Stone Country: Then and Now
228
Stone Country: Then and Now
228Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253024527 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2017 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 10.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Stone Country
Then and Now
By Scott Russell Sanders, Jeffrey A. Wolin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Scott RussellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02452-7
CHAPTER 1
HUNTING FOR WHAT ENDURES
Solid as rock, we say. Build your foundations upon stone, we say. But of course the rocks are not fixed. Waters carve them, winds abrade them, heat and cold fracture them, the twitches of the heaving earth buckle and warp them. The sands on our beaches started out as bits of mountain. The soil that feeds us is laced through and through with pulverized stone. Right this minute the oceans are manufacturing the stuff , and so are volcanoes. A cauldron of fresh brew is boiling beneath our feet. The very continents glide about like great raft s, floating on the planet's molten mantle, one plate grinding against another, new rocks surging up from trenches in the seabed, old rocks slithering down. A time-lapse film of any landscape, with frames shot every thousand years or so, would reveal a flurry of changes. From one millennial blink to the next, God would see an altered world. The Psalmist uttered a geological truth when he declared that the hills skip like lambs. They do, only we're too quick-eyed to notice.
Still, in our hasty sight the rocks seem fixed. By comparison with our brief lives and our fleeting works, they might as well be eternal. Their clocks are running, but only a millionth as fast as ours. There is nothing like geology to take the urgency out of the morning's news. If we could watch events from the rocks' point of view, all of human history, from the stalking of woolly mammoths to the launching of space shuttles, would appear like a blinding flash. Our longest running shows, such as Egypt or China, would be mere blips in the ears of stones. When we disappear, we probably will carry a good many other animals and plants down to extinction with us. But rocks won't keep much record of our brief transit. Despite all our drilling and blasting, we have barely scratched this stony planet.
If you find comfort in that, if life in a throwaway economy makes you hunger for durable goods, if your blood pressure goes up and down with the stock market or political polls, if you fret about pulling off the monthly balancing act in your checkbook, if the daily rush makes you dizzy — you would do well to spend time in stony country. And you will find few places where the presence of stone is richer than it is in a narrow belt of hills and creek beds in southern Indiana.
The territory I have in mind lies chiefly in the counties of Lawrence and Monroe. The northern and southern boundaries are marked by the main stem and East Fork of the White River — a meandering stream that the Miami called Wapahani, meaning "white sands." The lesser creeks of the region wear names like Jack's Defeat,
Beanblossom, McCormick's, Pleasant Run, Leatherwood, Goose, Salt (which is sweet), Clear (which is cloudy), and Big (which is little). The principal towns are the two county seats, Bloomington and Bedford. The villages and hamlets include Romona, Spencer, Stinesville, Ellettsville, Clear Creek, Guthrie, Harrodsburg, Peerless, Needmore, and Oolitic. On the western edge of the country I'm talking about is Popcorn, on the south are Pinhook and Buddha, just over the eastern border are Nashville and Gnaw Bone, and up near the northern edge are Cuba and Carp.
In this neighborhood the reigning rock is limestone — not the common sort that's crushed for use in making cement and roadways but a rare, thick-bedded, tight-grained stone that can be quarried in large blocks, cut to any shape, and carved with fine detail. Prized by sculptors and architects and builders, it's called Salem limestone by geologists and Indiana limestone by everybody else. It was laid down roughly 330 million years ago, in the Mississippian period, around the time the sharks and cockroaches were getting their start, long before the appearance of anything resembling a mammal. The Salem outcrop, which extends northward in a snaky belt never more than ten miles wide from the southeast corner of Lawrence County to the northwest corner of Monroe County, is the largest accessible deposit of premium building stone in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. If you live anywhere in the lower forty-eight states, you are probably within walking distance of a library, bank, church, house, monument, or skyscraper built with Salem limestone. For more than a century and a half, chunks of southern Indiana have been shipped all over the continent.
Within a few miles of where I live in Bloomington, there are gaping holes in the earth from which stone was quarried for the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, Rockefeller Center, the National Cathedral, Grand Central Station, San Francisco's City Hall, Chicago's Tribune Tower, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Vanderbilt family's mansions, thirty-five state capitols, and countless other buildings grand or humble. Walk to your town square or courthouse lawn and chances are you'll find a war memorial carved from Indiana limestone. In Washington, D.C., the dome of the Jefferson Memorial and the columns of the Lincoln Memorial are made of it. The Bureau of Internal Revenue toils behind sturdy walls of Salem stone, and so do the Departments of State and Commerce and the Interior, along with other bureaucracies too numerous to mention. Recently the west front of the U.S. Capitol — built of Virginia sandstone — was given a facelift with our local stone.
Over the past century, the destinations for Indiana limestone read like a graph of America's growth: first the great international cities, Chicago and Boston and New York; then the muscle cities of the Midwest, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, St. Louis and Indianapolis; now the glittering cities of the Sunbelt. New towers, sheathed with Indiana limestone, are rising today in Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, and Denver. There was a time, back in the heyday of the industry before the Great Depression, when two-thirds of all the cut stone in America was coming from this little strip of land, an area so small you can hike it from side to side or bicycle it from end to end in a single day.
