05/06/04’s illustrious band:

Rock Faces of Men

Brought to you by Gutzon Borglum.

Yesterday a colleague, Jan With the Plan, showed us a video she’d picked up on a recent trip to Great Britain. It was about the Eden Project (www.edenproject.com), a collection of enormous biodomes in the strip-mined countryside of Cornwall, England. Eden’s mission: “To promote the understanding and responsible management of the vital relationship between plants, people and resources leading to a sustainable future for all.” It contains plants and cultural scenes from five continents.

We saw the first of two videos. The first covered the conception and the construction of the project. It’s a massive undertaking and a marvel of engineering. It’s amazing that human beings could conceive of such a thing, let alone build it, but here’s proof of both.

In that way, the Eden Project reminds me of Mt. Rushmore. I grew up about 90 miles from where four presidents’ faces were hewn from Black Hills granite. With little more than a vision and some dynamite, sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his crew carved men from the mountain from 1927 to 1941.

My family made at least one pilgrimage to Mt. Rushmore every summer that I can remember -- more if we had out-of-state visitors or just needed to get out of town for a while. When I was little I didn’t refer to monument as Mt. Rushmore, but as Rock Faces of Men, which I thought much more accurate. If we were spending a couple days at Camp David, my Grandma Clar’s closet-sized cabin in the Hills, we’d always take a side trip to Rushmore to play license plate bingo in the parking lot, find South Dakota’s flag on the Avenue of Flags, groan over the cheesey T-shirts (“America’s greatest rock group;” a quartet of butts captioned “Behind Mt. Rushmore”), and get saltwater taffy in the nearby tourist town of Keystone. I also learned some of my family history through visits to Mt. Rushmore; my uncle Tom (he lives in a cabin -- really!), so the story goes, was once arrested for attempting to climb George Washington.

Dad was fascinated by the carving and the history and incredible achievement it represented. He could spend a long time gazing up at the carved mountain and its neighbors from the patio of the visitors’ center, and an equally long time watching the documentary videos inside. Eventually I stopped chasing the squirrels long enough to find out what interested him so, and I got hooked, too. Once I began to understand the enormous scope of Rushmore, the talent, technology, and tenacity that went into its making, I began to find it inspiring.

How can I ever complain that my job is difficult? I’m not carving a mountain or cramming an entire world into a corner of Cornwall. But I’ve stood in the shadow of big things and I know they’re possible. Maybe I’ll move a mountain one day. Maybe you will.

Today around the world: May 6 is the National Day of Prayer in the U.S.

E-mail the Media Sensation: BandNameoftheDay@hotmail.com

Visit the BND archives at http://jugglernaut.blogspot.com.