On past, present, future and the modern minivan

Bison rest along the Black Hills of Custer State Park in South Dakota. PHOTO: Aaron J. Brown

Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range blogger, author, radio producer and columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

Humans prefer borders. We’re like squirrels that way, and screech just the same. We see our world in one place and that of others locked over there, across some line only we can see. Some borders stand arbitrary, penned on maps with compasses and rulers by a whiskey-breathing voyager of the old times. Some borders are natural. You feel them without needing a map. The slow-rolling Missouri River in central South Dakota is just such a border.

Our little green minivan, still stained with the reddish gravel of Northern Minnesota, came howling toward the big bridge by Chamberlain and we knew we had arrived somewhere else. Sure, it was still South Dakota. We’d been on the Interstate since morning light. We had even visited the Mitchell Corn Palace, adorned with maize of many colors. But crossing the Missouri we had forthrightly Gone Out West. There’s a reason the original map of Minnesota territory ended here. This is the line. The only thing standing between this river crossing and the mighty Rockies are the sacred Black Hills and Badlands. That’s where we were headed.

Aaron J. Brown

You all know the Black Hills, even if you’ve never been there. It’s where they carved Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln into the mountain. It’s where they now carve the heroic Lakota leader Crazy Horse into an even bigger mountain. Bison still roam Custer State Park, where a park, a city and a county bear the name of the Army general who stumbled into legendary infamy. The very mines that sparked conflict between Lakota and U.S. leaders are now tourist attractions where my rockhound son pans for gold and beg for trinkets from the gift shops.

In touring these titanic monuments of great men, I am struck by how vulnerable these fragile legends would be in our time. One imagines their archaic beliefs, bafflement at our technology, outdated prejudices rightly vilified in today’s time. The plaque at Mt. Rushmore shows George Washington waving a friendly cane at his farm workers, whose skin was lightened for the painting so as to downplay the fact that they were slaves. Jefferson knew slavery would have to end, but owned slaves himself. Lincoln freed the slaves, but only after he found the political expedience to do so. Further, I simply do not believe that Crazy Horse would have approved of the laser light show featuring Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American” projected upon his monument.

Aaron J. Brown

From wooden teeth to crippling depression, the great presidents of Mt. Rushmore would dash themselves upon the rocks of the present. Fortunately for them, and us, their time was across another kind of border, an impenetrable one called Time. For the future would render these men powerless — maybe even kill them on the spot through sheer cardiac shock. In their time, in their land, they could be great.

Indeed, we can only take the future in small doses. Just one sunrise per day. Even this will kill us eventually. We can, however, build a tolerance that lasts roughly as long as our weakest internal organ. Physicists theorize that if time travel were ever achieved it could only bring us forward. This is one scientific achievement we need not bother pursuing. The future will come, surely as the Missouri flows down to the Great River, South to the ocean, whose mists rise into the air, float away and fall back down to wash away the Badlands, surely as the rain, surely as the future, surely as the tread wears thinner on the tires of our little van.

Ah, but the memories, the lessons, locked away safe across yesterday’s unalterable border. We look forward to tomorrow, ready for its trials.

Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and hosts the Great Northern Radio Show on Northern Community Radio. This post first appeared in the Sunday, Aug. 24, 2014 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.