The Cannibal Queen (49 page)
Why? Because I always wanted to.
I am a little happy and a little sad. If only there were four or five more states!
Climbing out of Mobridge I fly south along the western shore of the lake, south almost to Pierre. I don’t see a boat. Not a single boat, a single wake, which amazes me. This lake must be a big secret. You folks in Tennessee and New York—bring your boat here and you’ll have a huge lake all to yourself.
West of the river the hills are virgin prairie grass. In the valley of the Cheyenne River a few ranchers are raising irrigated hay, but mostly the land looks as it probably did when the first white trappers saw it in the early 1800s.
The Cheyenne turns south, so I follow the Belle Fourche River westward for a few minutes. Finally I realize that I can see the sun reflecting on the hangars of Ellsworth Air Force Base at Rapid City, 40 miles away. I turn in that direction.
The temperature at Rapid City is 103 when I land, a new record. Unloading the
Queen
and wiping her down drains what energy I have left.
The air conditioning in the FBO’s office feels good. I stand in front of the blower and slowly come back from the sky.
T
HE FIRST SIX MILES OF THE ROAD FROM
R
APID
C
ITY TO
M
OUNT
Rushmore has an eclectic mix of tourist traps. There is a water-slide emporium, two go-kart tracks, an aquarium, an antique car place that looks deserted, a factory making “genuine Mt. Rushmore gold and diamond jewelry,” and—saving the best for last—something called Reptile Gardens.
Taking your youngster to Reptile Gardens may well prove to be the highlight of your vacation. Here he or she can watch mesmerized as lizards eat bugs and snakes swallow mice. Then hourly for the next week you will be treated to the same question over and over again: “Why can’t I have a snake?” Put Reptile Gardens down as a must-see on your vacation list.
After the last of the tourist traps the road climbs more steeply and winds up canyons into the Black Hills, which, in the finest tradition of American names, are neither black nor hills. They are mountains covered with pine trees with some aspen salted in.
As a youngster I first became aware of the gigantic sculptured faces on Mount Rushmore when I watched Cary Grant in a business suit—he always wore a suit and tie—climb down Lincoln’s nose in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller
North by Northwest
. Remember that scene?
The faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are carved together in the granite cliff just below the mountaintop. Working haphazardly as funds and weather allowed, sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his crew spent fourteen years creating this masterpiece, and believe me, it
is
a masterpiece. You view the sculpture by looking up from overlooks on a hillside across the creek. The necessity to raise your head and gaze upward converts you to a mere peasant in the presence of magnificent greatness, which is no doubt precisely the emotion that Borglum intended you to have.
Obviously Borglum was a world-class sculptor when he started this project at the age of sixty, in 1927. George Washington has the prominent place, on a projection of the cliff that allowed Borglum to do almost a complete bust. To Washington’s left, your right, and recessed slightly is Jefferson. On to the right in a crevice that makes the face the least prominent is Theodore Roosevelt. Lincoln is on the extreme right, on another projection of the cliff, but this bust is tied in with the others by the way Lincoln faces, which is almost toward Washington.
This is the world’s largest sculpture. More importantly, it is one of the best, set here amid the wind and pines and clouds of the Black Hills.
The morning I was there a lusty wind sang in the pines. Not many people, which sort of surprised me this late in the summer with Labor Day just around the corner. I had the windy observation deck all to myself for the first ten minutes I was there, then six or seven other people arrived.
There are cracks in the faces, cracks visible with the naked eye. In the visitor’s center are photographs from the 1930s of the workmen using jackhammers on the faces; the cracks were there then too, imperfections in the rock. Apparently water gets into the cracks during the winter and freezes, so the cracks are getting worse. Even carved into living granite, memorials made by man are attacked by the forces of nature in the oldest process on earth, erosion.
The completed sculpture was dedicated on October 31, 1941, just five weeks before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the nation plunged headlong into the maelstrom of World War II. So the sculpture is fifty years old this year, a year older than the
Cannibal
Queen.
Washington’s and Lincoln’s presence on the mountain need no explanation. They are easily the two most important Americans who have yet drawn breath. The author of the Declaration of Independence and champion of the common man, Jefferson penned these words: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.… ” That sentence alone qualified him for the cliff, even if he hadn’t slickered the French out of half a continent when he was President or introduced ice cream to America.
Teddy Roosevelt got his mug up there because Borglum liked his style. T.R. was not a great president. One needs great events, great challenges, and great enemies if one is to impress the historians. Teddy’s tragedy was that the nation was at peace and prosperous throughout his presidency.
Yet he wanted to be great. In the visitor’s center is this quote: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take ranks with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” Teddy took his own advice: he seized life with both hands, and Borglum liked that. I do too.
There are no plans to carve more faces on Rushmore, yet there is room for a couple and the federal deficit is so big we’d never miss the money. Of course, we could always rescind the latest 25 percent pay raise our 535 congresspeople awarded themselves and use those dollars. They’re not giving us anything for our money—why not spend it on something worthwhile?
My candidates for the cliff are Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. Although each man had his smirches, I think history will ultimately conclude they were the two greatest Americans of this century.
Roosevelt had the crises his cousin Teddy lacked—the Great Depression and World War II. During his twelve years in office he indelibly stamped his personality and character upon America and our way of life.
King used unforgettable words, personal courage and leadership to forever alter race relations in this country. He forced Americans to attempt to make Jefferson’s ideal our reality. We should put him up there on the cliff with Tom and Abe.
Sitting at the overlook pondering those faces in the granite, one wonders if the sculptures will outlast the republic to which these men contributed so much. Our institutions look permanent to us only because of the perspective from which we are forced to view them—one day at a time during short human lives.
