Things about today:

1. The Mount Rushmore park is very nicely done. I ended up being more moved by the monument than I’d have thought — not by patriotism, but by the idea of creating something huge and permanent as a record of our presence for future civilizations, which was Borglum’s intention. Choosing four dead white guys to symbolize that is both perfectly right and perfectly wrong for this country.

2. Crazy Horse is indeed huge. The thought of one Polish sculptor laboring on it alone for 40 years is amazing. If one is me, one wonders why the tribe wasn’t up there helping him. Mister Husband claims it’s because only white people are crazy enough to dangle off huge rocks whilst stuffing them full of dynamite.

3. I’ve always said I couldn’t live far from a city of at least some size, but after today I think I could live on the rolling prairie just below the Badlands. There’s nothing quite like realizing that you cannot see any trace of humanity for miles and miles and miles. So I’d buy a couple thousand acres and plunk my house down in the middle of it and watch the sky for a few decades. Now I know that about myself: either lots of people and things to do, or nothing whatsoever. But not any part of the range in between.

3a. We wondered if The Who wrote I Can See for Miles after their first American tour, which would have taken them across the plains. And then I pondered a playlist of stalker songs: I Can See for Miles, of course (both Who and Petra Hayden versions), Every Breath You Take, I’ve Got You Under My Skin (many versions).... What else?

4. The Mammoth Site is an ice-age sinkhole filled with mammoths who waded in, got trapped by the steep slopes, and died. Every single last one of them was an adolescent male. So now I have this whole children’s mammoth book in my head, where the Mommy Mammoths tell all the Children Mammoths about the sinkhole, and how if you go there you’ll die, and Ghost Mammoths live in there and if you’re Bad Mammoths maybe we’ll just leave you in the sinkhole. And then all the boy mammoths get to be 14 or so and rebellious and curious and go down to the sinkhole at midnight during a full moon because shit, they aren’t scared. And yep, they all die. The End.

5. We always travel with the RoadTrip set on shuffle. A little while after we left South Dakota, Liz Phair’s South Dakota (from The Girlysound Demos) came on. And as we pulled up to the hotel in Ogallala, on came Springsteen’s Nebraska. The Shuffle Knows.