Ben Segal
In South Dakota they carve mountains.
Most places have their monuments, their sculpted stones or massive architecture. And there's land art all over, of course — enormous earthworks and the like, whole bulldozed environments. But there's something to be said for taking a mountain and blasting its face with dynamite until it resembles some historical figure. That's what you find beyond the badlands.
I don't know where else that kind of destruction is even allowed.
I too wanted to mountain sculpt. I didn't care much about the ecological cost and was driven, intensely, to defile at such scale.
That said, I wasn't so interested in turning a cliff into a great man's head. I had a hill at home that looked like Robin Williams—wind-carved, natural. No landscape needs more celebrity jaws.
I was interested instead in turning one mountain into another. What I proposed was to blow some unknown peak into the exact shape of Everest or Kilimanjaro. I wanted a real mountain to become a replica, a quarter scale icon. I wanted a curated range of great peaks.
Or maybe I wanted the same iconic spot carved many times over to form a chain of differently-sized exact replicas.
Imagine, I told David, that you're walking in the space between those repeating peaks.
Talk about an uncanny valley, he said.
David was a tremendous deflater. He poked a hard plastic straw into a tiny thimble of packaged creamer.
I was undeterred. I had only, I explained, to find a government corrupt enough to lend me their land.
This wasn't exactly true. There were also the matters of funding and technique, of which I had neither. Modelers would have to be hired. Consultants. Dakotan old-timers would need to be assembled.
David was at this point suctioning the creamer from its container by dunking the straw, placing his thumb over the open end, and withdrawing it so that the liquid inside remained suspended. Again and again he released the cream onto a widening, softening spot on the paper tablecloth.
I switched topics to David's love life. He brightened and described it as curdled—half-solid, possibly toxic, a way station on the transit-route to rot.
In mining there is a practice called mountaintop removal. It is rightly reviled. But if I frame it as art? If it is, that is, non-productive? Mountaintop removal as luxury. I telephoned a coal baron and my call did not get past his secretary.
I pictured her blouse and skirt and called another mining magnate. Another. Their administrative staffers were uniformly courteous.
David emailed me a few days later. He'd had a thought about my mountains.
As I see it, you have two options:
1) Rogue states - Cryptonations. Terrorist-held regions or Transnistria or any number of ethnically-controlled autonomous zones. There's a whole theory of mountain people living beyond control of the state, a kind of altitudinal anarchism, that you could potentially explore. Or 2) You could call the project industrial. If you say it's for profit, practically any atrocity's allowed. Some lonesome western state would surely welcome the hiring boom. An Idaho. A Wyoming. Somewhere with three syllables and a hard 'I' and a tendency toward white nationalism.
Lacking the finances to make any real progress, I could only refine and expand my project's theoretical frame. Over time I became less interested in the idea of newly-carved copied mountains and more interested in the ones I would have to destroy. I realized that, in order to prepare new mountains, I would have to make perfect models of the old ones, would have to map their dimensions exactly to plan the dynamite placement.
I decided the best thing do—to memorialize—would be to make copies of the ruined mountains by carving them into fresh ones. My project would become a visual game of telephone, a chain of mountain displacement, a continuing shifting of shapes into new configurations and at different scales.
There remained the problem of rubble. And also of finances. I was drinking with David in his apartment. The curdling, he told me, had advanced to its mold-growing stage. He understood his romantic life to be characterized by fuzzed outcroppings, discoloration, the wonder of life. I waited out his performative self-pity, steered the conversation back to my uncarved peaks.
What you need, he said, is a rich idiot.
A patron, you mean?
No, a rich idiot. You need to convince someone that he's your collaborator.
I frowned. I wasn't ready to abandon the heroicized image of myself, alone, directing the endeavor. But I knew he was right. To get anywhere at all, I'd need to hitch my dreams to the vanity of the impossibly rich.
So, I made a brochure of mountains to be carved, a menu of sorts, that I then mailed to the heirs of billionaires. There are lists of such people. I was convinced that one or another would see in my descriptions a grandness to match their ambitions. I was sure an excited scion would call with a blank check and a stockpile of explosives, a team of interpreters, a private jet to some remote and quasi-lawless highlands.
Six months past my mass mailing I'd received no reply. I no longer expected one. The rich are often idiots, but they are also dull. So I had no backer. Instead I had a small book filled with pictures of mountains I'd printed from the internet. I had models purchased from various tourist gift shops.
I lamented this fact from the passenger seat of David's badly dented Toyota. We were miles from the city and en route to his uncle's hunting cabin. David reminded me that, in a way, I'd gotten my replicas. I didn't respond. The radio out here was mostly static and Baptists. I leaned over and turned up the noise.