Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the third installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

The Climb: Part III

It was quite literally because of Aphex the Cat that we were up here, perched on this mountain-sized monument carved deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She was, when it comes down to it, the one who made the decision to violate the clearly posted NO TRESSPASSING signs to become a little more acquainted with the famous Sioux’s massive effigy.

I had paid twenty dollars to see this monument, which I first became fascinated with while watching a documentary about its construction on the Discovery channel. It was a privately funded tribute to Crazy Horse, a massive statue carved from an entire mountain. I remember hearing that the United States had offered the family in charge of its construction however many millions of dollars it would require to finish the project within the next ten years. The family declined the offer, however, as they did not believe it was appropriate for the U.S. government to front money for a tribute to the Native Americans.

Korczak Ziółkowski, the man who began the project, is dead now—and although he could have seen his dream come to reality in his lifetime if he had just accepted the money, he did what he felt was right. He chose integrity over convenience.

Admittedly, I was disappointed at the chain fence and the ominous warnings that restricted our relationship with Crazy Horse to a distance of about a mile. Choking down my disenchantment, I did my best to truly admire the beauty and ambition of the project, although from a great distance. In the documentary I saw people standing on his gigantic shoulders, tiny ants in comparison to the Indian’s massive countenance. For twenty bucks I figured I could pop a zit on Mr. Horse’s chin.

I tried as hard as I could to conceal my disappointment, from my companions as well as from myself. We were still more than a mile away from the monument, and while the sight was still spectacular from this vantage, all we were allowed was a distant view of Crazy Horse’s profile, silhouetted against the dying light of the day. Yet again, I had been deceived by my own expectations. I knew this too well, and so I tried my damnedest to keep myself from feeling the inevitable disenchantment that comes with such unrequited anticipation. So we exited the car and stood in admiration of the monument, though i admit that my own admiration felt somewhat forced at this point, tainted by disappointment. I took the lens cap off my camera, took a few photographs, switched lenses, and took a few more.

The daylight was quickly bleeding away into night, and we watched with renewed wonder as the enormous floodlights were turned on and the mountain was bathed with an ethereal, almost supernatural light. The shift from day to night seemed instantaneous, with only a tiny sliver of twilight to separate the two. Before we knew it the sky had emptied itself into a deep inky void, and a tender cascade of stars poked through the fathomless fabric of the night. The moon was rising over the mountain, a delicate silver slash in the sky, and that was all we could see. The landscape was swallowed in blackness, leaving only an intuitive imprint of space and form in our minds. There was only the island of light that was Crazy Horse, a soft golden brown that seemed heavenly in its hue. It seemed to be the only thing that existed, and I felt sadness for my apparent separation from its wonder.

We stood there for about an hour, transfixed, until finally the time had come for us to leave. There was still a good five or six hours of driving ahead of us, as we had spent the entire day in the Black Hills we needed to make some real progress before we could justify settling down for the night. I disassembled my camera, packed it away, and said a silent and sullen goodbye to Crazy Horse.

Sean, a skinny and smarmy Amherst hippie who I happened to be traveling with, opened the back door of the car, and I watched helplessly as a four-month-old Aphex the Cat exploded out of the crack. She flew past the fence and scurried down the hill toward Crazy Horse. Her movements were calculated and precise, and I knew that she must have been planning this for the past hour or so, waiting by the door to seize her opportunity.

We grabbed a flashlight out of the car and slipped under the chain, calling the cat’s name and then stopping, remaining perfectly still to see if we could hear her move. About ten minutes later we found her, and put the kitten back into the car. We were about to get back in the car ourselves, when suddenly it dawned on me: we had been well past the chain fence, clearly violating the ubiquitous warnings us not to tresspass, while waving a flashlight around and yelling a cat’s name. And no one even noticed.

“Damn,” I said to myself, “we have to see how far we can take this.”

I had never really done anything like this before, having been entangled in my own inhibitory web for so long. For these inhibitions I have slowly learned to be grateful for, having led me to a level of introspection I may not have come upon otherwise, but its burden had surpassed its utility. The shell was serving me no purpose any longer, and needed desperately to be dismantled. I had been enslaved within myself for too long; it was time to break through the crust of crystallized fear that kept me from being who I knew I wanted to be. This is what had caused me to leave Boston in the first place, to leave everything I had ever known and move by myself to the other side of the continent. I hoped that by doing something drastic and throwing myself into chaos I would force myself into spontaneity, and I could begin something new—to carve out a new perspective, a new effigy of meaning, a new sense of self. I felt something or someone calling me out of my shell, something greater than myself inviting me to grow into my own true nature. I heard a voice in my head, beckoning me to follow like a sailor follows a siren. Only the voice didn’t belong to a siren. It belonged to a mighty Sioux chief who died exactly one hundred years before I was born.

I was in the midst of a dramatic upheaval, a complete geographical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual transformation—culminating into my very presence on this monument, doing exactly what I knew I wanted to be doing. My own self-imposed limitations could contain me no longer, and now I was willing to put myself in jeopardy and disobey the strictly enforced “No Trespassing” signs in order to do what I felt to be right. Half of me wanted to get arrested, just to have the story to tell.

Now that I was frozen amidst the debris at the base of the blasted mountain, waiting anxiously for security to come and apprehend us, it seemed as though I might just get my wish….

The Climb: Part IV