Never Bet Against the Avalanche

Chris O'Carroll

If you've scrutinized the design on a New Hampshire quarter, or driven behind a New Hampshire license plate, you've had a look at the granite profile known in literature as the "Great Stone Face" and in tourism promotion parlance as the "Old Man of the Mountain." Nathaniel Hawthorne famously described the Cannon Mountain rock formation as "a visage from the pages of a Jack Kirby sketchbook." No, wait a minute, he wrote, "It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice." But if the author's childhood had been piled high with Marvel comics he surely would have been alert enough that he would have noticed the Kirby connection.

(I remark in passing that if Hawthorne had marinated his young brain in overwrought comic-book prose, he might at least have had an excuse for such a redundant phrase as "enormous giant." Although, come to think of it, the man whose literary output included a Franklin Pierce campaign biography may have been well aware that some giants are more diminutive than others.)

The principle of full disclosure compels me to acknowledge that I am a native of Massachusetts, where making fun of all things New Hampshire is a pastime as sacred as rooting against the New York Yankees. It's an article of faith in my home state that the best thing about New Hampshire is the fact that their stretch of Atlantic coastline is so short that one can step directly from Massachusetts to Maine without setting foot anyplace in between.

Folks from the Granite State refer to us down in the Bay State as "Massholes," and we reciprocate with disparaging references to "Cow Hampshire" and myriad jokes about what a bunch of dumb hicks they are up there. Did you hear about the coyote from New Hampshire? Chewed off three legs, still couldn't get out of the trap. The New Hampshire National Guard has designed a new parachute -- opens on impact. And lesbians from New Hampshire date men. Essentially we're talking about nothing more edifying than recycled Polish jokes. Or Irish jokes if you're from England. Or Kerry jokes if you're from Ireland. Or Canuck jokes if you're from Maine. Or Wisconsin cheesehead jokes if you're from Minnesota. Or. . . . But you get the point (unless you're from New Hampshire, in which case I'll try to explain more slowly) -- everywhere you go, they've got someplace else to look down on and make fun of. Massachusetts and New Hampshire, like Alabama and Mississippi, have been serving one another in that capacity for many generations. So you'll have to excuse a touch of Schadenfreude in my contemplation of the Old Man's demise.

Nature, a far greater iconoclast than triflers like Robert Ingersoll, St. Patrick, or the Taliban, takes its toll not only on images and temples set up by human hands -- the Sphinx, the Parthenon, Angkor Wat -- but also on every monument that nature itself erects. To the geologist, a New Hampshire mountain in not a permanent fixture on the Earth's surface but a transient event, one brief scene in a multi-billion-year epic of tectonic shuffles and reshuffles. An outcropping of five precarious ledges, boulders balanced and wedged -- that may be as picturesque as all get out, but it ain't no symbol of permanence. The rumble of the rockslide that dismantled the Old Man's face was a pithy sermon in stones if we care to hear.

Children enjoy finding faces, animal shapes, and other pictures in the clouds. They are also smart enough (even the ones from New Hampshire) to accept the evanescence of those cloud pictures. When we find pictures in the dense clouds of matter we call rocks, we should cultivate the same wisdom -- enjoy them while they last and let them go when nature moves on.

The Old Man had been muttering ominously about his own mortality at least since the early 20th century. It was back in 1916 that human engineers and artisans launched a long campaign to hold the Great Stone Face together. The tools of this massive cosmetic intervention included first metal pins and straps, then epoxy applied annually to seal cracks in the constituent boulders of the craggy-browed, jut-jawed face. The rocks may have wanted to break free for the steep tumble toward Profile Lake, but our species was exercising dominion over the whole darn planet, and we had the staple gun and gluepot to prove it. I'm not here to give gambling advice, but gravity is reputed to be one of the fundamental forces in the universe. In any contest between elementary physics and the civic idolatry of landmark worship, I'm not going to bet against the avalanche.

Almost immediately after the early May discovery of the Old Man's passing, New Hampshire officials began making noise about plans to restore or commemorate the Great Stone Face. Maybe they could do a Rushmore number on some nearby chunk of Cannon Mountain. Or perhaps engineering wizardry could somehow collect and reassemble the fallen boulders, or at least install a cunningly crafted twin of the original. For a while there, it looked like things might get as weird as those Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials with an actor done up like the dead Colonel.

