The classroom rug was a little crusty, stamped with squared-off primary colors. At its far end, the beautiful Miss Chantry sat cross-legged in white stockings and a plaid wool miniskirt, while the rest of us sat “Indian style” upon the rug before her. From a stack of old favorites, she selected a crisp, clean book and held it high for all to behold. The front cover showed three curvy trees topped with tufts of bright fur. In the foreground stood an elderly, mustachioed man-rodent preaching a sermon from the rostrum of a sawed-off tree stump. “He is the Lorax,” she declared, “the latest, greatest character from our favorite author, Dr. Seuss.” The story was too abstract for the average kindergartner, at once a dystopian allegory and anti-capitalist manifesto meted out in deceptively simple rhymes. For the teacher it was a call to collect bits of trash from the playground. We just thought it was mean and nasty to upset the Lorax, to decapitate a grove of truffula trees, and to displace a unique sleuth of bar-ba-loots. Our empathy was sound, but we couldn’t imagine the myth as anything but self-contained, not even when the remaining grove of local forest was toppled for a new Kmart.
But Dr. Seuss slipped us a clue. The humming fish were fleeing the pond “in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.” We hadn’t noticed. The evening sun still melted to sap and slid into Erie’s warm bath. The waves could still swell to tsunami heights. In the far-off horizon, a maritime vessel slept upon Erie’s broad breast. But no one saw the slick of scum stuck to its bilge. And we didn’t pay attention to the sign that read, “WARNING: This water is not safe for wading or bathing.” Now our aqueous playground was rumored to be dead. At the time of my awakening, they were calling it North America’s Dead Sea.
* * *
Erie’s death had everything to do with its birth several thousand years ago, when a softening glacier receded, dribbling crumbs as it went. Much of its meltwater dripped into a large basin carved by a frigid predecessor. This became Lake Erie. More important for this story was its backwash, which slid along a slope so gradual it became a wading pool the size of Rhode Island. On a vintage map, it looks like a nibbled oak leaf pinned between Western Indiana and Sandusky Bay.
The lake mirrored piney forests, not the cemented towers of Cleveland or Toledo. Instead of paved streets, low moraines and sandy ridges crossed the slumbering plain. Upon this firm umber mattress spread a blanket of mud capable of swallowing a large cow. From the quagmire sprung trees that sunk their roots into standing water, others into leaky loam along the ledges. In time, the forest grew dense and dark, its trunks weaving together with grapevine, its high canopies fanning the lofts. In some places, the forest opened onto prairies where cattails bobbed in the marshes and towering grasses brushed the waterfowl, where sheets of dappled flowers joggled in the breezes and dragonflies shimmered like metal. Translucent river mouths sprouted dense beds of wild rice, their shoots bowed by grazing ducks.
Its tributaries teemed with fish of every sort. Mice and fox scattered across the wet prairies. Wood frogs sang, “I croak, therefore I am,” from still pools. Woodpeckers drummed trees for grubs, and salamanders scuttled under sodden logs. At daybreak, black bears foraged for fruit, while bobcats napped in hollow trees. Hordes of insects whirred from the muck and quadrupeds of every sort popped from their burrows. Under a freckled night sky, things slithered along the forest floor, their hungry jaws snapping at the air. Red, yellow, and white peepers glowed from the blackness, outnumbering the stars, yet they were blind to the great-horned owl perched in the treetops before it swooped to clutch a rat in its talons.
Here, all members of this soggy organism were valuable. Invisible molecules were the equals of visible matter, the smallest mite was as grand as the largest mammal. All had need of the other without envy or disdain. Polyamorous creatures mixed and married, gave birth to life, and never wasted a single drop of beauty. In the presence of God without humans, Erie’s once thriving swamp forest became a vaulting cathedral for creepers and crawlers baptized in its sanctuaries.
