Anoxic
The river does not remember.
Not in the way you and I do, of course. We have brains, organic computers with dedicated sections for storing and recalling experiences, information, in both the short and long term. Since a river by itself is not alive, it cannot remember things the way we do.
But it can keep a record of time.
Like a tree with its rings, rivers store objects and substances, vestiges from the past. They support thousands of organisms living in and around them, even miles away from their banks. Like houses, they support and nurture life itself, providing shelter, food, and recreation for everything from the smallest minnow to the tallest human. Water, rooms, soil, and floors aren’t living things in and of themselves. But they’re spaces that allow for whole communities to flourish within and among them. What is a watershed but a neighborhood in the natural world?
But enough about time and cycles and living things, and breathing and water and records. Let’s get back to the river.
If you were a pebble in northeastern Ohio, and you fell into the Cuyahoga’s mouth in Geauga County, 30 miles from Erie, you would travel approximately 55 miles south to Akron, then curve around a bend and start flowing north. By the time you reach Erie, you would have traveled 100 miles total, through six counties, draining 813 square miles of the state along the way.
The river is older than you, or me, or our grandparents, or our great-grandparents, or even our great-great-great grandparents. The Cuyahoga recorded when it marked the western edge of the United States, and when the Seneca people named it something meaning jawbone, and when the last glaciers suddenly started to retreat, and its water could flow north instead of south. The river recorded the first time it met the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Erie.
And the river remembers the fire.
Which one? You might ask, and its water would burble over its rocks, a fluvial laugh, and the river would say the big one. The one that got all the attention.
This is the story of how it happened.
Cleveland, the scene of the crime, was established right before the 19th century. Industry tightened its grip right after the Civil War. In 1866, Henry A. Sherwin founded his namesake paint company. In 1870, John D. Rockefeller established Standard Oil. Forty years later, Republic Steel came along.
Pollution got dismissed as the price of progress. Companies dumped their waste chemicals directly into the water, while the suburbs around Cleveland emptied raw sewage into the channel upstream. Good, union-strong jobs in manufacturing, in oil, let parents have two cars and send their children to college. The American dream was booming on the shores of Lake Erie–as long as you ignored the stench of industry underneath it all.
By 1969, Sherwin-Williams’ net sales had reached $500 million. Meanwhile, the city and its suburbs dumped raw sewage straight into the water. In 1942, Republic Steel was one of the biggest employers in town, supporting the livelihoods of some 9,000 people. Rockefeller gave so much land and money back to the city that they buried him there. Meanwhile, in the summer, methane bubbled up from the depths of the river.
In fall, the Cuyahoga Valley ignites with color. The first maples–Acer saccharum and Acer rubrum–cycle through the warm half of the rainbow. Then the oaks, Quercus palustris and alba, turn reddish brown. Look up, and you might catch the colorful wood ducks–Aix sponsa, the male with his emerald-crusted head and the female with her sapphire-tipped wings–flying south to their winter home in the Gulf.
In November, bald eagles (scientific name Haliaeetus leucocephalus, the Greek for white-headed eagle that eats mostly fish) perform coupling dances before building their nests high in the trees. By December, the wolf’s smaller, cleverer cousin–Canis latrans, the coyote–is venturing out to the fields and woods to feed as much as it can before winter.
The Cuyahoga caught on fire at least nine times before the big one.
The earliest recorded fire occurred August 28, 1868, when sparks from a tugboat ignited oil floating on the water near a bridge.
Twenty-one years later, a grain elevator fire spread to the water. In 1899, the city closed out the year with another fire, again from an oil slick.
In 1912, the deadliest one began when gasoline leaked onto the water from a Standard Oil barge. Six explosions killed five men. Eighteen years later, fermented grain in a grain elevator spilled into the water and combined with oil, starting another fire that reached the grain elevator itself. A month later, wind blew sparks from the smoldering structure onto the water and the river burned for the second time in two months. It burned in 1941, 1948 and 1949.
In 1952, Cassandra issued a prophecy: a fire warden pointed to a spot where the Great Lakes Towing Company and Standard Oil sat on opposite sides of the river. There will be one here, he told the press, where six inches of oil cover the water. The prophecy came true in November of that year when a fire started in that exact spot and caused $1 million in damages, the most expensive yet.
The hearth lay cold for the next seventeen years.
