Living the Dreams

"That's a good billboard," I pointed, and Andy swerved into the parking lot of an imposing stone castle. A stained glass window glowed in the afternoon sun.

Stone Faces Winery offered three tastings free. In its infancy, the wine business seems improbable in South Dakota, and most bottles cost more than $17.00.

Andy said, "The wines taste crisp and sweet, but they must import all the grapes. They don't have a long enough summer to grow them. Maybe global warming is helping."

Up the road Prairie Berry Winery crammed with people on Sunday afternoon. Virginia and Diane served us the five free tastings, which included many with infusions of local fruit like choke cherry, crab apple and, unusually enough, pumpkin. Visitors lined up at the cash registers to purchase the sweet but rather pricey treats.

Twice we walked all the trails at Mount Rushmore--Sunday midday with guests present and Monday morning in solitude.

Andy read Gutzon Borglum's words that a monument should be monumental in size, like the Colossus of Rhodes or the Sphinx of Egypt, and that it should last through the test of time to show the future what kind of people we were. There is no doubt that he accomplished what he set out to do when he carved the granite of the Black Hills.

"He transformed a mountain into a larger-than-life work of art," I read as Andy browsed in the museum. "That's what Borglum accomplished here when he carved the heads of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. It was his tribute to our country's founding, growth, preservation and development," I told Andy.

Contemporaries laughed, but Borglum's vision prevailed: "place them as close to heaven as we can" and "until the wind and the rain shall wear them away."

He kept adjusting his sculpture to fit the stone of the mountain, removed 90% of the rock with dynamite, created a 12 to 1 scale with his model that was proportionately equal to men 465 feet tall, did the fine carving with mini jack hammers handled by men suspended in midair to finish the facial features, and came up with the idea of leaving a 20-inch protrusion in the center of each eye to serve as the pupil and reflect the sun. How ingenious he must have been!