Broken Rock and Mount Rushmore

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Mount Rushmore is sacred to the Native Americans who originally lived in that area. Today it is surrounded by so much crass commercialism, and so highly regarded as a symbol of everything that is good about America, it seems the suffering and genocide behind it are like faded ink on a forgotten parchment. Still, it always bothered me - the faces of conquerors carved on the very place once revered. The cries of doomed Indian nations echoed for a moment in history, and the mechanized newcomers rolled across the land. It isn’t a new story, nor unique to our continent. How might a white man feel about Mount Rushmore?"

I wrote this story in 1998, just as I was becoming aware that the year 2000 would be a big hullabaloo for people predicting the end of the world. Imagine! A big, round number - two thousand. But actually, the world is 999 times more likely to end on a year that doesn’t end in x000. And besides, this story isn’t about the end of the world, just the white man’s world... though to many that would seem like a distinction without a difference. (Copyright 1998 George Wiman All Rights Reserved)
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Mt. Rushmore

Let me see your books," he said.

I led him upstairs from my woodshop to my library, where my books were arranged in rough groups on pressboard shelves covered in wood-grain vinyl.

He stood at arm's length examining them. Books on mathematics, philosophy of science, nature, Native American history, woodworking, music. Some by authors considered too radical to be exposed to children.

Broken Rock pulled several off the shelves, hefting them and measuring them with his ever-present Starret tape measure. He opened some, flipping through the pages, stopping to feel the paper and heft the weight of the volume. Random paragraphs seemed to draw his attention, and he stood reading.

The long silence was beginning to make me uncomfortable. He had been in my house less than a half hour, and he was obviously measuring more than just my books. I wondered, how long it would take us to build some bookshelves if he had to stop to read each volume?

"Hey, you want some coffee?" I asked.

"Sure. Black," he said. "Can I borrow this?" His scarred hands held an uncommon volume by a distinguished British engineer about the social implications of materials' science.

"No," I thought. "Yes," I said. I barely knew him. I had hunted for over two years to find that book. Now, I was loaning it to a relative stranger.

I loaned him many more books over the years, but I always had to go to his woodshop to get them back. And he wasn't as careful with them as I am. They came back with bent corners and tobacco stains, and greasy fingerprints.

I borrowed some of his books - and he got mad when I had one rebound before returning it.

"Don't you know that things exist in time?" he asked. "It wore the marks of every person who ever read it. Now, it's naked again." I said I was sorry, I wouldn't do it again. He eyed me suspiciously, as if I were a child making promises he couldn't keep.

I met Broken Rock when I went to buy some planks from him - pine and cherry for edging and trim. I saw some of his work, and he offered to come over and help me design the shelves. That was in 1988, over fifteen years ago. We got the bookshelves built. They were beautiful and full of character and we hauled the crummy pressboard ones out to my garage to store paint cans and garden tools, where they remained for years.

He looked nothing like me - about forty years old, a thinker with a sense of deep credibility about him. His hair was thick and strong as his arms, and he never wore anything but jeans and boots and a plaid shirt. He smoked a pipe he had carved himself.

It seemed as if we were friends from the instant we met. Not that it made any sense: he was a conundrum of a man; full - blooded Indian, woodworker, and I am a computer network consultant of British descent. Our friendship came from some other place than the history of our respective peoples, I am sure.

In all that time, my divorce, a promotion, fired, a new job, I had just one friend - Broken Rock. I asked him once what his name meant. He said he couldn't tell me yet - and that was ten years ago.

Now, we were driving in my battered '91 Ford to Mount Rushmore on a camping trip. Not that there aren't places to camp in Illinois - but he had insisted. I didn't understand since he hated the place. "Your people's' most fantastic hubris," he had said.

I saw the ground change as we plunged Westward, taking on a different, more violent character, as if the sky and Earth were engaged in some contest. Farmland gave way to scrubland, and then to badland. My car wheezed as I pulled up a steep hill.

"Why don’t you replace this piece of junk?," he asked. "You can afford it."

"Matter of principle," I said. "It pisses me off to be taken like that. They make 'em to last ten years, by gawd, I'm gonna get ten years out of this one."

Billboards emerged from the horizon: "See Mount Rushmore! Eighth wonder of the world!" "See the Interactive Holographic Documentary on Gutzon Borglum" "Camp Within Sight of the Monument!"

"See How A Sacred Indian Mountain Was Named After an Insurance Salesman and Defaced By Vandals," he said.

"Hey, you wouldn't go anywhere else this time. If you're going to bitch the whole time..."

"I'll bitch if I want. Besides, I need to pray there."

I had never learned to pray the way he prayed. He would offer tobacco to the four directions, singing and chanting for anything from a half hour to all day. But he never offered to teach me, and somehow I knew that it was not for me, anyway.

