The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [141]
I went into the Gold Nugget Trading Post and had a look around. It was a large room selling nothing but souvenirs – moccasins, beaded Indian bags, arrowheads, nuggets of fool’s gold, Indian dolls. I was the only customer. I didn’t see anything to buy, so I left and went into another store a couple of doors away, The World Famous Prospectors Gift Shop, and found exactly the same stuff at identical prices and again I was the only customer. At neither place did the people running things say hello or ask me how I was doing. They would have in the Midwest. I went back out into the miserable drizzle and walked around the town looking for a place to eat, but there was nothing. So I got back in the car and drove on to Mount Rushmore, forty miles down the road.
Mount Rushmore is just outside the little town of Key-stone, which is even more touristy than Deadwood, but at least there were some restaurants open. I went in one and was seated immediately, which rather threw me. The waitress gave me a menu and went off. The menu had about forty breakfasts on it. I had only read to number 17 (‘Pigs in a Blanket’) when the waitress returned with a pencil ready, but I was so hungry that I just decided, more or less arbitrarily, that I would have breakfast number 3. ‘But can I have link sausages instead of hashed browns?’ I added. She tapped her pencil against a notice on the menu. It said NO SUBSTITUTIONS. What a drag. That was the most fun part. No wonder the place was half-empty. I started to make a protest, but I fancied I could see her forming a bolus of saliva at the back of her mouth and I broke off. I just smiled and said, ‘OK, never mind, thank you!’ in a bright tone. ‘And please don’t spit in my food!’ I wanted to add as she went off, but somehow I felt this would only encourage her.
Afterwards I drove to Mount Rushmore, a couple of miles outside town up a steep road. I had always wanted to see Mount Rushmore, especially after watching Cary Grant clamber over Thomas Jefferson’s nose in North by North-west (a film that also left me with a strange urge to strafe someone in a cornfield from a low-flying aeroplane). I was delighted to discover that Mount Rushmore was free. There was a huge terraced parking lot, though hardly any cars in it. I parked and walked up to the visitors’ centre. One whole wall was glass, so that you could gaze out at the monument, high up on the neighbouring mountainside. It was shrouded in fog. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. It was like peering into a steam bath. I thought I could just make out Washington, but I wasn’t sure. I waited for a long time, but nothing happened. And then, just as I was about to give up and depart, the fog mercifully drifted away and there they were – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, staring glassily out over the Black Hills.
The monument looked smaller than I had expected. Everybody says that. It’s just that, positioned as you are well below and looking at it from a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile, it looks more modest than it is. In fact, Mount Rushmore is enormous. Washington’s face is sixty feet high, his eyes eleven feet wide. If they had bodies, according to a sign on the wall, the Rushmore figures would be 465 feet tall.
In an adjoining room there was an excellent and more or less continuous movie presentation giving the history of Mount Rushmore, with lots of impressive statistics about the amount of rock that was shifted, and terrific silent film footage showing the work in progress. Mostly this consisted of smiling workmen packing dynamite into the rockface, followed by a big explosion and then the dust would clear and what had been rock before was now revealed to be Abraham Lincoln. It was remarkable. The whole thing is an extraordinary achievement, one of America’s glories, and surely one of the great monuments of this century.
The project took from 1927 to 1941 to complete. Just before it was finished, Gutzon Borglum, the man behind it all, died. Isn’t that tragic? He did all that work for all those years and then just when they