The Soviet Union lasted a mere seventy-two or seventy-three years. The Soviet people are toppling the statues, destroying the icons, shattering the institutions that looked so permanent even a month ago.
If financial bankruptcy is the harbinger of moral and political bankruptcy, the United States is well on its way down the road that leads to extinction. Our politicians regard elected office as a lifelong career offering power, prestige and wealth. They win it by selling their “friendship” to economic enterprises that contribute campaign money. They use their victory to live in a style that most Americans can’t even envision—great salaries, fantastic pensions, annual expense accounts of $640,000 each, exemptions from the laws they pass to regulate everyone else, a staggering list of perks—they’re like characters out of Gibbon. They make themselves impervious to attack by supplying government checks to the middle and working classes, checks the government must borrow ever-increasing sums of money to cover. Will our members of Congress, like the Soviet parliamentarians this August, someday find that they represent no one but themselves?
I don’t know. The genius of the democratic system is that it is self-correcting, that it gives us precisely the government we want, no more, no less. But is this what we want? If it is we’re in big trouble.
I wish I had a time machine. I would zip three or four hundred years into the future, pop into a bookstore if they still have those archaic institutions, and grab a handful of history books. I confess, I’m one of those people who cheats and scans the final chapter first to see how it all turned out.
Of course, I could just come to Mount Rushmore in my time machine to see if three or four hundred years from now the inhabitants of this continent still revere Washington and Lincoln. Will those presidents still be looking at distant horizons, or will a future generation have used explosives or artillery to obliterate a hated symbol of a dead past? Those faces on the cliff would tell me everything I really needed to know.
Later that morning I strapped on the
Cannibal Queen
for the final two legs of my Stearman summer—Rapid City to Torring-ton, Wyoming, and from there to Boulder. With the temperature at 88 degrees and no wind, I committed lift.
After flying by Rushmore and snapping the camera, I wandered around the Black Hills a little looking for the mountain that is being carved as a statue of Crazy Horse, the great war chief of the Sioux. And I found it, about fifteen miles southwest of Rushmore and six miles or so north of the town of Custer. Irony never comes in little pills, but in great doses.
When finished, this tribute to the American Indian will be the world’s largest sculpture. The figure has yet to emerge from the stone but they are hard at it. Maybe in a few years …
Flying south across the high plains I tried to put my Stearman summer in perspective. I have flown a long way. From an airplane almost a half-century old, I have seen America.
Without permission from anyone, without a flight plan or a destination, you can fly any airworthy machine anywhere in the nation. There are some rules and regulations, of course, and while they are sometimes tiresome and intrusive, they are not onerous.
In this America of 1991 almost every town of any size has an airport and someone at the airport has fuel to sell. Down the road will be a motel that will give you a clean room for a reasonable price. Nearby will be a restaurant that serves palatable food. Unless you are extraordinarily unlucky, you will not be assaulted, robbed or ripped off. You will be treated with courtesy and respect by friendly people who will urge you to return someday. And they will mean it!
I never know just what to say when people ask me where my home is. My house is in Boulder, Colorado, but my home is the United States. Everywhere in the United States. I am as much at home in Savannah and St. Francis and Rockland as I am in Boulder. This entire nation is where my heart is.
Often the problems that make news threaten to overwhelm me. The foolishness, the stupidity, the shortsightedness, the naked self-interest at the expense of the public interest, these things sometimes lead me to despair of my fellow citizens and our future. But from 2,000 feet above the ground individual hills lose their identity and the lay of the land becomes apparent. Our nation has weathered its first two centuries well. From this altitude that is plain. The future … well, the future belongs to those yet unborn. They will have to spread their own wings.
As this summer draws to a close the Soviet Union is in meltdown. Only one thing is certain—the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are emerging from darkness into light. What will come next no one knows. Perhaps anarchy, perhaps chaos, starvation, civil war or even a new political system that rests, in Jefferson’s immortal words, “on the consent of the governed.”
We free people wish the Soviets and Eastern Europeans well. We wish for them and all the people of the earth the life, liberty and freedom to pursue their concept of happiness that we ourselves enjoy.
And I wish the same for you.
I catch my first glimpse of the Front Range while I am still over Cheyenne. Thunderstorms are drifting east off the Rockies. One with a base of solid, opaque rain lit by strobes of lightning rests over the Cache la Poudre. In the next half hour or so it will drift down on Fort Collins.
And one is just east of Boulder. I point the right wing of the
Cannibal Queen
at the ground and corkscrew down at three Gs. Then I roll and pull some to the left. I right her and chop the throttle for a stall. She shudders and pitches forward and I smartly give her forward stick. Now roll and pull as the speed increases.
She responds crisply. The stick and rudder bring instant responses as the sunlight highlights the dancing yellow wings against the gray vagueness of the storm.
She has been on a long flight, visited every state. She has delighted people from coast to coast and carried many aloft on flights they aren’t likely to forget.
Now it’s over.
I’m tired of living out of a soft bag and sleeping in motel beds, so in a way I’m glad. But there will be no more strange airports or fog in mountain valleys, no more unanswered calls asking the direction of the wind, no more low passes searching for wind socks, no more inviting grass runways.
Still, I have lived it. For that I am truly thankful.
Maybe when he is my age and remembers how it was, my son, David, will grin and be thankful too. Good memories, those are the best things you can give a kid.
After a few minutes of whifferdills I cut the power and point the
Cannibal Queen
toward home, down there under the trailing edge of that storm.