Page 19 - WTP Vol. X #5

of being lost.
After leaving Buffalo, Wyoming, we pulled a U-turn on a narrow highway in order to visit Devil’s Tower, the huge basalt laccolith you might have seen in the Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We circumnavigated the monument on foot and in silence, taking note of sacred Native American of- ferings hung in the trees, or the landscape of wild turkeys and prairie dogs, buffalo pastured with long- horn cattle. We saw the carcass of a deer half-eaten by a cougar. Our journey, which began in Washington, now became a pilgrimage in search of America.
We drove to Mount Rushmore. I had seen it before, and had also seen the evolving monument to Crazy Horse, one of my heroes, thinking how crazy it was to honor a great Native American by carving up a mountain. But I had not seen any of these things in the company of my Australian wife, who is gifted with visions. You might say she translated me in
my own country. She looks at her surroundings
with rare intensity and accuracy. She pays atten- tion where many people stumble in a dream. It was she who noticed not only the giant busts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln with a herd of white mountain goats below them, but also the landscape those august fathers gazed upon. As the few off-season tourist cameras pointed at the presidents, she turned and looked at the pine foothills and the vast prairies run- ning away like an eastward sea, and said, “They’re looking back at America. They’re looking back toward the capital, as if to see how far the nation has come.”
My new rule: if you ever want to see your own coun- try, see it with a foreigner.
We spent hours driving another back road that had been engineered with tunnels aimed precisely at the presidents. The man who laid out the road wanted you to have that vision whenever you came around a corner or looked ahead through a tunnel—the same four giants carved in rock. You could feel the pride he felt in America, the sense of awe he wanted to convey as he shaped the landscape. Even for a skeptic like myself, it was hard not to be moved by the thought of what America could be.
We drove on to the Badlands of South Dakota, a maze of dry broken rock, then to the haunted space of Wounded Knee with its old wooden sign of com- memoration—the word “Battle” had been covered by
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“Among writers, I bless the contrarians, the
ones who do not conform to their times but resist with every decency thei- imaginations allow.”
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