I shut up and drove. Broken Rock had been troubled by something he wouldn't tell me about, and as we made our way closer to Rushmore, his anxiety and anger seemed to be gaining energy from our unholy destination.

We paid the campsite fee at the Ranger's station and made small talk while he made up our windshield tag. "Stay off the steep hills and cliffs," he said. "We had a small earthquake here last week. Shook up a lot of people. Not good for climbing."

"Here?" I asked?

"Yeah - they think it's got something to do with Yellowstone last month, though I don't see how. First one I can remember at the park." I could tell he'd given he same speech fifty times just today. A small quake was all the excitement he ever had in this job.

I thanked him and we drove the few miles to a campsite nowhere near the monument. Broken Rock set up our overtarp - basically just a big tarp suspended on ropes at an angle over the place where we would set up our bags. Not much need for a tent in a high plains desert. This was routine for us; I set up the Coleman and began cooking as he pulled firewood that we'd brought all the way from Illinois out of the trunk and built a small fire.

There were a couple thunderstorms in the distance that night. If you have never experienced a storm in the desert, you owe it to yourself to quit what you are doing, and go there right now. Don't leave until you know what I'm talking about. I got up and pulled on overalls, and sat in a lawn chair smoking a cigar, feeling the cool wind and watching the storm crash its way across the land like an exuberant Indian spirit.

Most people talk about watching a storm, but in the cities we build, our range of vision is too occluded to encompass an entire storm. The moon was out, full; I could actually see the entire thing, a Naturefact framed in the texture of the landscape and the sky. You could see lightning bolts from ground to sky, see their shapes, and hear the sound with a clarity that seemed like a voice. It was a living, boiling thing; watching it, you understand a little of their mythology. Or at least, I thought I did. I looked over toward the campsite - Broken Rock was sleeping peacefully.

The next morning was cold and clear. I stood up refreshed and felt twenty years younger. But as I set about to make some coffee, I noticed Broken Rock was gone.
This was a familiar pattern. He almost always woke before sunrise, and almost never stayed up later than 9 PM. Even in his house, he seldom used artificial light. I toasted a bagel over the Coleman and waited for his return.

In mid morning, with still no Indian woodworker in sight, I set out with my sketch pad and colored pencils. He would either turn up or not, or we'd meet or not. I was not waiting for that. I wanted to embrace the delicacy of shape and color that surrounded me.

Hiking, I passed a family of tourists with noisy kids. The girl was whining about how she wanted to go somewhere else, and the boys were running this way and that while the father snapped their picture over and over again in front of weirdly eroded rock shapes. The wife had a look of distilled boredom on her face. Silently I thanked Broken Rock's spirits that they were going one way, and I another way on the trail. Gradually their voices faded to distance and disappeared. I could hear the wind again.

I sat near a high cliff sketching. A man appeared wearing a fishing vest full of camera equipment, set up a shiny new tripod and camera, and began excitedly snapping pictures. "Sure is beautiful here," he said. "So, you're sketching?"

I wanted to hear the wind and the sky and the ground around me. But there was no point telling him that; he would only have launched into a diatribe about how wonderful silence is, etc. Long ago I learned that being a lousy conversationalist is the surest route to solitude.

"Hmm-hmm." I said, not looking up. After a few long minutes, he went off to shoot a few hundred more pictures somewhere else. I thought about how he'd look at them after they were developed. "Wow, we sure were in a beautiful place," he'd say. "See?"

Around 5 O'clock, I went back to the campsite with a half dozen sketches. I was hungry and generally felt wonderful. Broken Rock was there, heating up some soup over the Coleman. I asked him how his day had gone.

"Pretty lousy," he said. "I took your car and went and looked at that damn monument."

"Why do you do that to yourself?," I asked. "I just went out and made some sketches and had a great time. Want to see?" I held up the sketch pad.

"Yes, later." He stirred the soup and ladled some into a cup and handed it to me. "I just don't get it. They came and raped and stole and enslaved and killed and practically pushed us off the continent entirely. Then they carved their damn faces in the mountain..."

"You're not usually so bitter about it. You make furniture to put in rich people's houses." As soon as I said it, I realized it didn't have anything to do with his complaint, and it would only make him feel worse.

"Gee, thanks - that makes me feel so much better."

I pressed in; "What - you blame me for that thing?"

"No, stupid, your ancestors. A man can't pay his father's debts. Or his grandfather's."

I had always known that Rushmore was the biggest thorn in his side. Not the spoiled rivers, nor the many dead, nor the reservations, or the cultural genocide. It was the symbol; Rushmore. White men's faces carved on their mountain. No, scratch that - they didn't own the mountain; it owned them. It was like having the faces of your oppressors tattooed on your mother's forehead. It was the very archetype of profanity.