In colonial times, English settlers pushed the Shawnee, Wyandot, Seneca, Ottawa and others into western Ohio. Finding the swamp forest impenetrable, the first nations hovered around the fringes and founded villages, where women planted gardens and men scanned the rivers from birch canoes, spearing fish with a single stab. They knew the creatures directed the show, an opera of trills, staccato clicks, and open-throated warbles. Other times a ritual of thumping mating dances. They penetrated the center during the day only to gather materials to build or to hunt. But they fled the woods when the barred owl’s shrill screams pierced the night, like an old gal having a good time.
And then came new neighbors who decided the land might be of some value. At first, the British and French erected trading posts and forts between indigenous villages. Between longhouses and Shawnee wigwams, they built log cabins. Soon a person would be able to stand at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers and marvel at miles of homesteads. At least that was the impression of General Anthony Wayne, who arrived in 1794 on presidential orders to conquer the Ohio wilderness and establish his namesake, Fort Wayne, Indiana—the point on the map where the nibbled oak leaf meets its invisible stem.
At the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers, the tribes aimed to protect their settlement by forcing the soldiers to slog after them into the hostile interior. Stuck in the mud, the English soldiers became confused and disoriented, remembering nothing. For how many hours they trudged through the swamp for a lighted path, we’ll never know. In those days, more men lost their lives to the swamp than to a bloody battle. But in the end, Wayne got to stick his flag in the sludge, a dreary victory that culminated in the Treaty of Greenville and laid the groundwork for future treaties that would put out to pasture all Native American claims in the Northwest territory.
For a while, the center held, and travelers stridently avoided it, launching north into Lake Erie squalls, or trundling south around the swamp, both preferable to the sting of a malarial mosquito, which regularly sent unacclimated settlers to bed at night with bone-rattling fevers. There was “a funeral every day,” sang the survivors, “without hearse or pall; they tuck them in the ground with breeches, coat and all.” Any attempts to cut through the center on Hull’s Trace, “the worst road on the continent,” led to cold soaks in flooded tents, submerged wagons, and fatally injured equine struggling in saddle-deep mud. The path was so strewn with wreckage that young men earned their wages by pulling them out, and by 1830 these wetlands rang so infamously in the human ear that they earned a fearsome title: The Great Black Swamp.
* * *
Most would-be residents stayed away, even with expanding railroad and canal systems. But those committed to making the swamp a home saw potential in the rich black soil undergirding the swamp for the cultivation of high-dollar farmland. Still, the settlers had work to do. They drained the pool and flanked murky roads with deep ditches, crossing them with wood planks. They unearthed the firm clay stratum and baked it into under-drainage tiles to channel water from every freshet, pool, and puddle straight into the lake.
By 1840, much of the forest went up in smoke for Ohio’s railroad system, forcing the stream-steadying beaver to abandon the Maumee Valley altogether. In the meantime, farmers kept draining their fields and welcomed more settlers, who killed the last pair of cougars, the lynx, and the wolverines. By the 1860s, the drainage neared completion, inviting more transplants to the region. Their arrival drove away the remaining wolves, whose job it was to keep the deer population in check. The bears left, too, those whose foraging activities kept the forest clear of debris. At last, the 1870s landscape was a squared-off checkerboard of tidy fields, big barns, and county roads, while in Toledo, merchants darted in and out of storefronts like ants invading a pantry. The milldams blocked spawning runs and silt smothered aquatic vegetation. It was too bad, “BUT business is business. And business must grow.”
Aged pioneers returning in 1900 rarely bemoaned the swamp’s transformation into corn rows stretched across the earth like unrolled bolts of corduroy. The swamp in its pristine condition was to them a hellish morass obstructing human progress. Even in 1969, when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River fire sparked the need for a Clean Water Act, few imagined that the epithet, “mistake on the lake,” might refer to a land project completed a full century before. Never did the farmers think that the toils of their big-hearted grandparents—who heroically remolded an entire ecosystem, turned a geographical cipher into productive farmland, and brought prosperity to the region—could ever engender an environmental scourge. The most devastating and enduring mistake on the lake, it turns out, was the draining of The Great Black Swamp.
