If you have never seen the memorial at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, you might want to consider visiting for the Fourth of July.

There are fireworks freaks aplenty in Eastern Oregon; just note the volunteers at Pendleton’s Hometown celebration. Well, get this: It took a park service helicopter carrying 800-900 pounds of material 43 – that’s right, 43 – trips to get all the fireworks up to the top of Mount Rushmore last week.

That’s something in the neighborhood of 18 tons.

The show, on Saturday night, reportedly lasted 30 minutes, and, in the words of acting park superintendent Mike Phlam, “was spectacular.”

Mount Rushmore is situated in the Black Hills of southwest South Dakota. The nearest population center is Rapid City. The roads in and out of Keystone, which is the nearest accommodations, are all two-lane and some feature a nifty design feature called a “pig tail” which if you think about it for a second, doesn’t require much explanation.

It’s not easy to accidentally bump into Mount Rushmore.

But if the phrase “purple mountain’s majesty” means anything to you, Rushmore is a must-see part of Americana.

The likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt are huge, and yet, not as big as you might have thought. They are scary accurate, even to the appearance of a glint in their eyes.

A guy who has seen fireworks over the Washington Monument in D.C. can rate “emotionally charged” celebrations. Rushmore wins on a night when they don’t fire off tons of rockets.

Every night, there is a lighting ceremony at the memorial, which is how the natives invariably describe it. Every night they play patriotic music in the amphitheater at the foot of the mountain, and then a ranger talks about the park and the four presidents and then there is a video which details the greatness of their lives and this memorial.

It’s moving in its red-white-and-blue, apple-pie-and-hot-dog, down-home, this-is-America approach. It makes a cynic’s eyes blur a bit. Really.

“If you didn’t have dry eyes at the lighting ceremony,” Phlam said last week, “you would have out-right cried at the celebration Saturday.”

The preparation for the July 3 celebration also included homeland security. A pall over the freedoms to which the memorial pays homage, but a dose of reality all the same.

They would narrow Route 16A to one lane, where vehicles – most belonging to campers, remember this is out there – were scanned and searched, and riders were reminded to leave all weapons, explosives, etc. secured in their vehicles and to not take them into the park.

Then, as they entered, they were subjected to “airport-level” security.

“We do have a collection of knives,” Phlam admitted, “but it wasn’t all that oppressive. Most of the comments we heard were about how safe the process made people feel.”

All in all, according to folks at the park and down in Keystone, the security wasn’t as oppressive or time consuming as it might have looked to be. One waitress at the Mountain View Inn said by the time her shift ended at midnight or so, she was the only car on the road going home. “Some years, there’s been huge traffic jams at that time.”

Phlam said he hoped the park service was getting better at this, as crowds continue to build for the annual celebration. This was only the seventh year for fireworks at the memorial, and he said more than 25,000 were in the park with untold hundreds if not thousands on roads and trails around the mountain.

“We had times when people coming in were waiting up to 15 minutes, I’m sure,” Phlam said. “But never more than that.”

Still, the six-story-high faces of those icons to personal liberty and democracy are the real show. It was hard not to wonder what they would have said about the measures taken to ensure the safety of Americans in this most American spot.

It’s a fair guess that they would have mixed considerations: A commitment to keeping their people safe from terror, and a commitment to rid the world of the kinds of threats that make “homeland security” something other than a “given.”

That would make them just like about everybody else who celebrated our national birthday on July 4, 2004.

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Dave Balcom is publisher of the East Oregonian.