Rooftop

by Kate Raphael

Ivan Bandura

I ventured to Rooftop Quarry only once. My college boyfriend was visiting me in Bloomington, Indiana where I was languishing through an endless August at home before my senior year. I waited outside Arrivals in the family minivan for him to emerge from the Indianapolis airport, then drove us back into agro-suburbia, feeling with each passing soybean field that I had less and less for us to do, my planned activities too quaint and Midwestern to suggest to this born and bred New Englander.

Pulling into my cookie-cutter subdivision, I inched into the driveway and killed the minivan’s engine, the cicada buzz suddenly loud in our ears. I was sticky with sweaty anxiety at the immediate intimacy of allowing him into this world where I’d spent 15 years of my life, the house I grew up in, the town I’d reluctantly come to refer to as Home. I hesitated to let anyone from my erudite ivy-covered universe into this one, as if by exposing my humble origins, they—he—might think less of me.

But he wasn’t filled with the imagined superiority I feared. He was thrilled by the excavation of childhood artifacts: the lime-green bedroom blossoming with a decade’s worth of colorful arts and crafts projects, newspaper clippings my mother had saved every time I was mentioned in our local paper, grade-school picture days, a rainbow of ribbons from eight years of track and cross country races. He loved all of it, all of me.

The days of his visit stretched, taffy-like in their saccharine, pullable consistency, as we lazed around the air-conditioned house. “Let’s go to Rooftop Quarry,” I said one afternoon as we lay sprawled across the living room furniture, our bodies adhering to the leather. “Okay, sure!” he responded immediately, eager to do whatever I pleased.

We’d both seen Breaking Away, the 1979 coming-of-age film set in my town; sun-soaked cinematic summer days feature a group of boys just graduated from high school, reminding me of the days we were experiencing. In the movie’s most famous scene, the boys-not-yet-men lounge on rock slabs that tower above a massive limestone quarry. They are young, and do not yet know who they are, their lives not yet cut into stone. In the infinite expanse of summer, they blister their bodies with sun and youth.

This iconic scene is set at Sanders Quarry, referred to locally as “Rooftop,” its slanted rocks towering above a rain-filled basin, where, decades before, quarrymen cut hulking blocks of limestone out of the earth and carted them away to build houses, universities, national monuments.

***

Some 490 billion years ago, long before the first slab was cut, the land called Indiana for its original inhabitants hugged the equator, bathed by a warm, shallow sea filled with minerals and marine organisms—foraminifera, bryozoans, snails, scallops. These creatures lived and died and left their skeletal fragments to accumulate in layers on the ocean floor. Shells and bones, crushed under their own pressure and the constant sweep of waves, were compacted, leaving behind small pores, large enough only for the mineral-rich sea water to trickle in, its granular deposits gluing up holes in the boney remains. The minerals cemented these skeletons, creating pale grey limestone from death itself.

The resulting limestone is soft and porous, easy to carve into, and the Miami, Delaware, Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Peoples knew the stone before white people forced them from their land, usurping the limestone beneath their feet and claiming it as their own. Upon discovering that Southern Indiana sat upon the purest, highest quality limestone in the world, white settlers made their first quarry gashes in 1827. As railroads expanded, the demand for stone to build tunnels and bridges for the rail lines skyrocketed, and Hoosiers cut quarries, lifting vast rectangular basements from the earth.

The Great Chicago Fire torched the Second City in 1871, changing building codes across the country: structures previously framed from wood would now be built from stone, resistant to flame. And so more and more and more Indiana limestone was quarried from the ground and carted by train over the very bridges the stone had already built.

As limestone was moving out of Indiana, immigrants poured in. Italian carvers arrived on U.S. soil, as did Scots and Irishmen, many with decades of stonework experience tucked into their toolbelts. Chisels in hand, they sculpted ornate patterns into the thick blocks and carved out lives for themselves, chipping at the rocks that had been hoisted from the country’s heartland.

By the 1930s, Indiana limestone faced grand buildings across the country: The Rockefeller Center, The Empire State Building, The Pentagon, the façade atop New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. In an attempt to lift the nation from The Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration employed stoneworkers to build Indiana University’s campus among many others: they erected magnificent Collegiate Gothic limestone buildings, creating art in the exteriors, archways, and steps. They etched and chiseled. Hammered and hewed. They wrote educational futures into stone.

