Dead Presidents: Not Neccessarily a Rock Band

Note the hairpin turns on the sign: that was not exaggeration, it was a warning.


A little slice of paradise...


A payphone in the middle of nowhere. Go figure.


the valley we were in really did look like this. the curve of this road was nothing compared to the turns ahead.


We made it!


Bob is happy the man; he even let me take his picture!


One for the guys at Plainfield Harley Davidson.


Pretty self-explanatory.


This was the beautiful weather; in reality we only got a few raindrops on us. We managed to avoid the rain the entire day, chasing it from one spot to another. The clouds always stayed ahead of us. Weird (but good).


The mountain...


The close-up.


I can't even begin to comment on what this means to me.


Bob tries to relax after a hard day.

Howdy!
Yesterday was Dead Presidents day on the Madigan journey. We rode up to Mt. Rushmore to see the sculpted mountain and then came back to camp in the early evening. I have to say that Mt. Rushmore was, for me, almost anti-climactic and frankly it pissed me off a tad bit. Let me clarify: I was fascinated by the workmanship that went into it. I could have sat there all day and listened to the stories of the drilling and how you can make something so big out of a template so relatively small. The sculptor changed the design of that thing NINE times before they got the finished product due to the actually working of the stone. The technical part of the story; how the whorls and cracks in the stone dictated the placement of the heads, the way the scaffolds were made, etc., were the things I found interesting.
The part that pissed me off was the politics. Yes, the greenies had to get their foot in the door so there’s this big display all about some beetle that’s eating the pine trees around here. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s wonderful that there is information available to teach people the reason you don’t move wood. I think the national Forest Service does a great job and the guys working in those positions have a tough row to hoe explaining to ignorant hollow-eyed Berkeley morons why sometimes burning and/or cutting a forest is a necessary and scientifically proven method to keep the trees more viable. But what the fuck does the voracious pine beetle have to do with carving a mountain? Nothing.
Then there was the wall dedicated to the dedication from various Presidents such as Kennedy and Bush Sr. It was purely political; those people aren’t on that mountain. They were kids when the idea was conceived. But the government paid for it and by golly they will use it as a platform to say what they damn well want to say when they want to say it. Why couldn’t the exhibit be more about Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln? Of course they had a few panels dedicated to those four men but the overwhelming feeling I got as I walked through the main hall was this: Mt. Rushmore was built and paid for with tons of tax-payer dollars. In the eyes of a politician that means the monument belongs not to you or me, the monument cannot stand on its own merits, but must be a platform for showing how awesomely wonderful it is that we have a political class of people in this country who are going to look out for us and show us how hard they are working to make life better for us and gee; aren’t they too wonderful?

OK: you’re wondering where that rant came from; frustration. The idea that so much of people’s money went into making a sculpture that they would probably never get to see because they couldn’t afford to get there really bothers me. Don’t forget that this sculpture was carved in the middle of the Depression. People were forced to pay taxes they couldn’t afford in order to stroke the egos of people who could have afforded to pay for it themselves. It pisses me off. Rant done.

On a much lighter note: We rode Highway 16 A for about 15 miles. This road is pretty hairy but tons of fun with two or three tight hair-pin turns and beau coup signs saying “Slow to 25 mph, turns ahead”. (That was an optimistic muber if you ask me.) The curve signs looked like snake warnings there were so many of them. Bob was a real sweetie and gave me a “thumbs up” for doing so well on the curves. He knew I was nervous because I had never done those kind of tight turns before, (really, how curvy is Indiana for God’s sake), and there is no room for mistakes out here. You don’t lean, you fly. It’s really that simple. Some of the road just drops off for a couple of hundred feet; you sure don’t want to overshoot your curve so you gotta lean over as far as you need in order to get around the corners. It was scary but totally exhilarating and one of the reasons I wanted to ride out here. Bob said if I can take those corners Deal’s Gap will be a cake walk because their turns aren’t so tight. I felt kind of bad because we got about three quarters of the way up the mountain and had to turn around due to a wreck. It seems a car and a motorcycle met head on: I really hope everyone was ok.
About half way up the mountain we stopped at a place called Elk haven. It was a beautiful piece of land; the store had a huge front porch deep enough to sit at some picnic tables and sit out of the rain if you needed to. Rocking chairs and a checker board completed the ideal country place. Definitely a place I would buy with that winning lottery ticket. The thing that tickled me was the pay phone at the end of the gas pump pull-through. Not only do you rarely see a pay phone these days; who woulda thought you would see one in Bumfuct, SD?
Today we head for Wall Drug, then Minden Nebraska to see a kitschy little village with a blacksmith shop, pioneer village, and old trains, planes and automobiles. Our kind of place!! I can't wait.