When This Was All Field

I remember I used to ride in cars through the Midwest and see old farmhouses a stone’s throw from the interstate and wonder why anyone would build their house that close to the highway. They didn’t, of course—the road came to them. It can be difficult to imagine a landscape as it was before its dominant man-made feature was built. It’s even harder, perhaps, to stand in the quiet of woods or fields and imagine the man-made structure to follow.

I suffered this cognitive dissonance whenever I visited Thomas and Sandra Tokarski, the mother and father of Indiana’s anti-I-69 movement, at their home in Stanford, Indiana, 20 minutes southwest of Bloomington. The Tokarskis have lived on a wooded 35-acre lot there since 1975, and every time I stopped by they were up to something folksy. They had just baked bread or lemon pie, or they were trying to figure out what to do with all of the fresh blueberries or sugar snap peas from their garden, or Thomas was midway through weaving a blanket on the loom in the living room, or Sandra was getting ready to fire up the kiln and finish some pots she had thrown with clay from the creek bed out back.

Their house is a good distance off the road. Their driveway, sloped and rutted enough for a Jeep commercial, winds through a few acres of maple and oak and tulip trees before coming to a high clearing on which the house, the garden, and a chicken coop are situated. If you walk a little farther beyond the house, past a small meadow and a raised observation deck that the Tokarskis built for stargazing, you come to a wooded ravine with the creek running through the bottom. Just across that, on a ridge along the back line of their property, is where the great NAFTA highway is supposed to run.

The interstate’s construction, if it happens, will leave the Tokarskis’ house where it is but will strip them of their rural seclusion and a nice chunk of their land. Fighting such a fate has already consumed a significant portion of their lives. For 20 years now, half of their life together, while raising two children and working jobs, the Tokarskis have led a statewide crusade against I-69. Their dissent began even before they knew the road might affect them directly, but knowing that it will has added a certain heat to their conviction. The paper detritus from their public battles occupies an entire room of their home, where clippings and binders fill file boxes, shelves, a desk, and much of the floor. This in a house that cannot easily afford to lose rooms to paper.

“Thomas would say it’s a crummy house,” Sandra told me. It’s comfortable, and they can’t imagine ever leaving, she said, but every time you turn around, something needs to be fixed. “You know how they talk about the old farmhouses that are so well built? Well, this wasn’t one of them.”

The Tokarskis seem at first like an unlikely pair of rabble-rousers. They are in their sixties, with hair that’s turning white (his) or salt-and-pepper gray (hers).Thomas retired recently after 30 years as a lab researcher at the Indiana University School of Optometry, where he coauthored such papers as “Regional Morphological Variations within the Crayfish Eye” and “Retinal Development in the Lobster Homarus americanus.” He is scrupulous and thoughtful, wears glasses and a mustache, and has a slight lateral lisp that turns his s’s a bit slushy, more so when he’s agitated, which is often when he’s talking about I-69. Sandra works at an art-supply store in downtown Bloomington and is short and maternal, with hair cut above her shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses over cheeks that often appear red from sun. The Tokarskis share a healthy sense of humor, and they take a serene pleasure and pride in caring for their small section of Earth. But never far away is an anxiety and frustration about the highway plan that they view as scandalous government malpractice. When discussing the interstate, they take turns finishing each other’s points, but each has a unique strength—Sandra is a soulful communicator and tireless organizer, and Thomas picks apart government reports and composes arguments with the attention to detail of a prosecuting attorney.

Their interest in I-69 began in the late ’80s, when a firm called Donohue & Associates embarked on a federally funded study to examine the feasibility of what was then envisioned as simply the Evansville-to-Indianapolis highway. Like a lot of people in Bloomington, Thomas and Sandra had been reading for years about various proposed highways through southern Indiana, and they were of the opinion that a new freeway was a terrible idea—an environmental disaster and a waste of tax dollars and good farmland. The Donohue study, released in February 1990, recommended against construction of the road, and the Tokarskis were relieved. They figured that the matter had been put to rest. But that summer, the Tokarskis attended a community planning session at the county fairgrounds and were surprised to hear Department of Transportation people still talking about a new highway through Bloomington.