Digging up that much stone has left a good many holes hereabouts. The work of cutting and carving it has occupied thousands of local men. Along highways and back roads, you see the brawny machinery these men used to handle the stone, the humpbacked mills where they shaped it, the rails where they shipped it, the piles where they heaped what they could not use. For the past two years, in company with Jeffrey Wolin, I've been talking with the stone men, exploring the mills and quarries, tramping along creeks and railroad spurs. Each of us had poked around the region for several years before our meeting, but we did our best work, our most intense work, together. This book is our personal map of the limestone country. What Jeff came to understand about the place and its people is recorded in photographs. My own understanding is caught here in these words. We learned a great deal from one another, but in the end each of us offers his own vision. We did not set out, as scholars might, to give a sober history, a skein of dates and dollar signs. Nor did we come to visit this place as outsiders might, searching for the exotic, squinting our eyes for a glimpse of local color. We live here. This is a travel book of sorts, yet it concerns travels undertaken in our own neighborhood. It is also a sort of biography, not about a person — although it is filled with portraits of individuals — but about a place. It is a close look at a piece of the earth where the accidents of geology have bared a special kind of stone, and where landscape, towns, and the people themselves carry the mark of that stone.
CHAPTER 2BONES AND SHELLS
Near the village of Needmore, toward the southern end of the lime- stone belt, there is a graveyard on a knobby hill surrounded on three sides by abandoned quarries. You reach the cemetery on the fourth side along a gravel drive. Raspberries, just coming ripe, lapped against the fenders of our car as Jeff and I rolled up to the locked gate one morning late in June.
We had the place to ourselves. From the borders of the cemetery, ox-eye daisies gazed darkly at us. Daylilies burned a fierce orange. Yucca plants lift ed their pale flickering blossoms. We had come here in search of limestone grave markers, especially ones that carry the imprint of private feelings. And we were not disappointed. The first headstone we spied was a homemade job carved on a rough slab, for a boy who had died at the age of nine in the last year of World War II. In the upper right-hand corner was the inscription,
ASLEEP IN JESUS, with the J written backwards, the way my son used to write it when he was six years old. In the upper left was a kindergarten sun, with light beams radiating from it in squiggly lines. The picture might have been carved on the wall of a cave twenty thousand years ago, it was so elemental a sign of hope.
Jeff was on his belly in the grass, taking a photograph of this marker, when a car gritted down the drive and pulled to a stop behind ours. The man who emerged from the cloud of gravel dust was about seventy, a slow-stepper, wearing baggy blue workpants, a white shirt, a ball cap emblazoned with the Goodyear icon, and mirrored sunglasses that shone like lustrous coins. His cheek bulged with chewing tobacco and his right front pocket bulged with a revolver. I could see the blond handle, cross-hatched for easy gripping. Sunlight flared on the shiny hammer. Was our visitor trying to drum up business for the graveyard? As he approached, I speculated industriously on that gun.
We exchanged howdies, mine cautious, his cold. Behind those sunglasses, his eyes were unreadable. He leaned to spit, shift ed his chaw, shift ed his feet, then just stood there, as if waiting to be told what in the devil we two fellows were doing with a notebook and camera in Hopkins Cemetery at eight o'clock in the morning. So I told him we were studying limestone.
Hearing that word, he thawed out. "They ain't nothing much around here but limestone." He shoved hands in pockets — for a quick draw? — and then set off talking. He was the caretaker for this place, kept it mowed, kept the plastic flowers in their holders, kept his eye on visitors. The cemetery plot had been donated to the township by a guy named Hopkins, who sold all the surrounding land to the limestone companies. Quarry holes yawned out there in any direction you cared to look. "There's good stone right under where we're standing. We only dig the graves four feet deep. If we had to go six, we couldn't bury anyone without drills and dynamite." Most all the dead belonged to stone families, whose men worked in the quarries and mills. For markers they favored limestone. "Worked all their lives in it, and now they're buried on top of it and underneath it. Just like a sandwich."
The combination of hand and revolver in his pocket still worried me. When he paused to spit, I asked him why he packed the gun. "On account of that Leggo boy who's been hiding around this cemetery since he broke out of jail," he answered. "I don't expect he'd shoot me. I been knowing him all his life. But you can't never tell about kids."
Neither Jeff nor I had heard of the infamous Leggo boy, so the caretaker filled us in on the history. He was a local tough, about eighteen, grew up right here in Needmore. Not long ago he broke into an aluminum-stamping plant down the road, a huge brick building that used to be a limestone mill. The sheriff caught up with him, put the boy in the Bedford jail. Next visiting hours, Leggo's mother came to see him with a pistol in her purse. The sheriff found the gun, got mad, and sent the boy to the state penitentiary for small-timers, up near Indianapolis. Next visiting hours the mother came to see him and blame if Leggo didn't walk straight out the door with her, pretending he was only a visitor.
