over the country. But here they focused on improving public buildings and viewing area safety rather than restricting access to the mountain itself.
But that wasn’t as bad as the overreaction in 2009, when a group of Greenpeace protestors had managed to make it to the top of the presidential heads to drape an anti-global-warming banner there. Following that was years of limiting access and clamping down on the circulation of images of the top. National Park Service officials believed distribution of these images constituted an unjustifiable security threat.
Even then Gensler had come across the report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that read “preventing individuals seeking to climb to the top of the monument for nefarious purposes is difficult.” But he had found that the real problem was the lack of funds needed to man those surveillance feeds and police the summit.
The superintendents before him had struggled to balance the visitors’ freedom with park security, but they had neglected to incorporate the human factor. Upon his hiring, he almost immediately realized the key was using their limited funds to their best advantage, as well as steward training.
These forest rangers were more comfortable with trees than they were with other people and had to have an attitude adjustment to change their preconceptions about “the annoying interlopers.” Once he made it clear that every visitor should be treated like a possible nature lover, and led by example, the mood slowly but steadily changed.
They all worked to make any visit so enjoyable that few seemed to notice Gensler’s steps to make sure the presidential sculptures themselves were well and truly off-limits. Nobody could get up there, but he did everything in his power to make sure they didn’t even think about wanting to.
Gensler breathed deeply of the fresh, crisp, autumn air. They were in the weather sweet spot where the southern Chinook winds took on cold Canada air trying to permeate the area, leaving them in a pocket of peace. As he straightened at the crest of his breath, he unavoidably glanced upward. His eyes, sharpened by years of training, narrowed. His brain, sharpened by the same training, slammed down the sudden panic that filled it.
There were three specks in his vision, where they couldn’t be, moving along the crest between the stone coiffures of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Two black specks and one blond one.
Not possible, Bernard Gensler thought. He blinked, praying they were shadows of soaring birds or clouds. But when he looked again, they were still there, and still moving—getting ever closer to the edge of the precipice.
Not possible. They couldn’t get up there. There was no way they could’ve gotten past security.
Gensler’s arms moved while his gaze didn’t falter. Up came both his hands—in one his smartphone, in the other the Sunagor Super Zoom Compact Binoculars he always kept in his jacket pocket. Without looking, he thumbed the universal code on the cellphone’s digital buttons, linking him with every ranger and staff member, and stuck it against his ear.
“Code green,” he said quietly. “S, l, x, t and a.” As he was giving the message meaning “scalp-line between Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln,” he brought the most powerful compact, zoom binoculars available to his eyes as calmly as he could.
“Not possible,” he heard someone gasp from the monitor room.
Not possible, Gensler heard echoed in his own mind as he thumbed the Sunagor up to its full hundred and ten times magnification. It was as he feared. Somehow, it was the little girl he had fixated on, or her twin. But even if she were a twin, the people who had flanked her before were flanking her now.
But his fear was not just because they had somehow gotten past all the security measures, but because he knew there was no conceivable way they could have gotten up there that fast—not unless they were all, somehow, twins. Another blond twin who was still holding a twin juice carton in front of her like an offering to the gods.
Above the buzzing in his head and the ambient sounds from the tourists all around him, Gensler became aware of other voices in his ear. Babbling coming from ranger stations all around the back and top of the mountain stridently maintaining that they had seen nothing and no one had passed, mingling with desperate questions and even accusations.
“R.S.,” he said strongly as he watched the three figures stop at the lip of the cliff. Radio silence. It was an antiquated code, but still effective. “Move,” he ordered the rangers nearest the spot. “Secure, safeguard.” Those were meant for both the location and the trio.
All the while, he never took his eyes off the three specks. His breath caught in his throat as the blond girl seemed to lurch forward, but he breathed again when the man beside her suddenly gripped her shoulder. He watched as the man and woman leaned down. The girl looked up at them.
“What are they doing?” Gensler may have whispered. Are they talking? What are they talking about? “Move, move, move!” he snapped, the word becoming more urgent with each repetition.
As he did so, he started becoming aware of nearby tourist voices also becoming more urgent and strident. Others had binoculars too.
Gensler’s head craned forward on his neck, desperately hoping that somehow might help. But as he did, the three atop the monument stopped talking, the girl turned back to face him, and the adults flanking her each gripped her elbows and ankles.
“No,” the superintendent said, the word seemingly torn from him by talons. But his building dread prevented nothing. The two adults swung the girl back and forth as if they were aerialists about to launch their youngest member to the top of a circus tent.
“No,” Gensler breathed with each swing. “No!”
As two park rangers appeared at the far side of both Washington’s and Lincoln’s heads, the two adults hurled the little girl off the cliff. Gensler watched as she swung out in a huge, diving arc, holding the juice carton out over her head.
He didn’t even stop watching when a loud explosion—it sounded like a firecracker in a metal trash can—engulfed the carton and her. Everything after that seemed to be moving in extremely slow motion. The shock wave blew off massive, ugly chunks of Roosevelt and Lincoln—noses, slabs of Lincoln’s beard, Roosevelt’s cheek—while scarring the chins and mouths of Jefferson and Washington. The sound of the blast and the crack of the monument took a few moments to reach the onlookers, but after that the crumbling roar was constant. The biggest pieces struck outcroppings on the faces and on the mountainside itself, shattering the stone into smaller chunks, like an obscene asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere and shedding its rocky skin. More facial curves and details were ripped away, smaller fragments that were no longer identifiable as other than what they were: ancient granite and metamorphic rock. The crack-crack-snap of each strike announced new destruction that was obscured by the dust cloud, but invoked horrible ruin that no one wanted to see—yet could not turn from. The dust set up a haze in the air that was constantly thickening and expanding, like smoke blown slowly from a monster cigar. The pasty, off-white fog was like a scrim to mute the pain of the vignette being played out behind it.
But it didn’t. It couldn’t. Nothing could. And the distant sounds couldn’t blot the nearby screams and shrieks and guttural roars and swearing and orders to run, run, move! that everyone seemed to be shouting at everyone else.
It was the longest and yet most viciously scarring few seconds Gensler could remember having lived through.
* * * *
“They threw her because she wouldn’t have done as much damage if she had merely