These forefathers had unwittingly denied a valuable freshwater source its kidneys, tasked with filtering away organic matter, including bacteria and phosphorus, and adding it to the swamp’s ground layer. But now, the good, bad, and the ghastly washed straight into the lake. Still, some insisted that water could dilute any substance, no matter how toxic, and you could float anything from paint thinners to your old dead donkey downstream to the neighbors.
In time, the lake began to bloom with too much life, “glumping the pond where the Humming fish hummed.” Decades of farming stripped nutrients from the rich swamp soil, pushing farmers to feed it phosphorous-containing fertilizers. Whatever nutrients the soil couldn’t digest washed straight into the rivers and, from there, straight into Lake Erie, inducing aquatic plants to grow, die, decompose, and hog all the oxygen. Large populations of clearwater game fish, the coveted walleye and bass, were dying off. A decade before we hatchlings scuttled upon Erie’s rough sands, they say the water was putrid and mossy, and it was not uncommon to see the beach strewn with rotting fish freshly evicted from a grotesque underworld. By the 1960s, Erie had become a small seascape with slimy green blankets skirting its shores. To the marine biologist, it was a moldy incubator. It might’ve taken another epoch for the lake to become a full-out bog. Now, Erie’s remote conclusion came a little closer—by about 15,000 years.
Alarmed citizens fought to limit the amount of phosphorous slipping into the lake, pushing for new and improved city sewage treatments and banning phosphate from all detergents. Suddenly, Tide and Dash were less effective at lifting and leaving two kinds of stains. Bad for clothes, good for the lake! Luckily, being shallow was as much a blessing as a curse. With the smeary water flushing out to sea and fresher waters flowing in from Superior, Huron, and Michigan, the native fish returned, and the lake was fast becoming the greatest ecosystem recovery in the world. So much so that Dr. Seuss removed his reference to Lake Erie from subsequent editions of The Lorax. In 1991, Seuss died dreaming of Erie’s smiling fish, unaware that the lake’s algae affliction was not cured, but merely in remission. The worst was not simply on its way. It had already arrived and was multiplying like metastatic cancer cells.
* * *
It came from nearly 6,000 miles away, where a more storied sea foamed and marbled its gray waters. At the port in Baku, ocean freighters bound for Russia rocked upon wind-swept waves, pulled back by their steel anchors. Here they docked until the sea quieted enough to float them eastward through brackish waters or northward to the Volga-Don Canal. Darting about the docks were a diverse crowd of hard-hatted Russians, Turks, and Azeris, a common scene on the Caspian Sea, the old “Silk Road,” where merchant-seamen once sailed, eager to sell silks to the denizens of old-world Venice, Rome, and Byzantium.
The ships launched with millions of gallons of Caspian Sea in their ballast tanks that were to be drained and refilled as needed for balance in waters deep or shallow, rough or calm. Crews loaded cargo and released small oceans into whatever foreign port they happened to dock. And when they emptied their cargo at the next destination, their tanks drank once again. Not just water, but billions of free-floating organisms. No one could see them, and few knew they were there. But wherever the ships happened to dock, whether in the Black or the Baltic, everything from viruses to exotic species, like water fleas and aquatic worms, small fish and killer crustacea, flowed in and out like passengers on an international cruise ship. Most of Europe’s canals were Caspianized long ago, from Budapest way back in 1794 to Italy two centuries later.
Then came North America. Researchers traced the invasion back to 1986, when a commercial cargo ship set sail from the north shore of the Black Sea, crossed the Atlantic to North America, drifted into the heart of the continent and bypassed Niagara Falls through the Welland Canal. Finally, it emerged in Lake Erie at Buffalo, its tank swirling with stowaways from the old country, most notably microscopic children of zebra mussels. Once the ship reached its first port of call, it released millions of gallons of Caspian Sea, loaded cargo, and moved on. For the next twenty years, new fleets of salties entering Lake Erie would rinse and repeat with impunity—but without immunity.