Hadn’t the DOT read the Donohue study? Did they plan to ignore it? The couple drove home from the fairgrounds that night bewildered and upset. Feeling a need to vent, Thomas penned a pointed opinion piece for the Bloomington Herald-Times, and a few days later, on August 20, the Tokarskis sat down to compose a handwritten letter to Senator Richard Lugar, for whom they had high regard.

“I can assure you we are not alone in our opposition,” they wrote to Lugar. “This is not a threat, it is a statement of fact. You will hear increased opposition not only from environmentalists and owners of homes and family farms in the road path, but also from citizens concerned about the priorities of government spending.” The Tokarskis were comfortable predicting this, as they put themselves in the latter category. They weren’t Not-In-My-Backyarders. They were watchdogs. And their letter, typical of them, was constructive in tone, political rather than personal, and tough without being harsh. “We strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this project,” they told Lugar. “Indiana needs a lot of things, but it does not need this highway. Surely there are less destructive, more creative ways to help our communities.” The letter was signed by Thomas, Sandra, and their daughter, Lara, who was 18. Their son, Ben, was only 10—too young for attribution.

A few months later, on an autumn Saturday evening, the Tokarskis came home to find, among their mail, a notice from the Indiana Department of Transportation requesting access to their property for surveying. They couldn’t believe what they were reading. Not only was the Indianapolis-to-Evansville highway concept alive and well, but the state was already mapping routes, including one that came right through their property.

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The Tokarskis were mortified. The intervening years have made them more or less numb to that initial sense of shock and loss, but Sandra says she feels the pang again whenever she watches landowners learn for the first time that their home might be taken: “I’ve been there, and you have this incredible, just, boulder in your stomach. You feel like you’ve been kicked in the gut. A lot of people who live in rural areas, they move there because that’s where they want to live.” Sandra is one of those. As a kid, she was shuffled around from town to town because her father was in the Air Force. “All I ever wanted,” she told me once, “was to stay in one place.”

The first organized opposition to the highway came together around a kitchen table. The Tokarskis and their friends Scott and Jackie Wilson met at the home of their neighbors Brian and Nancy Garvey. The six sat around after dinner drinking wine, drafting a petition, and throwing around ideas about what to name themselves. HOWL was one thought—Hoosiers Opposed to Wasting Land—but land was just one of many reasons to oppose a new highway, and maybe their name should be positive? “We didn’t want to be against highways, for God’s sake,” Sandra said. “We wanted to be for something.” By the end of the night they had a petition (“This highway would place an unacceptable tax burden on small communities and would be extremely damaging to the environment”) seeded with their six signatures. They also had a name: the Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, or CARR. “Fix the roads we have” became their slogan.

The next order of business was to hold a public information meeting of their own. In December, they booked the Center Township fire station in neighboring Greene County and started putting out the word. This first event was a test for both CARR and their fellow Hoosiers. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Sandra said. “We had not a clue. But we talked to neighbors and sent out flyers and put a notice in the paper.” Brian Garvey, an artist, drew up a poster with a Paul Revere theme: The highway is coming! The highway is coming! They decided that if 30 people showed up to the tiny rural fire station, that would indicate that there was sufficient interest to keep going. One hundred people came.

Requests for more meetings, in more towns, came pouring in. Over the next few weeks, at gatherings in towns such as Scotland, Newberry, and Bloomfield, people turned up by the dozens, got upset by what they heard, and signed the CARR petition. Soon local environmental groups—the Audubon Society, the Hoosier Environmental Council, and others— started their own anti-I-69 advocacy campaigns, piggybacking on the information the Tokarskis were able to distill from the Donohue study. While proselytizing to the masses, the Tokarskis were also busy sending appeals up what they perceived to be the chain of authority. Late at night and on weekends with the other members of CARR, they laid out their case in letters to Representative McCloskey, Senators Lugar and Coats, Governor Bayh, Indiana Department of Transportation executives, and the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Samuel Skinner. Their correspondence didn’t appear to change any minds, but they did get a few answers, some more helpful than others. In response to a presumably rhetorical question about whether the purchase of land by eminent domain included any payment for the tranquility that would also be lost, an INDOT official responded, “Loss of serenity is a non-compensable item.”

