God of Destruction

A cold river rushes by, and cottonwood trees have toppled in along the bank. On a sandstone bluff, 20 feet up, there’s a dancing Shiva carved deeply into the rock. The Hindu God of Destruction has been defaced by kids, farmers, fundamentalists. When Jim Langford carved it 15 years ago, a few Faribault evangelicals mobilized. They xeroxed flyers and put them in farmer’s mailboxes throughout the area. They claimed the “paganistic idol” would sicken cattle and kill crops. Theirs was a decidedly Old Testament view of things.

Each summer, Langford still makes the trip south to visit his handiwork at Scott’s Mill, a piece of Isaac Walton League land halfway between Northfield and Faribault, on the Cannon River. “Shiva was dancing on the head of ignorance,” he said recently, still relishing the truth of it. “But not anymore. Some farmers came with a shotgun and took target practice.” Years later, Langford saw the head of ignorance again—at a friend’s house. The friend had found the fragment in woods near the bluff, and brought it home to the safety of his garden.

Langford is a tall and energetic man, a happy father with fraternal twins in first grade. He travels five days a week, giving financial seminars in Atlanta, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1986, he was a senior at St. Olaf College. Through the arcane knowledge of upperclassmen, Langford learned about Scott’s Mill— a remote but favored location for the usual college bacchanals. And in a long-since extinct program that was on the leftiest fringe of a liberal arts education, he fashioned a senior project that encompassed American studies (think Huck Finn), Asian religion, and three-dimensional art. It all came together in the eight-foot-in-diameter carving.

The outrage of the locals was palpable. The Faribault Daily News was moved to remark on the public outcry. “Not since the city council considered cat-leashing has a story created such a stir here,” one reporter exclaimed. Religiously-inclined folks bridled the most, while the secular objected on the grounds that Langford had vandalized park property. Then again, Langford’s handiwork was simply the latest and most accomplished in a long tradition of local vandalism. Sandstone, which yields to pointed sticks and strong fingers, practically cries out for the initials of teenagers.

Langford spent six months working on Shiva, through the spring of 1986. He built his own scaffolding, waded through meltwater, and spent about six hours a day on the project. As final exams and graduation approached, he even hired an assistant. But the aide couldn’t handle the work, and suffered an episode of neurosis that involved staring at the sun for long periods of the workday. Believers might have called it a demonic possession. “He had issues,” explained Langford with the benefit of hindsight.

Despite a decade and a half of abuse, Shiva still dances on the sandstone bluff. “Oh yeah, he’s really in there for good,” said the artist, who received his baccalaureate degree as his reward.