The Arc of the Escarpment by Robert Root
Cornerstone Press, 2024
The Effects of Urban Renewal on Midcentury America and other stories by Jeff Esterholm
Cornerstone Press, 2023
In August of 2013, a tornado ripped through Manitowoc County, on Wisconsin’s eastern edge, hard along Lake Michigan. Some of the most lasting damage was done to trees: in Cherney Maribel Caves County Park, some 75% of the trees were uprooted, destroyed, strewn across rocky trails. In a few intense minutes, trees that had been there for over a century were gone.
The rocks on which they grew are part of the Niagara Escarpment. This vast limestone outcropping, under which the Maribel Cave system winds, is millions of years old. To the rocks, the product of endless millenia of sediment deposit and the slow agonies of erosion, the trees have barely been there at all. The humans who loved the trees and explore the caves are essentially non-existent.
These forces of time — of compression and erosion — are explored, in their own way, in two recent books from Cornerstone Press, based out of the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. Robert Roots The Arc of the Escarpment is a journey through geologic time and current geography, as he takes a trip around the Niagara Escarpment. The other book, Jeff Esterholm’s The Effects of Urban Renewal on Midcentury America: and other crime stories explores how time — and compression, and erosion — impact the short lives of the people who live in a dying Great Lakes town.
Start at the beginning. Some 443 million years ago — a couple hundred million years before the dinosaurs (but billions of years after the Earth was formed) – what’s now the Midwest lay south of the equator, covered by a temperate ocean. There were lots of tiny creatures, and as they died and settled on the bottom, compressed over epochs into limestone rock formations, which grew immense. As the seas receded (and as tectonic forces moved the land grindingly northward), the limestone mountains began to erode. What’s left is the Escarpment, essentially a shoreline of this ancient ocean. Running from New York, between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, around the top of Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan through Door County, this shoreline also helped form what we know as the Great Lakes.
Fast forward through the dawn of complex life, the age of the dinosaurs, the 66 million years after they died, the rise of mammals, and, basically yesterday, the age of humans, until we get to today, where Robert Root wrote about his journey around this arc.
Root’s book is an amiable and intelligent look at the Escarpment, a seemingly-gentle travelog with a sort of casual profundity. Each chapter in the journey follows a similar pattern: Root goes to a place, talks about the geology underneath the surface, and his time there. Most of each section is what he sees and experiences — rocks that are slippery, conversations with tour guides and experts, discussions with tourists who may or may not know what an Escarpment is. He even goes as far, at times, as talking about where he parked or how the weather impacted his observations on a particular day.
His anecdotes seem genial enough, but they unveil an interesting depth, adding a human layer to this vast and ancient system. And, despite our short timeframe, there is a human layer. The limestone that makes up the cliffs was quarried in vast amounts and used to build cities around the Midwest and the rest of the USA and Canada. Today, there are deep holes in the earth where once there was rock.
Of course, there are natural holes everywhere. There are cave systems throughout the escarpment. There are sinkholes. These are all the product of erosion, the endless destructive power of water, which is still slowly eating away at the cliffs and happens over a span of time we can’t comprehend. Looking at the enormous cliffs of Door County, one imagines permanence, but our lives are essentially one frame in their movie. The forces of nature are perpetually, if slowly, destructive.
But the Escarpment isn’t just a story of annihilation. It’s also one of creation. Root subtly shows the way this extraordinary formation helped form the region, and therefore its commerce and culture. How cities were built because of it and roads were built around it and how its presence forced engineers to innovate. The heights of the Escarpment are what the Niagara Falls tumble over; without it, our nations would be far poorer both in terms of majesty and in taffy shops and wax museums.
The book isn’t entirely casual. Nearly every chapter winds up with a gut punch of an observation, arrived at cooly, that puts the rest of it in perspective. When talking about the tornado with which this review started, Root writes:
“But the caves of Maribel, and, especially the caves of Ledge View, when I descended to their very bottom, make me aware of what time means to the earth itself: the unimaginably slow process of constructing the cuesta, wearing away passages within it, scraping off what settled upon it over millennia and then depositing glacial debris upon it. In comparison, what fraction of the blink of an eye does my existence, these parks’ existence, the devastation wrought by a few minutes in a whirlwind, take up?”
One human’s existence; the fraction of a blink of an eye. But it never actually feels that way to the human, does it? Life is long and full of opportunities for disaster and personal destruction — and that’s what The Effects of Urban Renewal on Midcentury America explores.
Esterholm’s collection mostly takes place in the fictional town of Port Nicollet, Wisconsin, set on the southern shores of Lake Superior. It feels cold; it feels run-down, but not small: a town that once had industry and promise. A town that was shaped by the ancient formation of the lakes, by the riches under the soil, by the potential of ports. In this way, it too is a product of geology. The town, like so many in the Great Lakes region, exists because of the way the land and water coalesced over hundreds of thousands and even millions of years.
