Before the Stories Began

From the Decorah Newspapers

Another close call!
We had a lot of those in Decorah, Iowa.
Got out of town just in time.

470 million years ago, a big chunk of something landed right where the town is located now.

If you look very carefully at the rock crystals here and there around town, you can spot the evidence. Apparently. And right after that, geologically speaking, an ocean flooded the whole area. There was more, of course: it is a college town. Ice ages; some that swept the area, and some that missed. The last one missed: that is why the town, and around, is so hilly today: glaciers are hard to steer. Later, much later, there came people: farmers and storekeepers and preachers and faculty members, and football games.

The river that runs right through the middle of town, more-or-less from west to east, has patiently carried away some of the silt from what was once an ocean floor--way up there in northeast Iowa--down to the Mississippi and back to the ocean. The limestone that has been exposed by the appetites of water and gravity are peppered with the fossils once created in the mud of that northern extension of the Gulf of Mexico.

Our log home is away from town, farther down-river, on the edge of one of those innumerable ridges carved by erosion. A few miles farther north, in Minnesota, just the mention of "cabin" suggests that there must be a lake, too, but in northeast Iowa, cabins are nested in those hillsides and bluffs. Lakes are where the water stops running. The Decorah Bald Eagles, made famous in these last few years by an "eagle cam", have their aeries near a fish hatchery at a spring bubbling out from one of those bluffs just south of town.

Someone, stunted by local humor, once said that the college in town was built on a bluff, and administered by that same principle. That was mean.

We missed the meteorite when it came, partly because it happened about 470 million years before God created heaven and earth and Luther College. But that is not to be lamented: almost everything happened long before God created heaven and earth or, for that matter, before anybody created the first gods. It is a rather old hole in the ground--now filled in--there, where Decorah rests. But earth is ten times as old as the bruise the meteorite created, a little less than half a billion years ago. And the universe--everything that is--is much older, still.

A lot of things happened before we began telling stories.

Comments

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