Vacation Report: Day Five #1

Each hotel stay included a "continental breakfast" which could mean anything from toast and juice to a full complement of breakfast foods including sausage, pancakes, bagels and a variety of fruit. Most of our meals at the hotels up to this point were quiet, oftentimes we ate all by ourselves with the occasional fellow traveler meandering in and out of the room from time to time. Not so in Custer. Located basically at the hub of a major national vacation spot in the Black Hills of South Dakota, it was veritably busting at the seams. The breakfast area was in the lobby of the hotel and people were everywhere. But we eventually made our way through the queue and had our breakfast among the din of other people having their breakfast.

We gathered our things and piled into the van for our first site of the day, not much more than 15 minutes away: The Crazy Horse Memorial. The museum there was huge, we saw a short film on the monument then took a bus ride directly under the huge face of Crazy Horse.

It is a huge monument, albeit unfinished, built to the spirit of the Native Peoples of America that inspires one to ask: "Why?". When one considers what Native Americans believe about the sacredness of nature, it's a little difficult to imagine them supporting blowing a piece of it to kingdom come for the sake of art.

Rather than bring to mind the Spirit of the Red Man, Melissa says she got more out of the Crazy Horse monument concerning perseverance through hardship and the great American Pioneering spirit of Korczak Ziolkowski, the man behind the monument. The Crazy Horse Memorial is the brain-child and blood, sweat and tears of the former Mt. Rushmore worker, all around handyman and jack-of-all-trades.

Where Mt. Rushmore had a full contigent of federal employees hard at work, Korczak single-handedly took on his task without government financing or even a crew for that matter! Just himself, a ladder and some dynamite. That's all you really need to make art, right?

Right?

No matter what you think of The Crazy Horse Monument, there's one thing we can all agree on. That thing is big!