During January, the owls–the great-horned, the screech, the barred–build new nests and sing to greet the dawn. In February, beavers, Castor canadensis, start to poke their heads up through holes in winter ice–after spending a whole season tucked away in their den, their eyes need to get used to the sunshine. And in March, the frog choir makes its annual trek to the small, still pools they lay eggs in. Can you hear the tiny spring peeper’s soprano? The rubbery call of the wood frog? The amphibious chorus can only perform once temperatures climb above 45 degrees.
Of course, by the time June rolls around, the area is much warmer than that.
In 1969, the twenty-second started out very pretty.
Cleveland’s summers are cooler and wetter than the ones its cousins get — either Columbus, in the state’s flat midsection, or Cincinnati, down on its southern edge. Erie gives the city cooling winds and amplifies rainstorms until people could probably do their laundry with the water.
Summer had dawned the day before. June in the city is quite wonderful. The average high climbs to the low 80s; the heat won’t peak until July. The Indians were about halfway through their season. They had been slugging it out with the Baltimore Orioles. The last game of a 4-part series was set for that day, and the Indians would go on to win, a nice case of home-field advantage.
But the river — slugging through industrial downtown, gasping as it reached Erie — felt as sick as it ever had. Water took between eight and thirty days to move through the industrial area. Nothing lived — not a fish, nor a frog, nor a plant, nor a mammal. In those days, before anyone had heard of a Rust Belt, industrial firms dominated the shore on both sides. Oil slicks and industrial chemicals floated on the surface.
Trains criss-crossed no higher than a foot above the water, coal-powered, moving freight and people and money and life, keeping the world turning.
Just after noon, the sun finally closer to the western horizon than the eastern one, a passing train rumbled over a wooden railway bridge. The train was on the Norfolk & Western line, which hadn’t reached Cleveland until five years before.
According to weather records, it was a sunny, low-70s day, no wind, no rain, just the factories on banks and the broad channel in front of them, sludgy and clogged and stinking to higher heaven. The railway cars whooshed past overhead, accompanied by the click and screech of wheels on tracks. The sparks flew back and forth, orange and gold.
A lone spark arced over the side, pulled by gravity, or time, or fate — a domino falling in history.
And the water below caught on fire.
Rivers don’t feel pain the way the organisms that live in them do. They feel heat, surely, in the way their water molecules begin to vibrate faster with additional energy. Their benthic zones see light if they’re shallow enough. But water that gets heated doesn’t burn or char, it just evaporates. What did catch fire, according to the fire department’s later report, was a stagnant oil slick on the surface of the water that captured debris as it floated by.
Interlude: Oil
Oil is very, very, good at its job. It will burn hot and bright and warm for you. Oil is life without breath, made almost entirely of carbon and hydrogen atoms, formed from dead, compressed plants and animals, impossible for any organism to breathe while mired in. Crude oil, the black stuff in the big barrels, is classified by the amount of hydrocarbons it contains — the higher the percentage, the heavier it weighs, and the thicker and slower it pours and flows. Certain weights of oil aren’t necessarily going to be more flammable than others. The stuff caught on fire in 1969 because the hydrogen and carbon molecules were exposed to oxygen and given heat in the form of the sparks. That’s the point of the ordeal, that it was everywhere on the river in 1969, so much so that you could dip your hand in the water and pull it out covered in oil to the wrist. Slick, slow, oozing. The fire didn’t waste any time.
For half an hour, flames engulfed the river and the bridge. The flames’ tips licked at the sky five stories above the water’s surface. By the time it was put out, the fire had covered an area of about two acres, a 300-by-300-foot square. Firefighting crews, used to blazes like this, dispatched it, uncovering a charred, smoking wooden structure and some floating trash. The total damage, from an economic standpoint, was close to $50,000. Before society had eyes everywhere, news crews needed time to get to the scene. The photos showed a burned bridge and broken railway tracks. Steel, like anything, melts when it’s hot enough.
The river had witnessed almost all of Carl Burton Stokes’s life. He was born and grew up on the East Side of the city and graduated from East Technical High School after serving in the military. He had gone away for college, to Minnesota, a state entirely north of Erie, but came back home for a J.D. from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. Stokes was elected mayor on his second try, in 1967, and made the cover of TIME magazine for being the first Black mayor of one of the 10 biggest cities in the US.