Freshly dispersed, the mussel larvae drifted with the currents. Within weeks, their shells expanded to the size and shape of miniature guitar picks. Each female zebra mussel and each one of her in-bound Ukrainian cousins, the quagga, would expel a million eggs a year, bolstering their populations to quadrillions by the turn of the 21st century. Some sunk to the lake bottom, fusing to firm surfaces—screen doors, grandpa’s old lawn chair, and various shipwrecks. Others clung to intake pipes surging with more bubbles than a freshly popped can of soda. The lakes coursed with their staple foods, phytoplankton and zooplankton, the stuff that formed the center of the lakes’ food web. This meant not only the starvation of native animals—for the invasive mollusks have voracious appetites—but also the filtering of naturally nutrient dense freshwater lakes that were never meant to run too clear.
I remember this strange crystal clarity. It was the early nineties, and I could count each flickering fish darting in and out of waving weeds and the gaps of humped boulders. Unable to resist, I would plunge in and propel through an imaginary coral reef of some Caribbean island. I didn’t know then that those pristine conditions resulted from alien dime-sized filtering machines, that this picture of health and beauty was really a sign of the growing danger to all forms of lake life.
For the remainder of that decade, increasing emissions of heat-trapping gases brought longer, hotter summers and fierce and frequent downpours. The deluges slipped across parking lots, flowed through city sewers, and washed over the farms. Not only did we revive the old recipe, but we tripled the serving size, seasoned with an admixture of soluble phosphorus, which algae can absorb immediately and more completely than particulate phosphorus, the staple ingredient farmers used back in the 1960s and 70s. And, with newer no-rotate, no-till practices, soluble phosphorus sat atop asphalt-firm fields from late fall until early spring when storms typically wash the unabsorbed excess into the lake, exploding algae growth like a match to a parched California forest.
But why didn’t the tiny filtering machines purify the extra gunk gumming up the lake? It so happens that the hungry zebra mussels are picky connoisseurs of phytoplankton, and they will spew from their mouths anything not to their liking, specifically blue-green algae, which is actually a bacteria. Knowing the difference, they feast on the delicacies and spit the crud back into the lake with all the venom of a diva served an inferior espresso.
Don’t judge them too harshly for their refined taste. Just splashing in the waves of an infected beach causes vomiting and blistering about the mouth. And if your fetching canine were to swallow enough water, he might end up with liver failure. Labrador Retriever, Casey Jenkins, was just one of many of Ohio’s departed, as well as numerous wild animals who lapped up water from bucolic lakes and streams.
* * *
In truth, blue-green algae have been with us for 3.5 billion years. Neither are they all bad. Like plants, they scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and emit pure oxygen. The lethal snags drifted along only after farmers altered their practices at the onset of the mussel invasion. Because mussels feed only on non-toxic algae, they leave the lethal stuff to bloom at the shallow end of the shallowest of all the Great Lakes, right where the Great Black Swamp once sloped on an imperceptible grade into Lake Erie.
The toxin in blue-green algae is clear and impossible to detect with the human eye. But with detection tools, north coast cities had always been able to catch it before it infected their water sources. Until August 2014, that is, when an algae slick in Toledo’s Maumee River slipped through its mouth and floated out to sea. The scientists weren’t concerned. This wasn’t a buoyant emerald pasture. More like a small lawn in a compact neighborhood. But, at some point during that mild day, the elements conspired, driving the bloom three miles offshore and straight into the cool deeps of Toledo’s intake. There, the water began its cleansing slide toward the treatment plant in downtown Toledo. By evening, the toxin dominated the water supply and advanced toward Toledo’s taps. Worse, Toledo had no alternative water source.
After midnight, Mayor Michael Collins deployed an urgent DO NOT DRINK THE WATER order. Some of the swamp’s night owls must’ve survived the decimation of their habitat, for every water bottle was cleared from store shelves before the slip of sunrise. Two days later, the mayor looked haggard but relieved. The problem was under control. At its worst, 110 people out of 500,000 fell temporarily ill. Before news cameras, he lifted a glass of freshly cleansed tap water and made a toast: “Here’s to ya, Toledo.” But he knew this was only the end of the beginning. That the bleeding away of the Great Black Swamp was a grave mistake was now far less cloudy to folks with previously blurred vision.
