The Saint Joseph River, which flows laconically for a
couple of hundred miles in a generally western direction through parts of
southern Michigan and northern Indiana into Lake Michigan, cannot be counted
among the great watercourses of our land, but in my present circumstances it
looms large. For I am writing this
from a snug apartment on the campus of Notre Dame University, where I am very
much enjoying a week’s sojourn as a visiting lecturer at the Medieval Institute. The lectures I am giving, unlike the
one that was the subject of last week’s post, are not impromptu. I have been thinking about them for
quite some time, and the opportunity to discuss some of their ideas with
knowledgeable and interested experts is exhilarating.
But
it is the river that is on my mind just at this moment. Our amazing country is composed of a
hundred, or maybe a thousand micro-geographies that all the power of a
homogenizing and standardizing commercial culture cannot efface. I suppose everybody knows that Notre
Dame is in South Bend, but it never occurred to me, at least, to inquire: the south
bend of what? It’s the south bend of the Saint
Joseph River, which is mainly in Michigan but loops a few miles in a southern mini-meander
into northern Indiana. Of course the
political border between Michigan and Indiana, laid out nearly two hundred
years ago at forty-one degrees, forty-six minutes north, is culturally
meaningless. Around here they
speak of “Michiana”, an area with a population upwards of a million souls,
centered in South Bend and including the old industrial towns along the river,
now ravaged by the unsettling forces unleashed by an insufficiently
premeditated buy-in to economic “globalization”.
One
of my medievalist hosts, Sarah Baechle, took me with her on Saturday to the
South Bend Farmers’ Market, even this late in the season overflowing with the
bounty of delicious agricultural produce. Especially tempting was the sumptuous fruit on offer
from the orchards of southern Michigan, which enjoys the blessings of a much
vaunted “micro-climate” that produces the sweetest apples on earth.
The
outsider gets the impression that Notre Dame University is the house that Knut
Rockne built and Father Theodore Hesburgh rehabbed and gentrified. Many months
ago, when we were negotiating the scheduling of the Conway Lectures, three
lectures to be distributed over a roughly ten-day period, I was struck by one
feature of the discussion. Though
I was offered a good deal of calendrical flexibility, it was important that the
week-end punctuating my stay be one on which the Notre Dame football team was
scheduled for an away game. For a mad moment I entertained the
fantasy that this stipulation suggested that I would be lecturing on a Saturday
and they didn’t want my prolusions on medieval asceticism to be cutting into
the perhaps sizable income generated by the Athletic Department.
But…no. Not in fact. People don’t lecture on Saturdays here any more than they do
anywhere else. The point is that
on football Saturdays the only thing
that happens on (and immediately around) the Notre Dame campus is the football
game and its penumbra of ancillary festal, commercial, and fund-raising
activities. Unless you are really
into it, which only a couple hundred thousand or so of the locals are, you want
to be somewhere else. At least so
I am told by credible witnesses. I
am also told that a good number of the residents in the immediate area of the
campus make a small fortune on football weekends by renting out their houses on
AirBnB. The nearest supermarket
I’ve found is about a mile away through a tidy, modest neighborhood where some
houses advertise back yard parking for twenty dollars and an apartment house is
called the “Stadium Club Apartments”.
Every second townsperson sports some kind of distinctive “Fighting Irish”
apparel or license plates. Even on
the campus, which boasts an art gallery well worth the visit, the most visible
piece of public art is a huge exterior mural-mosaic high on the tower structure
of the Hesburgh Library. Its
official title is “The Word of Life”, by the artist Millard Sheets, but for
reasons that will be obvious at least to my American readers, it is more
commonly known as “Touchdown Jesus”.
The
local athletic culture has trickle-down benefits even for the likes of me. My hosts very kindly arranged for me to
have guest privileges at the swimming pool, one of several athletic facilities
that bear the name “Rolfs”. I
don’t know who Mr. Rolfs was, but he certainly contributed magnificently to the
corpore sano side of the rich college
experience on this campus, just as the fabulous library of the Medieval
Institute has been ministering to the mens
sana. Olympic pools terrify me
if I am forced to do the long lanes; but at least for “Recreational Hours” you
can do the short ones here. When I
apologetically explained to the welcoming pool manager my normal speed is one
mile per hour, he simply smiled and said “Slow and steady takes the prize.”
mens sana in corpore sano