***

On my first look at Indiana, driving by the low-to-the-ground, tornado-proof limestone houses, I thought the rock looked flat and drab. Its light grey, sandy pallor lifeless. A stubborn eight-year-old, I was prepared to hate my new home.

It would take years before I would come to see limestone as full of life, the product of change over billions of years, history that had ossified into bedrock, forming the literal foundation beneath my feet.

It would be another decade before I would seek out the quarry itself. On that summer day, I packed a backpack and dove into a string of online forum posts mapping out a labyrinth of winding dirt roads, instructions on where to park, the best footpath through wooded backcountry, how to exercise discretion when trespassing on private quarry property, tantalizing me with a photo of the lush basin we sought.

The judicious rule-breaking was intoxicating. I had been so good, so painfully rule-abiding in high school, and planning our illegal trespass gave me a small taste of what I imagined my classmates had experienced: packing their sweaty bodies into cars after school, roaring out of the student lots and heading for the quarries. They’d jump from the towering limestone heights into the shimmering aquamarine below—hot-blooded bodies breaking the water’s surface into a rippled spray of white.

I lusted after that imagined reality, burned with a ragged summer desire to make it my own.

We set out from my house on cascading rural roads I barely knew and pulled into an empty church parking lot. I drove slowly, crunching gingerly through gravel, and parked beside the deserted sanctuary. We grabbed the backpack and set off, pulling up Google Maps to guide us.

The sun roasted us, and the air buzzed with cicadas as we scrambled through an overgrown path, sidestepping abandoned quarry equipment and swatting gnats off our shiny faces. After an hour of trekking, occasionally retracing, our GPS signal long lost, the trail far from obvious, I looked back and said, “Maybe we should turn around.”

And then, as a Midwestern mirage, Rooftop Quarry appeared before our eyes, its bright blue water iridescent in spectacular summer light.

We stood on a rock ledge formed by millennia, staring down in sun-washed awe at the dimensions of this long, rectangular mine. Sheer rock walls flanked the magnificent pit—an inverted monument. It was impossible to see the rock floor and sawtoothed debris beneath the placid water’s surface. Nor did I want to see beneath it—the quarry looked as I imagined it had looked for decades. Just as it had appeared in Breaking Away in 1979. Verdant greenery shrouded each face of the quarry from the rest of the world and nothing else existed. We breathed deeply and silently, and there was only the rock and the water, the trees and the sky.

***

It is easy to peer down into a quarry and imagine it has been there forever. To gaze up at gothic Midwestern architecture thinking the patient slabs of limestone were destined to be intricately chiseled into art. Of course, they have not been there forever, and nothing is destined.

I had imagined retracing my steps to Rooftop in the years to come, but the quarry is filled in now. Too many kids trespassed as we had, then jumped in the water, often getting lucky, but sometimes not—injuring themselves on jagged rock or truck or refrigerator, jutting peril invisible from above. Emergency vehicles couldn’t get through tiny access roads. In the span of 25 years, three people died. Rooftop became a liability, and so, became a memory. The limestone I’d previously thought lifeless, and which I had come to understand as the dynamic product of billions of years of movement and transformation, compression and excavation, has ossified into my skull, a relic of Rooftop. Of Indiana. Of uncomplicated, infinite summer.

My dad emailed me not long ago after I’d shared an essay I was trying to publish during my longer-than-anticipated period of unemployment—my infinite, complicated summer. My pitches were aspirational, and I’d sent the piece around to editors I doubted would accept it. But my dad devoured my words, writing to say it was an accomplishment in and of itself, whether or not it landed. “It seems you were destined to turn out like you did,” he’d typed, “but that sounds far too easy, since it is more like you carved yourself out of rock. I love the way you just put one foot in front of the other, instinctively knowing what this becomes over time.”

I do not know what “this” becomes over time, but I know what I have become over time. I have lifted myself from the basement of the earth. I am chiseling my one life out of stone. A chip at a time, carving away, as if I have forever, when all I’ve ever had is now.

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Kate Raphael is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her previous work has appeared in Bon Appetit and LeapsMag.