Listing Through Life

On Friday morning, we headed north. This meant that we weren’t going through Custer and couldn’t eat at Baker’s Bakery. On our way through Hill City, we happened upon the Hill City Cafe.

It wasn’t fancy, but the food wasn’t bad, even if our server was wearing short shorts so she could show off her strange tattoo.

Later in the day, we stopped in Lead (pronounced “Leed”) to buy snacks. I’m usually open to try new, local foods, so I bought a Cherry Mash.

It consists of chopped, roasted peanuts in milk chocolate surrounding a wad of soft cherry-flavored … stuff (“made from real maraschino cherries!”).

The Chase Candy website brags that the Cherry Mash is the third oldest candy bar and the best selling cherry candy bar in the United States. As a public service, allow me to warn you that it is also the worst candy bar in the United States. The outside was just dull, but the cherry middle was sickeningly-mediciney sweet. Yuk.

But feel free to disagree and enjoy one while singing along “It’s a Cherry Mash Day.”

There’s a part of me that thinks the Crazy Horse Memorial is just silly. Then there’s another part of me that thinks so too. But it’s one of the things to do in the Black Hills, so we did it.

The carving itself is easily seen from the road without paying the $27-per-car admission fee.

But if you just look from the road, you will miss out on one of the oddest museums I’ve ever seen.

But I get ahead of myself. First we stopped in the parking lot and took the obligatory photos.

Before we got to the visitor center, we passed a bus which, for $4 additional dollars, would take you closer to the mountain so you could look straight up at it. We passed on this opportunity.

The museum consists of several rambling rooms and buildings that seem to go on forever. There are some displays about the mountain and the carving, including this photo of the mountain before work began.

But most of it has little or nothing to do with Crazy Horse. The first several rooms have random displays about American Indians. I could detect no theme, organization or point.

We left that section and walked out onto the deck. There’s a model of what the carving is supposed to look like when it’s finished. (I promise to make no jokes that include the words “pull my finger.”)

For a donation, we could pick and keep a softball-size rock that has been blasted off the mountain, but I passed up on that opportunity also.

The back half of the museum is dedicated to Korczak Ziolkowski, the sculptor, long since dead, who was commissioned by a couple of local Indian chiefs to carve the memorial.

There are examples of his other works, such as “dismembered hand in a jar with two dead flies,” “naked lady popsicles,”  “Ray Kroc feeling his cheek,” and “Brothers sniffing brothers ” (Those are our names, not Korczak’s.)

We also saw a certificate of blessing from the Pope, so they’ve got that going for them anyway. Which is nice.

We didn’t stay long. There’s only so many times you can look at a mountain and the museum was more perplexing than interesting. Besides, our friends had been up for 30 hours and still had to check into their cabin at the lodge.

One more thing. This plaque is apparently going to be carved into the side of the mountain.

I thought it was a bit vague, so as a public service, I have translated it from English to Chinese to Creole to Malay to Polish to Swahili to Icelandic to Lao to Yiddish to English.

Maybe this will help.

They tell the story
Real name will be engraved:
Certain life civilians.
Responsibility we have in the world,
Experienced a long history.
We keep everything and more than
Inevitably, we must not forget.
Lau Sin this country in the countries to achieve
Several million years before:
Citizens Majestic possible.
Gift bags, the exchange
Thanks.
But then I oppressed
Murder and rape, and optimistic about the war.
striker spot
Uzurpatris legacy brutal.
For us, the past is in our heart.
Next, I never met.
For you, I will this time, granite
To make sure you always know –
“I live in a place to rest my last.”

I think “Gift bags, the exchange. Thanks” sums things up nicely.

The skeptic in me wonders if this is really a memorial so much as a scam. The sculptor started carving in 1948 and you can see there’s a very long way to go. At anything like the present pace, it won’t be completed within the lifetime of anybody currently living. But is that really the point as long as people keep coming and paying the big bucks to see it? They only have to keep working just enough to convince people they’re still working. There’s some interesting information on the Wikipedia page (so I know it must be true) about what some Native Americans think about the whole thing. Odd that none of that was mentioned at the memorial.