Stokes, along with his Utilities Director Ben Stefanski II, had been pointing the power of the bureaucracy at the river’s pollution for several years now. Perhaps most famously, the administration was able to persuade residents to pass a $100 million bond dedicated to cleaning up the Cuyahoga the year before. But once word of the fire reached the mayor’s office the next morning, Stokes and his cabinet realized it was a chance to spotlight the pollution issue, to get ahead in the fight to fix pollution from sewage and industrial waste.
On June 23, Stokes led a group of a dozen people on a tour of four sites near the Harvard Road bridge. In the mix was Betty Klaric, environmental reporter for the Cleveland Press, who had been campaigning to clean up the city since 1965. Standing on one of the railroad trestles that had been damaged 24 hours before, the mayor said to the journalist, “This is a long-standing condition that must be brought to an end.”
Stokes’s next words were grave, and it’s not hard to imagine his tone might’ve been as well. “There may be some wry humor in the phrase ‘the river is a fire hazard’ but it’s a terrible reflection on the city surrounding it when it does indeed become one.”
A photograph of the event shows Stokes in the middle of the group, talking with Klaric — short, coiffed — to his left. Two cameramen stand opposite them, and two others hold microphones to catch their conversation.
The Plain Dealer, the other city paper, was one of the first media outlets to report on the fire, running an article about it for the next three days. None of them made the front page, instead being relegated to deep within the C section.
TIME magazine was one of the first national outlets to report on the event. For its issue of August 1, 1969, it ran an article in the new “Environment” section titled “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism.” The article listed rivers in D.C., Omaha, St. Louis, in the northeast and south, and more in the upper Midwest, before describing the Cuyahoga as “among the worst of them all.”
“Some river!” wrote the author. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” Two months ago, during a new fire, the flames had “burned with such intensity that two railroad bridges spanning it were nearly destroyed.” It quoted Mayor Stokes as saying, “What a terrible reflection on our city.”
In December the following year, for a special issue centered around “Our Ecological Crisis,” National Geographic, one of the oldest and most widely-read magazines in the country, spotlighted the Cuyahoga as especially terrible.
Two photographs ran with the side section about the river. The first showed microscopic vorticellae feeding on bacterial sewage in water from the Cuyahoga. “To biologists,” the article read, “the protozoa, common in the Cuyahoga, point to grossly polluted water.”
In case readers didn’t get the point, the second photograph drove it home. In it, a dark-haired man, wearing a lab coat, watches over a tank filled with river water, and several small, silver fish. He’s an aquatic biologist with the Federal Water Quality Administration. There’s also a stopwatch attached to the side of the tank, facing the camera.
“Water can kill,” the caption read, “when it carries cyanide away from a steel mill.” The minnows inside had died in less than seven minutes. The ugliness could not be turned away from, and the pressure would continue to mount.
In early spring, wildflowers carpet the forest floor of the Cuyahoga Valley before the trees’ leaves can spread and block the sun. Petite yellow marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, pops up next to the Claytonia virginica, the spring beauty, whose tuberous root can be cooked and eaten like a potato. The Cuyahoga makes the soil of the valley moist and rich in silt, supplying wildflowers with an abundance of nutrients and minerals. The bluebells, Mertensia virginica, are the type species for their genus, the best example of its traits, as decided by German botanist Albrecht Roth in 1797.
Tiny DeKay snakes–Storeria dekayi, not venomous, for there are no venomous snakes in the Valley–sun themselves on rocks and trails, while a trio of warblers–the pine, the yellow-throated, the cerulean, all Setophaga–stack their harmonies in the tall, tall trees.
It’s very likely that the 1969 fire would’ve been dismissed as just another blaze if not for the TIME article that ran later in the summer.
While Stokes’ pollution tour was effective in showcasing the issue to a local audience, it took a national outlet like TIME to really grip the country’s attention–and all because of one photo.
When the piece ran in the August 1 issue, one of the photographs that ran with it was of a large smoky fire on the water’s surface. It’s dramatic, showing a brave little boat on the left, caught in the flames, and a hose out of frame spraying water into the thick smoke. “BOAT CAUGHT IN FLAMING CUYAHOGA,” said the caption, and while that was true, the picture TIME used was actually of the larger 1952 fire. No photographs were taken of the 1969 fire at all, because it had been subdued so quickly.