* * *
Although the toxic algae problem in western Lake Erie has diminished since 2014, the most recent data from the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science still mark it as moderately severe. A sign at Maumee Bay State Park warns swimmers of anything that “looks like spilled paint, has surface scums, mats or films, . . . colored streaks [and] green globs floating below the surface.” And the algae problem is not exclusive to Lake Erie. Most national waterways swirl with toxic soup. But few outbreaks have been as virulent as those springing up annually off the coast of the once vital Great Black Swamp, which simmers with almost half the phosphorus load in all five Great Lakes. That’s not surprising, since more than half of Erie’s watershed is used for agriculture. For some farmers, this is a tough pellet to munch. They are proud of how their ancestors transformed the region’s wetlands. It is their legacy.
Since the 1972 Clean Water Act billowed from the flames of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, its burning concern has always been pollution flowing from pipes and smokestacks, which means the Act is virtually powerless when it comes to ballast water or farm field run-off. At most, ships must rinse their tanks with ocean water before puncturing fragile ecosystems, a leap in the right direction, but not foolproof against critters that can survive anything from radiation to infernal and astral temperatures.
The burden of blue-green algae is Ohio’s heavy barge to tow, it turns out, and initiatives from H2Ohio, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, and the Black Swamp Conservancy are incentivizing farmers to use sustainable fertilizing methods and restore some of the Black Swamp’s wetlands. Ohio farmers are now required to complete training to prevent misapplications of phosphorus before earning the freedom to broadcast fertilizers across the land. These programs are a great start, and their agents mean well, as do those of us who still fill our tanks with the very fuel springing from the bled-out remains of the old swamp—corn. “I meant no harm. I most truly did not.”
* * *
Swamps have mystified humans for centuries. Sojourners everywhere once imagined all sorts of unsavory creatures lurking in murky waters or tangled in the forest’s dense ganglia. Nearly every continent has a swamp myth, from Britain’s Grendel to South Africa’s Grootslang, and from the Greco-Roman Hydra to the Algonquin ghost woman. In these myths, the swamps echo eerily, leading trespassers toward an early death.
Southern folklore said that swamps were hellish hindrances to a landscape tamed and tended by the genteel farmer, a mentality owing to a deep suspicion that humans don’t belong here, that we are nomads scouting for a way out of the mire. Humans tried to get the upper hand over a nature that can sometimes seem ruthless. And in that struggle, a few became grifters. Every day is a struggle against nature, within and without. It’s how we evolved. It’s how we prevailed. And it’s how we may very well turn the dagger upon ourselves.
“UNLESS someone cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
* * *
Many years from childhood, I imagine flying over the lake as the waves batter the craggy shoreline. I see my bronzed feet toeing through the sand and kicking through the surf. I alight upon the lighthouse nosing out from the headlands to squawk at my brother backflipping into the water. I soar over neat lines of corn zipping across the landscape. On the tip of a peninsula, my feet dangle from a thrill ride before dropping into a cloud of lost-swamp mosquitos.
At night, when the lake is a placid pane of glass, it reflects the city’s skyline, as if to lure out to sea some poor inebriate who thinks he is stepping into a bakery for a donut. It’s true, Lake Erie bears our reflection. But the reflection is not always clear. Are we the glorious stuff of creation? Or are we decrepit and toothless, covered in parasites, and running with sores?
***
Candace R. Craig has taught students at every stage of development, from pre-kindergarten through college. She has been an English instructor at Pikes Peak State College and is a freelance tutor at renaissancewomentutoring.com. In her free time, she publishes a variety of scholarly, literary, and entrepreneurial projects, including a book of creative nonfiction vignettes, a series of classroom guides to literature, and a book-length study of the films of David Lynch. You can visit Candace’s personal writer’s website at candace-r-craig.com.