I slept badly that night. I kept having a dream that consisted of a moment's feeling. My feet were sore and my parents, along with the rest of my village, were dragging their belongings behind them on sticks. There were soldiers on horseback ahead of us and behind us. I was sick and scared. I woke up thinking "That's crazy - I'm a white man." Three times, then a fitful sleep.

The next morning he woke me at his time. I asked him what he wanted.

"I need your help. Come with me - please." That was all I could get out of him.

We drove over to the monument in silence. He led me along a trail above a viewing lookout filled with tourists. Clouds had moved in and it was beginning to spit rain. He broke off from the trail and began to climb straight up the hillside, past a sign that said, "Please Stay On Trail." I followed him.

When I caught up to him, out of breath, he was standing with his back to me looking at a platform made of branches and pine boughs. There were ceremonial markings on it and on the ground around it. I recognized it: an Indian burial platform. Some Indians had their bodies placed on them to return to the Earth the fastest way, with the animals and birds. He didn't turn around, waiting for me to catch my breath.

"What are you going to DO?!," I demanded. He turned around and looked past me. I I was still out of breath, and turned around to see where he was looking.

Clouds had descended almost to the top of the valley and it was beginning to rain in earnest - we were getting soaked. I could barely see the faces of the presidents. The trail below was empty of tourists. I turned back toward Broken Rock.

"Damnit, answer me! What are you going to do?" I was really scared now. His face seemed to be shining, full of intensity and wrath and grief.

"I don't expect you to understand, but you will know what I need you for in a little while," he said.

I imagined he would kill himself, or kill me, or something I couldn't imagine. Paralyzed, I sank down to the ground as thunder rolled up the valley. Then the Earth moved and I felt and heard the loudest thunder I'd ever experienced, behind me. My head wheeled around - and around.

Broken Rock was standing, singing something in his Indian language, arms upraised holding a rattle made from the shells of two turtles. I looked back at the monument. Volleys of thunder struck my face as the monument was hit by a seemingly endless rain of powerful lightning bolts - two at a time, ten at a time, a hundred at a time. A few bolts hit with a deafening roar near us. I began to sob in terror. Broken Rock was still singing.

Then the Earth lurched like a leviathan shot by electricity. The wind picked up and rain hammered us both, and a sound came up from the valley and passed through my bones like a strong wave through a jellyfish; an earthquake. I fell face down and looked at Broken Rock. He seemed bonded to the rocks, still standing, moving with the earth. As I turned around again, I glimpsed through the rain and lightning, heard a continuous roar as the entire side of Mount Rushmore fractured off its base and fell into an opaque dust cloud in the valley. The cloud rose up into the rain and began to thin after a minute or two.

The faces, the presidents, were gone. And so was the earthquake. And the lightning. And most of the rain. As if Nature relaxed from her labors, the wind slowed to a gentle zephyr and I finally caught my breath and sat up. Thunderous echoes rolled up and down the valley.

I looked back at Broken Rock. He was gone. Then my vision cleared and I saw him collapsed to the ground. But it was not him. It was an old, old man, his hair thin and white, hands brittle and spotted and transparent, eyes clouded over. Wearing Broken Rock's clothes.

I struggled to my feet and then knelt beside him. He looked up at me, raising a hand with some difficulty. I held his hand, cradled his head. It was Broken Rock - impossibly old, ill, dying, weak, but the man himself. His face was emaciated, his skin transparent and weathered.

"My name was given when I had a vision," he croaked. I could only listen, not trusting myself to speak.

"This was foretold. I had a vision that the white men would take everything away, and that I would live for 200 years and pray. And at the end of the white man's millennium, his works would roll back and the Earth would come out again."

"What happened?" my voice was shaking. "Why do you look this way? You look so old! What's happening?"

"I am old," he answered. "I had my vision in 1816; I was just a boy. I've been praying all these years, carrying something inside me, safe from the white man. And now I've just let it out."

I looked back at Rushmore. The mountain side gleamed with the brilliance of freshly exposed rock. The obscenity had been cleansed.

"This is only the beginning," he said. "Please, sit with me, friend. I need you."

I shifted myself around, cradling his head in my lap, stroking his forehead. I began to sing, words I had heard him sing, words I didn't understand. His breathing became irregular, and I sang, louder, crying as I sang. And then I suddenly understood.

"From our mother, comes our life and our destiny," I sang, over and over. "She is all around us and we belong to her." Not in English. I sang until my voice no longer worked.

He was gone. I gently closed his eyelids over his still eyes. There was a blanket on the ground. I wrapped his frail body in it and hoisted it easily up onto the platform, and turned to leave.

From this vantage point, I could see for many miles. The storm had dissipated completely and the air was clear. In the extreme distance, I could see a haze of black smoke.

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