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In a time before the internet made information ubiquitous, the Tokarskis scoured every report and article they could get their hands on. The piles of paper that clog that room of their house hint at just how meticulously they have worked to tackle I-69, and how sophisticated they became in doing so. No detail was too small. No damning contradiction escaped their notice.

Judging from the state’s own facts and figures, there were fiscal, environmental, and social reasons to forgo the road, they argued: It would cause severe damage to the environment, paving over wetlands, fragmenting forests, disrupting delicate limestone karst features such as caves, springs, and sinkholes. It would upset protected species, consume good farmland, and destroy the integrity of rural areas.

Proponents claimed that these were small prices to pay for the economic benefits the road would bring, but the state’s own Donohue study, the Tokarskis pointed out, predicted that the vast majority of these benefits would fall to Bloomington and Evansville, and the growth on either end of the road was likely to come at the expense of the places between. The notion that the highway might save dying places like Odon and Petersburg was a wish not supported by the state’s own study, they insisted. It was just as likely, if not more so, that some of the communities could become ghost towns after the highway reshuffled jobs and businesses. And these questionable results, the Tokarskis maintained, would come at a cost of more than a billion dollars that could be spent on needed repairs and maintenance to the appropriate rural roads that gave CARR its name. I-69, they said, was the economic-development equivalent of an overpriced lottery ticket. The state could do more good by driving around the sleepy backwoods highways throwing hundred-dollar bills out the window.

The case that the Tokarskis made against the Indianapolis-to-Evansville highway rang true in the environmentalist culture of Bloomington and among many land-loving residents of rural communities to the south who preferred to think of their region as “undisturbed” rather than “undeveloped.” Everyone wanted more jobs and better economic opportunity. But they weren’t all eager to make the deal that the rest of Interstate America had been given. They didn’t want prosperity to come in the form of traffic and pollution and chain stores and truck stops.

So what did they want instead? The Tokarskis offered their alternative in an essay sent to supporters in late 1991. “Like all other states, Indiana must begin to plan and build a transportation system that will meet our needs in the future,” the Tokarskis wrote. “The new six-year transportation act strongly supports mass transit, bicycles, and increased use of railroads to help solve our transportation needs. These, along with repairing and upgrading our existing roads, will help … all of Indiana.” People who oppose the highway, they wrote, “are frequently accused of being afraid of change. That is not true. We want change—real, significant change in the transportation system of this state, and of this country. It is the highway boosters and the elected officials who support this project who are afraid of change … They want the rest of us to continue to pay for their outdated, destructive, fiscally irresponsible projects.”

The Tokarskis’ vision was at odds with the norms of contemporary development and the popularity of suburbs that attracted people and jobs from the smaller towns and center cities. But it wasn’t out of line with Indiana’s past or its self-image. Governor Bayh had recently unveiled a new state license plate at the Farm Bureau convention, the Tokarskis pointed out in their essay. The tags depicted a sunset-colored farming scene with the slogan “Amber Waves of Grain.”

“Did you intend to honor and help rural Indiana,” they asked the governor, “or were you eulogizing rural Indiana? Indiana’s license plate may proclaim ‘Amber Waves of Grain’ now, but if we continue to exploit what’s left of our beautiful, productive rural lands, future plates may read, ‘Indiana—Easy to Get Through, No Reason to Stay.’”

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Even as the Tokarskis worked against an Indianapolis-to-Evansville highway, another group was working quietly to extend the route all the way south to Mexico. In 1990, at a small breakfast with local leaders in Washington, Indiana, an economist from the Hudson Institute named David Reed had casually suggested that I-69 might have a better chance of gaining support if its path crossed through more states and cities. A road through Indiana would not excite Congress, he thought, but a NAFTA highway connecting international borders and major manufacturing and trade centers might. The idea captivated David Graham, the farmer and banker at whose home the concept was born, and Graham set out on a road trip that next summer through seven states to solicit support. He made a few well-connected friends, and by the fall of 1992, line items in two pieces of federal legislation had extended the route of I-69 to Houston.

