A Conservationist Manifesto

On Loan from the Sundance Sea

On Loan from the Sundance Sea \ W hy, you may ask, does a weathervane in the shape of a fish swim atop the dome of the county courthouse in Bloomington , Indiana, six hundred miles from the sea? The explanations that circulate hereabouts range from sober to silly. My own theory tends, I suppose, toward the crackpot end of the spectrum, but I will share it with you anyway, because it belongs to my private mythology of this place. A fish, some argue, simply has the right contour for a weathervane, long and flat to catch the wind. Some speculate that a few of the families who settled the town in 1818 may have migrated to the hills of southern Indiana from Massachusetts, where codfish whirled upon rooftops. Some think the weathervane is modeled on the perch in nearby ponds, even though it’s the size of a 10-year-old child. Some explain the fish as a zoological compromise between Democrats, who wanted a rooster, and Republicans, who wanted an elephant. Some regarditasasymbolofChrist .Othersseeitasawarningthattheactions of government, including those carried out in the courthouse below, may be fishy. Still others claim that the blacksmith who is given credit for hammering the weathervane out of a copper sheet and coating it with gold leaf in the 1820s actually brought it with him when he moved to Bloomington from Louisville, and thus the fish hails not from an ocean or pond but from a river, the mighty Ohio. My own theory is that the courthouse fish swam up out of our ancestral memory, recalling the time when Indiana and the whole heart of the continent lay beneath a vast and shallow gulf, which geologists call the Sundance Sea. As the denizens of those inland waters died, theirshellsandbonessettledtothebottom,formingachalkymudthat eventually hardened into limestone. Around 250 million years ago the heartland was raised above sea level by a collision between the North American and African plates, aprolonged stony grinding that liftedup the AppalachianandAlleghenymountains,and Indianahasremained dryeversince.Althoughglobalwarmingmayswelltheoceansenough Caring for Home Ground 120 to flood coastal areas within the next hundred years or so, saltwater is unlikely to reach the heartland again any time soon. Meanwhile, I like to imagine that the fish atop the courthouse is keeping watch for the returning tide. Since I’m imagining, I think of it asasalmon—acopperysockeye,maybe,overlaidwithgold—spawned in a local stream and now seeking its way back to the deep. Whether salmon or codfish or perch, it’s a token of wildness, reminding us that our land is on loan from the sea and our own genes coil back through all our ancestors into those primordial waters. \ When friends who live on one or another of the coasts ask me how I can bear to live in the hill country of southern Indiana, landlocked, high and dry, I tell them my home ground is not really so high, only about six or eight hundred feet above sea level, nor so dry, because rain falls bountifully here and streams run through limestone caverns underfoot. Why,the place is so intimate with the sea, I tell them, that a salmon floats in our sky and our buildings rest on an old ocean floor. Limestone is the ruling rock in this place. It’s exposed in road cuts and creek beds. It dulls the blades of plows that scrape the thin topsoil. Bloomington is ringed by pits where the buff or silvery stone is quarried , and with mills where it is cut into elegant shapes. The foundations of the courthouse are laid on limestone and the building itself is fashioned out of it, as are many houses, banks, churches, and shops around town, as are tombstones in the cemeteries and monuments on the courthouse lawn. I delight in knowing that much of my city is made from the husks of creatures that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago in the inland sea, just as I delight in knowing that our sun and solar system andEarthitself—thecopperandgoldoftheweathervane,thecalcium andcarbonof your bodyandmine—are made from matter left behind byanearliergenerationofstars.Althoughmycityismoredurablethan On Loan from the Sundance Sea 121 my body, both are fashioned out of recycled matter, both are caught up in the surf of decay and renewal, both are destined to survive for a spell and then yield their stuff to new constructions. \ At first...