Our friends arrived at 10:30 on Thursday morning. We drove into Custer and ate lunch at Baker’s Bakery, then headed west to Jewel Cave National Monument. We bought tickets for the Scenic Tour, which meant that we had almost two hours to kill. The visitor center was tiny and only took a few minutes to cover. We walked a short trail, then sat on a deck overlooking the park — much of which was devastated by a forest fire in 2000.

Outside the front door there was a cement block with a hole through it. A sign informed us that, in order to go on the wild cave tour, we had to fit through the hole.

I knew I had very little chance to get through, but it occurred to me that it might make a good Red Chair photo. The chair fit through no problem. I only got as far as this:

Jewel Cave is even longer than Wind Cave. As of this writing, it has somewhere around 160 miles of explored passages, making it second in the world only to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The passages branch off each other and stack on top of each other much like those in Wind Cave. There is a much greater variety of formations in Jewel Cave, with popcorn being especially in abundance.

Much of the tour route was covered with metal stairs and walkways. Jewel Cave was much more open than Wind Cave, with some very large rooms. I haven’t learned how to use my new camera well enough yet to get it to take photos in very low light, so many of these photos were taken by the light of the guide’s flashlight as he pointed out various features.

The two most interesting formations were this soda straw (above, right) and cave bacon (below).

I don’t dislike touring caves, but I find them all to be pretty much the same experience. Of course, this tour also included the “turn off the lights to see how dark it is” bit.

My wife came down with a cold on Wednesday, so I volunteered to let her sleep late on Thursday while I drove into Custer and bought pastries for breakfast. I used the opportunity to tour the town. Many businesses and most street corners had painted buffalo statues, some of which were impressive and some of which were just gaudy. I took a Red Chair photo with the one that stuck out the most. I made no effort to photograph them all, nor have I included all the photographs I took.

I liked the town. It had two great restaurants, the residents were friendly, and it wasn’t pimped up like Deadwood and Keystone. It was on this morning that we began having trouble with a couple of our tires. Every morning, a dashboard light would indicate that we were losing pressure. We’d fill them up, and they’d be fine for the day, but the next morning the light would be on again. I thought perhaps it had something to do with the altitude, but as the week went on and the problem didn’t go away, we decided to have it looked at. I talked with the waitress at Baker’s Bakery on Sunday morning and she told us to take the car to Leo, the local tire guy. I asked if he would be open on a Sunday, and she said, “If he’s not, just knock on the door.” (We didn’t do that, and we made it all the way home. Our local tire guy found nails in two tires, which I find strange. I wonder if some kid at Mount Rushmore put nails behind our tires as a joke.)

Incidentally, the street visible in the background of several of the buffalo statue photos is purported to be the widest Main Street in the United States — wide enough for oxen pulling a wagon to make a U-turn.

There is more to Custer than gaudy buffalo statues. There’s also this odd bust of Lieutenant Colonel Custer himself, in celebration of the 1874 Army expedition he led into the Black Hills to look for a location for a fort and search for gold. His unit, the 7th Cavalry, camped on the site of Custer. They found gold, which caused a huge gold rush into the region which had been promised to the Sioux Indians. Partly in response to this invasion, the Sioux went to war with the U.S. One of the battles of this war took place on the Little Big Horn River, where Custer and his troop were wiped out.

If that odd, pink monument isn’t weird enough, there’s also a much larger monument to Horace N. Ross, the member of Custer’s expedition who discovered the gold which led to all the kerfuffle.

On the way back to the lodge, I made a quick side trip down to the shore of Sylvan Lake. I passed through a state park check station and was vehemently flagged down by a woman in a ranger uniform. She came storming over to the car and saw my state park pass on the dashboard by the steering wheel where I had put it to avoid gumming up the glass. She leaned in the passenger window and said, “I need to see that.” She ripped it from my hand, tore the backing off and pasted it to the windshield on her side of the car. She looked at me and said sternly, “It needs to be here so we can see it.” I said nothing and drove meekly on. Three minutes later I passed her going the opposite direction. She waved and smiled like we’d been friends for years.