“Lo and behold!” Sandra said. “All of a sudden the highway’s going to Houston? And then all the talk is about NAFTA. All of a sudden it’s Canada to Mexico!” The Tokarskis had built a formidable local opposition, but their kitchen campaign was hardly equipped to fight a national I-69 effort. In late 1993, the couple mailed out a letter to 20 or so Sierra Club members in the other affected states in the hopes of drumming up a national coalition against the highway. “Promoters speak as if their highway would be the mythical rainbow,” they wrote. “Spanning the countryside, it would spin off glittering paths to fill pots of gold in every town and hamlet. They’re only doing us a big favor, they insist.” But the Tokarskis warned that the interstate would ruin the very places it was claiming to save: “What slops over the edges of the cities into the rural areas is all glitz and despoilment,” they wrote. “The rainbow is nothing more than a concrete slab laid over our forests and wetlands, across our streams and rivers and farms.”

Extending the road to Mexico had given the highway boosters a justification to lay before Congress, but in their letter the Tokarskis turned this NAFTA rhetoric on its head. “Now [interstates] are being justified as taxpayer subsidized infrastructure improvements for fugitive companies that move their factories and jobs to Mexico,” they told their potential compatriots. “There they hope to exploit cheap labor and the lack of enforcement of environmental regulations. We need to awaken people all along the route to the disaster that is building. This is a politically driven project so politicians must be confronted,” Thomas and Sandra pleaded.

The Tokarskis sent their letter and they waited. Eventually, a few responses trickled in from sympathetic environmentalists, many of whom were learned in these matters and jaded by their experiences, but no one seemed eager to act. Help came soon, though. In early 1995, a young lawyer named Alexander “Sandy” Ewing from the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago joined the fight.

Ewing had grown up on a cattle farm in Dutchess County, New York, and after he met the Tokarskis he developed strong feelings about their struggle. “The Tokarskis are some of the greatest people I’ve ever met in my life,” he told me recently at his apartment in New York City, where he now lives. “They’re smart and totally sincere and without pretension.” His heart had gone out to clients before, of course, but the case against new-terrain I-69 was “much more black-and-white” than any other he’d handled, he said. “This was just wrong.”

Ewing and Andy Knott, a policy director at the Hoosier Environmental Council, proved indispensable in bolstering CARR’s homemade crusade. The two nonprofits had staff and resources and experience, and Ewing and Knott shared the Tokarskis’ command of the issues and their appetite for government documents that could turn weaker minds to mush. As a plaintiff’s attorney, Ewing also had the legal expertise to pull apart the environmental impact studies that were being conducted. The collective critique was now much stronger: The road was still a bad idea for all the reasons the Tokarskis had laid out, they argued, but the state’s justifications also failed to live up to the requirements of federal law.

Specifically, federal regulators required the state to “rigorously explore and objectively evaluate all reasonable alternatives” to the project, including the option of building nothing at all. But the state had considered only new-terrain routes that went through Bloomington. There was another course of action, the critics pointed out, that would improve the connection between Indianapolis and Evansville and fulfill Indiana’s obligation to build its piece of the now federally designated I-69 route: The state could use the existing leg of Interstate 70 from Indianapolis west to Terre Haute, then upgrade U.S. Highway 41 between Terre Haute and Evansville. Using these existing highways would reduce construction costs by roughly half and spare thousands of acres of farmland, forest, and wetlands. What’s more, they said, this alternative would continue to feed the towns that already depended on U.S. 41, rather than siphoning traffic elsewhere at those same towns’ peril. The 41/70 route would be slightly longer, of course, but the difference in driving time, one state document suggested, might be only eight minutes.

They called it the “common sense” alternative and took up the more nuanced slogan “No New Terrain.” Putting this forth did wonders for the cause. The debate was no longer simply about whether to build I-69. It was about how to do so responsibly. The state could have its cake and eat it, too, it seemed—an interstate connection from Indianapolis to Evansville and an undisturbed Bloomington; a piece of the NAFTA highway; and peace.

