extremely tired. 

The antibiotics finally kicked in, the crackle went away, and I only needed the inhaler at night, but until this week, I have been tired all the time, especially after the mildest exertion, began coughing again whenever I went out anywhere, and spent most of the day napping wherever I sat. 

It is just this week that I finally feel back to normal, picking up the household tasks that I meant to do the week after vacation. All in all, it took a month for me to recover from my little cold.

So that’s why no blog posts. I was too tired even to think coherently.

I intend to post a few more posts about my vacation, although maybe not as many as I had originally planned. I did at least get my photos sorted out while I was ill. Some of those I definitely want to share.

Four Presidents

So finally we made it to Rapid City, South Dakota, the focal point of our trip. On our way there we crossed over from Central Daylight Time to Mountain Daylight Time, so it was only 2:30 when we arrived at our motel, and they didn’t have a room yet. No worries, that gave us an opportunity to see Despicable Me 2 (yes, my husband’s choice) and scope out places to have dinner.

The next day we took off for Mount Rushmore. While we were in Moline, my brother told us about the Chief Crazy Horse Memorial, which is not far from Mount Rushmore, so we decided to see both of those and if time permitted, to see the  Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Or in short: rocks, rocks, and more rocks.

While at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, we were able to meet the last surviving worker, Donald “Nick” Clifford, and buy an autographed copy of his book, Mount Rushmore Q and A (Answers to Frequently Asked Questions). The Memorial took 400 men from 1927 to 1941 to carve, and now only one is left.

And although you have already seen much better pictures than mine, here are the obligatory tourist snaps, with commentary.

As always, click on the picture for a larger size.

Entrance to the Memorial

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum

That Declaration thing was nice, but the first ice cream recipe  in America? Major props! 

There it is, Mount Rushmore

Distance shot, to give you an idea of how the sculpture fits into the mountain.

Close up of Washington and Jefferson

Close up of Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. Roosevelt is as far back as he is because a lot of rock face had to be blasted away to find suitable granite for sculpting him.

Model for the sculpture. As you can see, the presidents were to have been depicted from the waist up, but there wasn't enough usable granite, and then Borglum died. I like it the way it is.

 I'm glad I finally got to see Mount Rushmore. As impressive as it is as an object, it is also a microcosm of its time, the early twentieth century when nothing seemed impossible. The Panama Canal was completed in 1914, the Hoover Dam (originally called the Boulder Dam) in 1933. The first skyscraper in the United States, the ten story Home Insurance Building, was completed in 1885, but it was the Empire State Building in New York, built in 1931, that would stand as the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Nobody had dreamed of the ecological impacts, global warming, and certainly not the possibility of jet airplanes crashing into even taller towers on a clear day in September.

They emerge from the rock, four giants of our country's past, a reminder from an age as innocent as the ice cream cones made with Thomas Jefferson's recipe, of hope and hubris, two of the defining qualities of humankind.

Wall Drug

When you are driving along I-90, the Badlands of South Dakota don’t look so bad. Of course, to really see the Badlands, you need to at least loop off the interstate, but we had 350 miles to drive from Sioux Falls to Rapid City. Besides, starting at the Iowa - South Dakota state line, I had started seeing signs advertising something called “Wall Drug”: “Kids like Wall Drug”, “Wall Drug Rocks”, “Cowboy Up! Wall Drug” were a few. I kept trying to figure out what “Wall Drug” could possibly be. As we got closer, signs like “Homemade Pie, Wall Drug” made it a little clearer. It’s some kind of roadside tourist attraction. 

When we finally got to Wall, South Dakota, around lunch time, what it was became clearer. Wall Drug started out as a drugstore during the depression. The owners, Ted and Dorothy Hustead, had a hard time making a go of it, but when Mount Rushmore opened as tourist attraction, Dorothy had an idea. Wall Drug could advertise free ice water for tourists travelling through Wall on their way to Rapid City, and once people came into the store, they might decide to buy lunch, or coffee, or ice cream. It worked. Ted’s son Bill began adding the other attractions that make Wall Drug what it is today.

We had burgers and pie for lunch and took a few pictures before wandering on our merry way. I also sent a post card to my aunt (there is a post office). John refused to pose on the jackalope, however. Spoilsport!

Main Street

Restaurant, with Western Art

The Jackalope, which would have looked better with John on it.

A Brief Geography Lesson as We Go on Our Way

Time for a brief geography lesson as we drive across the plains. Four of the nine states we visited this trip, and three of the four new ones, were created in whole or in part from the Louisiana Purchase. Not all of what became the state of Louisiana was acquired with the purchase: Thomas Jefferson was largely concerned with acquiring the port city of New Orleans. The first map below shows the original Louisiana Purchase, and trades that were made between US, Britain and Spain that resulted in the borders and state lines we now have. The second map shows which states came from the Louisiana Purchase and adjacent acquired territory. As you can see, almost all of South Dakota and large portions of Wyoming, North Dakota, and Minnesota were acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. 

The Louisiana Purchase and adjacent territories

States created from the Louisiana Purchase

The eastern border of the Louisiana Purchase is the Mississippi River. Branching off the Mississippi along the Illinois -Missouri border is the Missouri River. I don’t remember the source, but I do remember reading something by Isaac Asimov stating that if the Missouri River and its continuation into the Mississippi were counted as one river, it would be the longest river in the world. When Lewis and Clark set out to explore and chart the newly acquired purchase, they travelled along the Missouri River from St. Louis north and west.

The four states on our trip that we hadn’t been to before were South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. South Dakota is one of the High Plains states. According to Wikipedia:

Due to low moisture and high elevation, the High Plains commonly experiences wide ranges and extremes in temperature. The temperature range from day to night usually exceeds 40 °F (22 °C), and 24-hour temperature shifts in excess of 40 °C (72 °F) are possible ^{. . .}The region is known for the steady, and sometimes intense, winds that prevail from the west. The winds add a considerable wind chill factor in the winter. The development of wind farms in the High Plains is one of the newest areas of economic development.

We saw wind farms across Iowa but didn’t see more than a few windmills in South Dakota.The weather, however, turned out to be a factor in one of our other  disasters adventures.

Statue of Sakakawea, who guided Lewis and Clark, with her infant son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. It is more common to see the name spelled Sacajawea, but Sakakawea and Sacagawea have become common as more is learned about her language.