We passed over quaint wooden bridges that curled like pigtails and through old stone tunnels that looked, every time, as if they were going to rip off our side mirrors. More than once, I had the feeling that we were driving in a theme park. Each tunnel had been carefully blasted to frame a perfect view of Mount Rushmore. The presidents were watching us come to them. Our daughter screamed when she saw them and made me pull over so she could get a good angle for Snapchat.

“I hate pictures,” our son said. “Your mind is your own picture-taker-thing.”

At one point, we passed a roadside cliff that looked vaguely like a face, and we all spent several minutes debating whether it had been carved like that deliberately or if we were maybe going slightly crazy in the snowy, empty woods. Soon everything we saw started to look like a face: rocks, trees, snowdrifts. “They’re haunting me!” our daughter shouted. “Every rock I look at! I don’t understand life!”

By the time we pulled into the Mount Rushmore parking garage, after an eternity of winding, everyone was exhausted and starving. The park’s restaurant was closed for renovation, so we settled into a sort of triage-unit cafe next door. We ate in tense silence. The food was bad. I drank a beer called Honest Abe Red Ale, the can of which featured a picture of Mount Rushmore below the slogan GET SICK-N-TWISTED. Our son complained, bitterly, that his plastic cup of applesauce was “hot.” “I don’t want to be here,” he said — and that “here” seemed to encompass everything: the cafe, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, America, the 21st century.

After lunch we walked outside, to the viewing deck, and there — well, there was Mount Rushmore. That was really the biggest thing you could say about it: There it was. Rushmore is a ubiquitous American image, tattooed on the inside of every citizen’s eyelids, so it felt disorienting to see it in three-dimensional space, pinned to this particular spot on the earth. We had the viewing deck almost to ourselves, which meant that the presidents and our family faced off. Four of us, four of them.

There was Washington, out front, the leader of the band — noble, aristocratic and smooth, his mouth a grim stone line. A dollop of snow stuck to the bridge of his nose. Peering over his shoulder, like a shy sidekick, was Jefferson, his big nose held high, showing his nostrils to the world. (This was not an artistic choice; the grain of the rock forced Borglum to tilt the head back.) Lincoln stood apart from them, heavy eyebrows frosted with snow, and in the middle, almost swallowed by the mountain, was Teddy Roosevelt, with his wire-rimmed spectacles and Freddie Mercury mustache. They were all looking in slightly different directions, not at us but far over our heads, into the great American distance.

I must admit that, in person, I was not especially moved by the beauty of the sculptures. They were, essentially, traditional busts, distinguished mainly by their insane scale and placement. The novelty of it was stronger than the beauty.