Since the jailbreak, the mother had been making frequent trips down the gravel drive of the cemetery — "parks about right where your car's setting" — to leave bags of groceries for young Leggo. "I seen him in the woods and quarries three or four times, but never close enough to grab. The police had squad cars and a helicopter out here looking for him the day before yesterday, but they never did find him. He could hide in them quarries for ten years and nobody'd ever run him out. There's old hermits and guys have lived out there, winter and summer, wild as bears." The caretaker was coming down to check on things at the cemetery every hour or so, to keep an eye peeled for the kid and the old lady.
"She give him a gun, of course. But I don't think he'd shoot anybody except the sheriff. The sheriff, now, Leggo'll shoot him on sight. You boys should be all right. Just so long as he don't take you two for a couple of detectives, you don't have to sweat."
When the caretaker was gone and Jeff was back at work with his camera, I sweated anyway, less on account of June than on account of Leggo. "Keep me covered," Jeff said. We discussed which of the pair sounded like the meaner customer, the jailbird or the
mother. I felt like ringing a bell and declaring that we were not detectives, that we were neutral in this whole affair. I kept listening for the grit of Mrs. Leggo's tires on the cemetery drive, for the click of Leggo's gun. Instead, from across the field of quarries, I heard the humph of the aluminum-stamping plant, humph humph, like an asthmatic dragon.
I browsed among the graves. The ground felt spongy under my boots. Limestone markers from the nineteenth century lay toppled over, more likely by frost than by vandals. Many of the names were ones that people around here still wear: Grayson, Patton, Campbell, Turpin, Swango, Holtsclaw, Sears. Joseph Massey, "Nipped in the opening bloom of youth," gone now almost a century. Roy Black, "BORN Feb 23 1911 DID Mar 3 1913." On the headstone for a child, dead at four, rested a small wooden car. Rain and sun had bleached the wood to the color of ivory. I lifted the car, amazed to find it loose, amazed that no one had stolen it in the years since the child's death. I set it down again, scooted it back and forth to make sure the wheels still rolled.
All the while we prowled through the cemetery, I imagined Leggo out there hiding in the crevices of stone. There were plenty of crevices to choose from. The quarries to the north were shallow and scrubby, grown up in sumac and sycamore. Immediately to the south opened the vast gulf of the Empire State Building hole. I stood on the lip staring down eighty feet or so into green water and tried to stuff the skyscraper, block by chunky imagined block, into that enormous pit. Moving it back across country from 34th Street in Manhattan to Needmore in Indiana was easy, but seeing how that tower could squeeze into this gaping trench was hard. Think of a domed stadium, squash it into the shape of a box, and you will have some notion of the size of the emptiness left by the Empire State Building. Beyond that gulf the gouges and rubble heaps stretched southward for miles toward Oolitic and Bedford, one of the largest clusters of building-stone quarries in the world. The snort of cranes and the machine-gun rattle of air drills sounded from a working pit down that way.
East of the burying ground there was another sheer drop, down to a quarry filled with junk. One glimpse and I understood the sign we had seen on a hog-wire fence when driving up: PLEASE DO NOT THROW TRASH IN THE CEMETERY. THERE IS A DUMP AT THE BACK. Junkyard behind graveyard. Here was the dump, in a hole left from the building of a bank or museum. Down below, trash spread across the pit like a river delta — car bodies rusted the color of a rooster's crown, bullet-riddled stoves and washers, televisions, buggies, bottles, a jigsaw puzzle of torn plastic. I remembered one of the stories about how Needmore got its name. (There's another settlement with the same name twenty miles northeast, in Brown County, with the same story attached to it.) When the village was still small enough to shout across, a city-slicker from the East was asked what the place needed in order to become a seat of culture. "I never saw a place that needed more," he answered. Needmore still lacked a lot, if you were looking for a city, but at least it was accumulating the debris of civilization.
Jeff balanced his tripod and aimed his bulky camera down at the dump. The height made my legs feel mushy. The ledge we were standing on was actually a wall of old quarry blocks, erected here twenty years earlier to keep the easternmost graves from slipping over the brink. Some poor souls took the dive before the wall was built. I thought about the old quarriers, working down there in the hole and glancing up one day to see a rain of bones.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stone Country by Scott Russell Sanders, Jeffrey A. Wolin. Copyright © 2017 Scott Russell. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsRevisiting Stone Country1. Hunting for What Endures2. Bones and Shells3. DiggingFirst Update4. Doorways into the Depths5. A Veteran6. PoisonSecond Update7. The Men in the Trenches8. Cutting9. Three CarversThird Update10. Truth on the Back Roads11. Stone Towns and the Country Between12. The Shape of Things to ComeFourth UpdateEpilogue: In Praise of LimestoneWhat People are Saying About This
"Photos contrasts the current world of the limestone industry with what the authors found in the 1980s. A worthwhile read!"