Of course, the characters in the stories aren’t thinking about that. There isn’t much reflection, just bad decisions. In nearly every one of these crime stories, someone is desperate or down on their luck or not clever enough or too clever and they make choices that define their lives (and very often, shorten it). Given the economic upheaval, the lack of opportunities, and the very nature of a precarious life, these decisions seem almost preordained. Life seems compressed into a moment and circumscribed by forces outside the characters’ control.
People get jobs, lose jobs, get drunk, fight, fuck, live, and die throughout. Esterholm’s stories can be gritty and hard-boiled, especially the ones set in the 40s and 50s, as if imitating the boozy writers of the time. One, Payday Friday, begins with a detective-like patter:
“He met her the first time at Otto’s. Payday Friday, he wanted to meet her again. A date he’d call it. A short drive from the plant after showering, slap on the bay rum. ‘Someone’s getting some tonight?’ He grinned, blushed. Anders shrugged, a young 25. She wouldn’t expect him.”
This story ends happily (relative to most of the collection), as his not-quite-date left with a rich guy, and Anders finds the guy’s coat with ten grand in the pocket. Many of the stories, though, end with death or dissolution, especially as time passes, as the job that Anders mentions having seems a relic of the past, as we move to the tough 60s and dying 70s and beyond.
Time plays a role here too. Sometimes the stories are brief moments, sometimes they telescope through years or decades, as families come apart, as black sheep continue their patterns 30, 40, 50 years later.
A standout example is “The Forcier Brothers.” In barely three pages, we tour through the lives of three people. Mainly, the brothers, Clifford and Lyle, who were “a malevolent force in the hardscrabble city where they grew up and then worked in positions of authority” and “inspired fear rather than respect in the populace.”
Lyle marries Pauline in 1958. “Clifford stood as Lyle’s best man. Within a year, he was Pauline’s.” This affair, we understand, lasted their entire lives. Later, the two men, now in their 80s, sit in a small hunting cabin. Lyle is dying and wants Clifford to kill him, put him out of his misery. “Knees almost touching,” they toast how they lived their lives the way they wanted. Then Lyle says that right before she died, Pauline told him the truth. He calls Clifford a son of a bitch. He kills his brother, and then himself. Violent lives have violent ends.
Three pages. Endless betrayals of people for whom we had no sympathy. Lives in full. It’s captivating, if not uplifting.
There’s a risk, in books like these, for life and death to feel cheap, weightless, like the characters are henchmen in an action movie. They die and we turn the page, and the force of their life is lost for a quick thrill. Esterholm manages to avoid that by managing to create recognizable, realistic characters, with their full lives, in a matter of a few sentences. You actually feel like you know the characters. You feel like their existence has, or had, weight.
But more than that, Esterholm skillfully weaves together several interconnected stories that show the weight of death. These revolve around the unresolved murder of a young boy, the way it impacts his family through the years, the way it hits the town, the way that people still feel the effects decades later. He dies in the 60s, but there are stories about his family and the impact his death had that are set in the present day. He died just short of his 15th birthday, on his morning paper route; we see him thinking about work, thinking about girls, thinking about the future. He’s a young man, and then, suddenly, he isn’t anything at all.
He lived, and then he died. But he lingered. The memory of him lingers. Nothing just vanishes. The trillions of dead creatures whose bodies compressed into the Escarpment defined where our lake cities were built, and the decisions made to shutter plants and close ports circumscribe the way we live.
Root, while considering the time it took for water to erode one rock into two separate ones, tries to imagine “the relentless changes of season.” But, he says, “I only imagine myself imagining it — my imagination, supported by my meager knowledge, is in no way sufficient to the task.
It’s the same way with life. We think we know why we do things, why things are the way they are, but it is really just an imagining of imagining. We don’t have control over everything. The forces of nature and the choices of humans create the framework of our own destiny. Sometimes we make decisions, and sometimes they’re made for us.
Time is the main character of these books, both in its vastness and in its minute agonies. Time can seem endless when we’re walking the edge of a cliff face, over rocks laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Time can seem so short when we start to slip, and realize, suddenly and terribly, that we’re all out of it.
Brian O’Neill is a freelance writer living just north of Chicago, along the lake. His focus used to be on international politics, specifically in the Middle East, where he specialized in Yemen. His writing on that topic led him to explore the relationship between the environment, natural history, and current events, a theme which has carried through his work. More recently he’s shifted from the Middle East to the Midwest, with many of the same themes. Brian has written about books for The Chicago Review of Books, The Cleveland Review of Books, Necessary Fiction, Yemen Review, and other publications. Understanding the region, the environment, and the people inside it is his passion and project.