-
In the Shallows
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In the Shallows Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new. The river, wider here, held fossils in the shallows. These were the famous corals— Silurian, Devonian— that Agassiz had gathered. He made a special trip from Cambridge to our county after the Civil War. The sun beat like a hammer on huge, silent mudflats: the Iowa River Valley of eighteen sixty-eight. And it was hot. He sweated, the aging professor— the tick, tick of his hammer echoing off the bluffs— but when the sun had set six pallets had been loaded to take back to Harvard: fine specimens of coral, some dozen massive sponges, and one perfect ammonite: 10 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. a gift for Holmes, the poet of the chambered nautilus. Nearly a century later, the sun beat like a hammer. On gray limestone covered by scratchy, gray-green lichen, my white, hairless body felt almost translucent— ribcage, backbone, scapula— in the relentless sun, and sometimes I’d imagine the companionable echo of my hammer’s tick, tick was my colleague, Dr. Agassiz— or that my hammer was a delayed echo of his: that I would be like him, distinguished, bearded, tall. But it was Time’s own hammer that was beating down tick, tick on the whole river valley. It was Time my hammer echoed on the gray rock formations as I chipped away another brachiopod or mollusk, and another, and one more. 11 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ...