The Grand Calumet River is still there.
You see it in glimpses of something riverine among dense tangles of phragmites and cattails. Box elders and willows weep. With a little elevation, a few oaks. Mounds in the understory make me want to believe are native burial mounds, still relatively common in the Great Lakes region – but these are dump sites, no doubt. There are containment berms around the white-rusty storage tanks full of God-knows-what chemical hell. As if it mattered. Barn door and horses and all that.
A lifetime split between Michigan and points west, I’ve made the drive dozens of times, always anxious, always hurried. Always cross about too many and too much.
The Grand Calumet River is tiny, but such a name. Thirteen miles long. Originating in an abused and besieged backdune at the southern end of The Big Lake (always capitalize). Its flow is mostly (90%) industrial and municipal effluent. A billion gallons a day into the Big Lake. It used to include raw sewage but the worst of it stopped with the Clean Water Act of 1972. Breached berms reclaimed and broken.
At one time the country’s largest refinery was there. The Gary Works, at one time the world’s largest steel mill named for the hard city of Gary, a familiar and persistent stubborn sulfur stink on the way to Grandma’s house in Iowa. Who would live there? I wondered in my precocious privilege from the backseat of a green Pontiac made of Gary steel.
The Grand Calumet River is still there. It weaves itself where it hasn’t been channeled, there under the Chicago Skyway, the premium toll road between Gary and the Chicago downtown. Save yourself a few minutes getting through. Chicago was named for wild onions, I think. Wild onions (ramps), are considered a great gift of the plants among the indigenous peoples of the eastern forests. A bit of knowledge softens the place and I imagine my way back through its recent history. Wild onions grow in shaded forest understories, on rich soils. Kimmerer says to never take more than half and never take the last one (and fry them up in a little butter). Gifts require gratitude and reciprocity. It’s a little embarrassing now.
Our GPS routed us to the Skyway this time — such a silly name. The purple hubris steel bridge into the city of big shoulders is impressive but the gray interstate approach, for most of it’s length is lower than a Northern water snake’s (Nerodia sipedon) belly – there in the tiny floodplain. There where our Windigo economy remade the landscape and changed the flow of rivers and extracted value and labor with abandon. I am sour. End stage Capitalism looks like this unless we imagine a better way (shiny mansions are somewhere else).
The Grand Calumet River. Imagine a different history. One where the sand ridges and swales at the southern end of the Big Lake were still vibrant with wetlands and birds and insects. Imagine the biodiversity in the crazy juxtaposition of peaty wetlands and droughty oak and juniper sand ridges. Imagine Pitcher’s thistle and beach-pea blossoms. Imagine the offshore wind in the beach grass, tracing out artful arcs in the pure Big Lake sand. Imagine water clean enough to hold oxygen for the benthic organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Imagine fish without tumors feeding herons and loons without organochlorine and methyl mercury burdens. Imaging the most dystopian landscape in the Midwest was somewhere else.
The Grand Calumet River is likely the most polluted river in the Great Lakes watershed, maybe in all of North America. The sediments contains “legacy” pollutants such as PCBs and PAHs (polychlorinated biphenyls and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), heavy metals, and pesticides. Legacies of unregulated industry. Its an “Area of Concern” (AOC) in the cold patois of regulatory language in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (a commitment between Canada and the US to restore and protect the waters of the Great Lakes). Home to a cluster of Superfund sites (five of which are on Superfund’s National Priority List). There are 30 AOCs along the US shorelines of the Great Lakes. Legacies indeed.
The Grand Calumet River is now a resistance story. Good people imagine. Good people work for the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Good people work for Indiana’s and Illinois’ Natural Resources agencies. Good people work for or join the network of private local conservation organizations. Good people paddle the Grand Calumet River and count the birds and muskrats. Good people battle the Windigo with regulations, lawsuits, lobbying, activism, elbow grease and stubbornness. Water is life.
There are dredging projects underway to remove and contain the poisoned sediments and restorations of rare habitats such as dune and swale and native prairies in The Grand Calumet River floodplain has been occurring for years. The cumulative price tag is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s the same old story. Profiteering from the commons and sticking Creation (and good people) with the tab. You can read about restoration efforts here and here and here. I hope these efforts can weather the coming storm.
And I only know this because I chose to look (and I am glad for it). In my drive-by assessment, I noticed an oak savanna, there in an otherwise bleak industrial plain. An oak savanna, whether there by accident or art contributes to and all-too rare prairie/forest type in our Midwestern landscape, with its own characteristic plants and animals. I wondered about it, so I started trying to learn a little.
Rustbelt realities in both directions on a train out of the last century. Frosted winter rooflines in the neighborhoods and church spires rising out of the fog. Smokestacks and harsh angular industrial fixtures to the windward. Church spires rising among the brumous savanna of steel transmission towers. It’s the winter prairie, dry seedheads where the flowers were. Waiting now on redemption promises.
Bless this broken place and the good people working for reconciliation. Bless the resilience of the red oaks and the willows. Bless the presence of the Big Lake bigness and an offshore wind. A reminder of her vastness and a redemption hope to wash in and rebuild the ancestral dunes.
The Grand Calumet River is still here.
Photos: Great Lake Mud. © 2023 Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, All Rights Reserved. Source: https://www.greatlakesmud.org/
Maps: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Public Domain. Source: https://www.epa.gov/great-lakes-aocs/remediation-and-restoration-projects-grand-calumet-river-aoc#restoration
Our Newtown Creek or Gowanus Canal.
Thank you! You are helping me see the shift in human energy toward love.
Once beautiful wetlands and sand dunes, this rounded corner of the Big Lake has suffered unimaginable tragedies. I’ll not forget the Standard Oil refinery fire in Whiting Illinois within sight distance of RCA and CRC faith communities from South Chicago to Northern Indiana. That devastation lingers. Yet creation can be renewed, the Calumet River is alive and gives us all a sliver of hope. Thanks.
Thank you for your dive into that bleak skyway drive into Chicago. I have often wondered about those areas of wetlands that snake around the cracked pavement as we speed by. Also the town of Gary, wondering, in my privileged West Michigan smugness, what it’s like to live in a town which always looks gray and depleted in some way. We’ve also taken Lakeshore all the way around the end of the lake, through many of those abandoned and bleak neighborhoods. A sobering, yet enlightening ride home.
Growing up in western Michigan, the lakes have always grounded me. I’ve lived away for more than 40 years, but they remain a touchstone (symbolic and actual) for most of what I hold most precious in my heart.
I followed the links you shared and was dismayed (although not entirely surprised) to find that Torch Lake in northern Michigan is also an Area Of Concern. (All those “pleasure craft” on that sandbar and the “cottages” along the shore.)
I had not known about the Great Lakes Quality Agreement with our Canadian neighbors and am grateful for that ray of hope and for learning what I can do (or stop doing) to help.
And although this may seem trivial by comparison, I love your ritornello: “The Big Lake (always capitalize.)” I’ve adopted this when I write (including the parentheses) and it makes me smile every time.
While Mr. Van Deelen waxed eloquent, I would have benefitted from a clearer and simpler message of what he was trying to say.
“Who would live there? I wondered in my precocious privilege from the backseat of a green Pontiac made of Gary steel.” And so any of us who ride in vehicles are pulled into this story. It’s pretty wild to imagine backwards, what those wetlands and steel-grey herons would have looked like. Thanks again for helping us love and care for this amazing world that is held in God’s hands and ours.
“Sacrifice zones.” We have already sacrificed so much. More precisely, polluters have shunted their “externalities” onto all the rest of us and onto these ecosystems.