A moment of truth came in 1996 when Indiana released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, for the South-west Indiana Highway. Not surprisingly, it identified a preferred route connecting Evansville to Bloomington and Washington through the Tokarskis’ backyard. But the Environmental Protection Agency, which reviews all impact statements as part of the National Environmental Policy Act process, dropped a bombshell. In a letter from Valdas V. Adamkus, a regional administrator for the EPA, the agency lambasted Indiana’s study. “Based on a thorough review,” Adamkus wrote, “EPA has determined that the DEIS is insufficient.” The reasons for the project were questionable, he said, the environmental consequences had not been fully explored, and the state had not given proper consideration to all viable options. “In view of the wide range of our objections to this project, I am urgently requesting that a supplemental DEIS be developed,” Adamkus wrote. “I simply do not believe that either the decision makers or the interested public can be adequately apprised of the full range of issues related to this project without a supplemental DEIS.” In short, the study was no good. The Tokarskis, Ewing, and Knott were right.

Sort of. INDOT had been slapped on the wrist and sent back to the drawing board. But it had not been told no. As Ewing explained to me, the National Environmental Policy Act “does not say you have to do the best thing for the environment or minimize harm to the environment.” Rather, it compels the government to “examine all of the alternatives and set forth what the impacts are. And the idea—the nice idea—is that once that’s all studied, the public and the policy makers will make an informed decision.”

This last, subjective step in an otherwise technical process tends to limit the power of environmentalist activists. “Everyone always thinks the silver bullet is a lawsuit,” Ewing told me. “Really all that a lawsuit or maneuvering over NEPA can win you is time.” Time is a valuable thing, though—budgets often tighten, governors change, priorities change. “We weren’t trying to win a legal battle. We were trying to win a public opinion battle. All the legal stuff is just a weapon to win time to win the public opinion battle.”

The EPA’s letter promised to buy the Indiana opponents months if not years, and indeed the governorship had already changed hands. Shortly after the release of the DEIS, Evan Bayh ended his second term with a successful bid for the Senate, and his lieutenant governor, Frank O’Bannon, was elected as his successor. This wasn’t necessarily good news for CARR, though: O’Bannon (along with Bayh, McCloskey, and other state politicians) was listed on the letterhead of the Southwest Indiana Regional Highway Coalition as a member. But he was an elected politician, after all, and theoretically he could be swayed by the strong feelings of his constituents. There was hope.

In 1999, the Tokarskis received an Environmentalists of the Year award presented, somewhat paradoxically, by the state’s largest power company. Ewing shared with me a copy of a letter he had sent in support of their nomination. “The highway battle is of David-and-Goliath proportions, and has been fought against enormous odds,” he wrote. “An impressive array of business and real estate interests, many of whom stand to gain financially from the highway, have spent literally millions of dollars lobbying for it in Indianapolis and Washington, D.C. Practically no one questioned that the highway was needed, and practically no one doubted that it would get built.” But the Tokarskis, he said, despite having day jobs and no paid staff, had identified flaws in the proposal and publicized its environmental and economic impacts. “No one knows how it will be resolved. But win or lose, the Tokarskis’ years of hard work on this project will pay big dividends … They have demonstrated that ‘ordinary’ citizens … can take on the powers that be and transform an ill-conceived project from a ‘done deal’ to a question mark.”

Once, sitting with the Tokarskis in their house, I asked them if they could remember a time when they felt as if they were ahead in the I-69 struggle.

“When the EPA slammed the state’s study,” Thomas replied quickly, nodding. “That was good.”

“Sandy and Andy came with champagne,” Sandra said, smiling at Thomas. Did they think they had won? “No. We knew we hadn’t won.”

“I don’t think there has ever been a point where we thought we’d won,” Thomas said.

“Sometimes I’ve dreamed that it was over,” Sandra said.

“Yeah. I’ve dreamed about it once in a while,” Thomas muttered.

“It’s always this great feeling of relief,” Sandra said.

“Incredible relief,” Thomas went on. “Every once in a while you say, ‘I’m just going to imagine it’s over, it’s done with. What would I do?’ And it’s like, everything just opens up, this tremendous feeling of relief, and you’re free to do all the stuff you always wanted to do but didn’t have enough time for. Finally we can go on with our lives.” ◊