Stone Carvings

I have been all over the lower 48, from Washington, DC to Seattle, Washington, from Orlando through Nawlins and San Antone to Albuquerque. The West is one of my favorite places; clean air, skies that have no glaze of humidity and through which you can see for miles. Dark and brooding thunderstorms that spring up at a moment's notice and shatter the air with thunder and crackling lightning and bursts of sharp rain and even sharper hail - and then a rapid clearing and a fresh washed scent. Snow that seems to melt away before it gets dirty and muddy and fouled with scraped-up trash and car sediment.

But I had never seen the Badlands, or Mount Rushmore, before last year. Odd, because I am all about history and impressive nature. These two historical monuments, one blatantly man-made and the other a massive formation of nature, deeply impressed me. I know, it isn't endless streams of gaudy fun like so many people need to survive their boredom. But standing on a massive cutaway edge, looking down at the sedimentary rock that looks like a layered cake cut by a giant hand, takes my breath away, impresses me more than I can say.

Look at the colors of the sedimentary rock here, slashed away by a Great Cataclysm of what they assume was the lava flow of some volcanic activity that dumped tons of ash elsewhere in the Badlands Park. Imagine traveling thousands of miles over wide open prairies, and then suddenly having to figure out how to get over this with oxen and wagons. To go around would have taken them hundreds of miles and days out of their way - not good when a winter was coming for which they were unprepared and unsheltered. The Badlands hid not only Indians but rustlers and criminals of the day, so making the choice to go into these bare and fearsome canyons hald a lot of peril, both natural and man-made.

Here you can see how quickly a storm can come up; look at those amazing thunderheads. Yet we had no rain where we were; the rain fell 50 miles north from us.

Here is a deposit of some of that volcanic ash. It has been carved by wind and rain into interesting shapes. It looks hard as rock, but if you pick it up it blows away into dusty ash.

A hundred miles west of the Badlands is Mt. Rushmore. You can take a 100 pictures of it and they all seem to look alike. But what you usually can't see in all of those pictures is that the shadows from the changing position of the sun alter the expressions of the carved faces. In some, they look wise and pompous.

In others, there is a shadow of a smile or frown on one or two of the stone faces. We were there before "the season" - over Easter Weekend at the end of March. Tourist season doesn't start there til the first of May, when there are lots of things for the kiddies and those ennui-infected tourists to do. When we were there it was chilly and not very crowded, and almost everything was closed, except the monument itself.

Stone carvings, old and new, manmade and nature made. All amazing, all different, and all expressions of voluptuous passions and profound elemental drives. Yes, the West is amazing - for those with eyes to see and hearts to hear. The peace and stillness belies the endless movement, the restlessness, the drive to do something, to move, to live, to become something else. The very earth here goads one to become bigger than s/he is. Maybe that's what those who say that the West frightens them with its big and open spaces really mean - that they are afraid of all of this wild and rampant power, afraid to tap into it, afraid to try to become and create all that they can. Afraid of the endless silence that forces them to see who and what they really are; without the endless chitchattering of voices and moods and liars and cheats and advertising filling their ears, their hearts, with the superfluous, the empty, the mindless and purposeless nattering.