Rushmore

The temperature hovers around 100 degrees, where it’s been all week. We drive through the Black Hills of South Dakota, encountering towns with romantic western names: Keystone, Custer, Deadwood, Spearfish.  A guy on a huge motorcycle roars up beside me, catches my eye, and stares me down before cutting in front of me. I brake hard, letting him in, remembering what my niece Sara said to me yesterday.

“Careful. These guys get really nervous when they get separated from their pack.” 

It’s the second day of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.  Every year, bikers descend by the thousands on Sturgis, South Dakota to re-live the glory days of the open road.  Some are there to ride, see their friends, listen to the live bands that play nightly.  Some, says my nephew Seth, are one-percenters, flying in their bikes, staying in luxury hotels, and doing more partying than riding.  Whichever category, the bikers gather in an astonishing kaleidoscope of machines, leather, pony tails and male pattern baldness. They drink, fight, dominate the roads, clog the towns, and generally cause a headache for Sara and Seth, who are police dispatchers for the National Park Service at Mount Rushmore.   “Ugggh,” they say about Sturgis. “I can’t wait til it’s over.”

This evening we are headed to Rushmore.  I have long wanted to see the illumination ceremony, a nightly celebration that culminates when someone flips a switch, flooding the presidential sculpture with light.   

Rushmore is a symbol, a dream, a destination, a flashpoint.  Americans are immensely proud of it.  Tribal people are heartbroken by it, and what they see as the desecration of sacred Black Elk Peak. As rangers, Sara and Seth field the weirdest collection of issues.  Search and rescue. Medical emergencies. Demonstrations.  People determined to re-enact North by Northwest, the movie in which Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint scrambled over the presidential faces. There are yahoos with drones, yahoos with guns, yahoos with drugs—all illegal in the national parks, although if you are nice, you’ll probably get off with a warning for packing a small amount of weed.  Rushmore rangers respond to everything from bomb threats to the bathrooms running out of toilet paper.  

A sampling of recent examples:

The night when the dispatchers, spotting a trespasser on George Washington’s nose, were about to scramble the response team.  You don’t call out these guys lightly -- at night, in the dark, on a steep granite face that’s hard to get to.  Just as the mobilization was about to begin, someone said: “Hold on a sec,” peering closer at the screen. “Stand down. That’s a goat.”

Or: the traumatized vet, feeling betrayed by his country, who phoned in his plan to drive from Texas to Rushmore and take his own life once inside the park.  The team mobilized, making educated guesses about where this person would be.  Sadly, but in an outcome that was far easier for the Rushmore team, he completed his plan somewhere in Wyoming. 

Or: the visitor who, with either a streak of defiance or a bout of incontinence, did his business on a public path just off the Presidential Trail.  Then, in a fit of conscience, he turned himself in to the command center and confessed to—what---unauthorized pooping? 

There’s an activist tribal group bankrolled by Jeff Bezos that demonstrates frequently. There’s another contingent furious with “that damned Joe Biden, for taking away our fireworks.”  (Nightly fireworks were halted not long ago due to fire danger and general ecological terribleness, but Joe Biden had nothing to do with the decision.)  The park superintendent gets a lot of hate mail.

Credit: Shootingwire.com

Part of the craziness is about the politics of South Dakota itself, which run from conservative to libertarian to survivalist.  The state’s gun-toting, right-wing rancher of a governor, Kristi Noem, is a Trump acolyte who brayed far and wide that Trump belonged on Mount Rushmore, and went as far as mocking up a model of his orangeness up there with the other four.  Noem harbored hopes of a vice presidency until she bragged about shooting her puppy in the head because “that dog was just bad news.” The shooting torpedoed her place on the ticket.  Proving, I suppose, that murdering puppies is one place where Republicans draw the line. 

I visit Rushmore 12 days after Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket.  It has been an electrifying two weeks.   I’ve been involved in political volunteerism for some years now.  And I must say, I was team Joe all the way.  Did I worry about his electability? Of course I did.  But for character, experience, and one of the most productive legislative records of modern times, I would have backed him to the very end.  That, and the fact that I will choose cognitive loss over sociopathy all day long. 

For weeks, the motto of my Focus for Democracy team had been, “Keep calm and bank votes.”  I was calm. I was resolute.  I believed with hard work and sheer grit, we could prevail in November.

But suddenly, a grim slog turned into joy. I love this candidate; she’s smart, tough, disciplined, articulate.  She’s ready.  She was loyal to her boss to the end. That first week, I got a message from the Harris team (me and about a million other people, probably) asking me to sign a thank you card for “my friend Joe.” I took a few minutes to scribble: “Mr. President, I used to admire you.  Now I revere you.” I revere his selflessness in stepping aside. His continuing leadership (Prisoner swap, anybody?  Ethics rules for the Supreme Court?)   I think the group I am working with is going to make a demonstrable difference in the outcome of this election. And, God Almighty, are we finally, finally, finally going to elect our first woman president? What a time to be alive.

Back at Rushmore, night is falling and the temperature has dropped to a temperate 89.  Bats dart across the sky as we sit in the amphitheater.  Above, the mountain is shrouded in darkness.  An interpretative ranger (“Interp” Sara calls her) is telling a patriotic story about visiting the monument when she was four, and falling in love with America’s ideals.  It is cheesy and cliché ridden and pretty damned moving.  I ask Sara if there’s some kind of test for the interps; some standard they have to conform to in their remarks. “Nope,” says Sara.  “She’s transgender. I wondered if she was going to say something about it.” So no. No standard of conformity.  It’s another of this place’s interesting contrasts: as a National Park, it is way more progressive than the country surrounding it. 

As the program finishes, patriotic music swells, and suddenly, a massive bank of floodlights illuminates the mountain.  It is dramatic.

Credit: jcsullivan/flickr

But my favorite part of the night happens a few minutes later, when many of the people had stood up and filed out.  The interp invites all veterans, active members of the military, and Gold Star families to come forward and join her on stage for the striking of the colors.  About 50 people make their way down to the front.  As they gather, voices ring out of the darkness of the amphitheater, over and over: “Thank you!”  “Thank you for your service!” “You are the reason we are free!”  “We love you!”

Once assembled, in unison like they had rehearsed it, the line lifts their hands in salute to the flag.  The ranger lowers the flag, and four people closest to her on the stage, with military precision, fold it into a tight, perfect triangle. They hand it to the ranger and salute.  She salutes them in return. 

She turns to the audience, which is roaring, and says: “This might be the only time these people have been publicly recognized for their sacrifice.  Isn’t it a privilege for us to be able to do that?”

For nine years this country --this flawed, imperfect, idealistic experiment of ours -- has been under siege.  It may be still, even if Donald Trump is defeated in November.  But for a little while that night, on a dark, contested mountaintop in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the unity seemed more real than the divisions. Rangers. Visitors. Bikers. Soldiers. Ranchers. Transgender. Cis gender. Youngsters. Elders. White people. Even Tribal people—who work at the mountain and teach native arts to the tourists.

I think every person there felt it.  I know I did.  And I know it will keep me going for the next 80-odd days.