But TIME failed to note this, either in the photo’s caption or anywhere else in the article. The 1952 fire became what the public thought the ’69 fire had been like–huge, smoky. This was the flash point that turned a local issue into a national one, that would thrust Cleveland onto a stage far bigger than it had ever occupied before.
In April of 1970, just after the first Earth Day, Stokes traveled to Washington, D.C. to testify before Congress in support of a bill that would increase federal spending on controlling water pollution. He painted the issue as an infrastructure problem, not an environmental one, reaching across the chamber to try and draw in opponents who might see the bill as just another concession to the movement.
Cleveland’s infamy was reflected in his speech, with the mayor remarking that, “We in Cleveland sit on the banks of a river and lake which has become almost legendary, not only in the United States but abroad.”
In summer, days in the Valley are hot and humid. During the cooler nights, eight different species of bats flutter through the air, silently hunting their insect prey. In the early mornings, river otters (Lontra canadensis) share the banks of streams with muskrats (Ondatra zibethicus), beavers, and the tiny mink (Neovision vision). In the tall trees of a wetland, thirty to seventy feet off the water, great blue herons (Ardea herodias) help their young chicks grow strong from river fish, crustaceans, and amphibians. Around early July, the babies leave the nest for good.
An adult blue heron is a striking sight in the Cuyahoga Valley. They stand just over four feet tall, on spindly legs, with a yellow-orange beak and blue markings under the eyes. Their wings, two-toned with black and a bluish-gray on top, can reach nearly seven feet from tip to tip.
Summer is the last time to see orange-and-black monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, before they migrate south to Mexico in early September. In the meadows of the Valley grow the only plant monarch caterpillars eat: milkweed, from the genus Asclepias. When the caterpillars lunch on milkweed leaves, they consume the glycosides inside the plant. In chemistry, glycosides are molecules combining organic compounds such as alcohol with a saccharide. In practice, ingesting glycosides will cause nausea, diarrhea, and even death. The monarchs, immune to the poison, let it build up in their skin. If a bird or other insect tries to eat them, the caterpillars will not only taste terrible, but make the predator vomit.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and charged it with enforcing the laws and regulations that would safeguard people and the environment of the country from harm. Two years later, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, recognizing the damage that had been done to America’s waterways and diverting money to clean them up. Ohio created its own EPA around the same time. Finally, clean water was becoming a priority for not only state governments, but the federal one as well. And while great progress has been made since then for the Cuyahoga, it’s still not in the best place it could be.
Around 70 different species of fish live under the water’s surface. Former mayor Frank Jackson, in office from 2018–22, committed the city to the Paris Climate Agreement after former President Donald Trump withdrew the country. People go paddleboarding and kayaking on the water. In March of 2019, the EPA declared that any fish caught in the Cuyahoga were safe to eat. The river is healthier than it was for a long time — but the wound still oozes.
Any fish caught in the river are safe to eat only once a month. The EPA tested the waters in 2018 and found dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyl — chemical compounds made of carbon, hydrogen and chlorine — despite the fact their use was outlawed in 1979. If someone drinks the water without treating it, the Salmonella, hepatitis A, and viruses will make them pretty sick. Most recently, one of the more conservative presidential administrations slashed the bedrock legislation that protects the Cuyahoga. Exactly fifty years after the fire, in 2019, the Clean Water Act lost control of 60 percent of the country’s streams and 110 million acres of land. The state governments’ power to regulate their own water has been devastated.
Rivers and houses need maintenance for the same reason: they can’t take care of themselves. If a pipe bursts, a house can’t go to the ACE Hardware down the street, get new supplies, replace the fixture and mop up the spilled water. A river can’t carry waste and chemicals away once it’s become too clogged with them. Both rely on the organisms living in and around them for their ability to maintain the balance required for life. In cells, this is called homeostasis. With humans, this is called compassion.
You can sit on the Cuyahoga’s banks for a little while, splash your feet in the water — if it’s clean enough — and contemplate, if you’d like, how far American progress has really come. It’s a different definition today, certainly — but as long as there are people out there willing to do harm to get rich, to pollute and sicken their communities, to disrupt the fragile system known as Earth, the Cuyahoga and so many rivers like it will almost certainly suffer. It’s going to be a long battle, a slog, a swim upstream against the current — but it will be worth it, in the end, for a healthier, cleaner, waterway.
Put your shoes back on, the river might say. You have much work to do.