However extreme the state government finally decides to go with the project, it's clear that there is destined to be some kind of Old Man monument before long. The Boston Globe may have overstated the case when it editorialized, "Inspiration to poets and writers, that face seemed to be the soul of New Hampshire, maybe even of America." But one can say without fear of contradiction that the Old Man has inspired generations of knickknack manufacturers and established itself as the soul of New Hampshire's tourism marketing strategy. An icon like that is the opposite of General MacArthur's old soldier -- it might die, but it cannot be allowed to fade away. The Old Man was said to represent all manner of bedrock New England virtues; in the end it will be flinty, hardheaded capitalist common sense that will guide the design and placement of some replica tourist attraction. The New Old Man might not be situated 1200 feet up a mountain. It might not measure 40 feet high by 25 feet wide. It might not even be made of solid granite. But you can be sure that it will be suitable for vacation snapshots, and that the obliterated yet immortal profile will continue to adorn lucrative quantities of T-shirts, mugs, keychains, and other roadside souvenirs.

OK, I have to admit, I cop a superior attitude now, but I've been known to play the sucker for fraught-with-meaning hunks of rock. I still treasure my Crazy Horse Memorial paperweight, a fist-size stone fragment chipped or blasted from the spot in South Dakota's Black Hills where a larger-than-large equestrian statue of the Lakota hero has been taking shape since 1948 with no completion date in sight. When it's finished, that statue of rider and horse will be so enormous -- 641 feet long and 563 feet tall -- that it will make Mount Rushmore look like a hood ornament. Myth-making and fund-raising are essential components of the mighty mountain-carving project, and visitors to the Crazy Horse Memorial are invited to leave a donation and help themselves from a bin of scrap rocks. So if I tossed five bucks into the kitty a few years back, and if I still look at the rock with residual reverence every time I move things around on my desk, then I've got a lot of nerve coming on all snotty and condescending toward the cult of the Old Man.

We've been at it a long time, this business of carving human history and legend into great stands of rock. The petroglyphs of North America's storied Southwest bear witness that we were already creating stone pictures way back when stone tools represented our most advanced rock-cutting technology. With the development of steels tools and explosives, we have not scaled back our ambitions. Sometimes, giant mountain carvings (or, as Hawthorne might have preferred to express it, enormous giant mountain carvings) seem just too weirdly grandiose. Few of us would rejoice to see a thousand-year-old sequoia chainsawed into the world's tallest grizzly bear sculpture. So what's with the thrill of aesthetic manifest destiny we feel as we chainsaw a million-year-old mountain?

On the other hand, if we accept that sculpture is a worthwhile artistic enterprise, it's hard to know how we might set size limits without being arbitrary. If there's no objection to quarrying a block of granite, carting it to a studio, and carving it there, on what basis can we object to leaving the mountain where it stands and carving the same image ten thousand times larger?

Manipulating nature to produce picturesque novelty items is a practice with a respectable pedigree. I wouldn't want bonsai trees, topiary bushes, and corn mazes to be the only green, growing things on the planet, but it's fun to have a few of them around. I don't doubt that the Crazy Horse memorial, if they ever complete it, will be every bit as kitchy as the quartet of faces atop Mount Rushmore. But kitch is an inescapable feature of the human condition, and it often coexists with a certain goofy grandeur.

Nevertheless, the Great Stone Face, a found-object curiosity rather than a work of human hands, is a whole different breed of picturesque novelty item. Any replica we might carve into nearby rocks would be an apotheosis of kitch, and singularly lacking in grandeur. Carving a rock to look like a human face might be a bit odd. But carving a rock to look like some other rocks that once upon a time naturally resembled a human face -- that would be downright peculiar.

New Hampshire roads will swarm this fall with leaf peepers, the tourists who come to New England every year for the spectacular seasonal blaze of our foliage. Those hot red/orange/yellows in the cool, cidery autumn air -- it's an experience that puts you in touch with something infinite. People treasure their leaf peeping memories not because the foliage looks like a picture of something else, but because it is so completely an image of itself. We expect the foliage to be ephemeral. If we're wise, we'll expect no less of the mountains.

Chris O'Carroll