This story was written by Robert L. Pisor and published in Monthly Detroit magazine in October 1979. Pisor worked at the Detroit News from 1963-74 and then became the press secretary for Mayor Coleman A. Young. Pisor returned to daily journalism and worked 11 years as a reporter and anchor at WDIV-TV. In 1995, Pisor opened Stone House Bread Co. in Leland. At age 67, he sold the shop and retired. He died on July 7. He was 77. This story is being republished to memorialize it on the Internet.
By Robert L. Pisor
Dirty, grey clouds hid the morning sun when my canoe slipped into the Detroit River at the foot of West Grand Boulevard. Almost immediately, the slender craft climbed a greasy swell that rolled from the bow of a passing freighter.
I had journeyed up the Nile in an air-conditioned luxury liner, up the Mekong in a flex-gunned Huey death ship and up the Mississippi in the sidewheel steamer. I had hiked the Hudson in New York, the Los Pinos in Colorado, the Lochsaw in Idaho and canoed Michigan’s Pere Marquette and Pigeon.
Robert and Ellen Pisor on the 55th anniversary. (Family photo)
One great challenge remained: the awesome, awful Rouge.
Danger and disease have always attended the exploration of rivers, and more than one adventurer found death, or madness, in the upper reaches of the world’s great waterways. Few, however, faced the terrors that lay ahead for me the next six days.
The Rouge, first of all, and I apologize that there is no more delicate or honest way to state the fact clearly, is filled with shit. Aquatic biologists dipped a scoop into the Rouge at the Fenkell bridge several years ago and came up with a six-tablespoon sample that contained 224,000 fecal coliform, microscopic bits of bacterial badness that grow only in the intestines of human beings and other warm-blooded animals. A more recent survey, taken during a storm, found an average of 360,000 fecal coliform and several individual samples that approached ten million!
As a basis of comparison, health officials close lakes and swimming beaches when the fecal coliform count reaches 200.
The Rouge, of course, is not a bathing beach. It is the cloaca of America’s fifth-largest metropolis, an urban-suburban sewer that drains 467 square miles of southeastern Michigan. But falling in the feces is only one of the hazards of a trip to the source of the Rouge.
The shorelines are greased with a grey mud-slime that makes footing impossible. Tangles of uprooted trees block the river in countless places. The low, evil-smelling ground along the river is densely thicketed in July with thistles and briars and stinging nettles, poison ivy, tangled ropes of wild grapes and nine kinds of thornbush. Humming clouds of mosquitoes cruise the dark, dank tunnel beneath the arching trees in a ceaseless search for blood.
Teams of attack dogs slaver behind barbed wire fences for the intruder who dares trespass in the backyard of the steel, chemical, paper, power, salt, gypsum, automobile, shipping, lime and coal companies that line the Rouge. Grey, furred seas of rats would part or, worse, not part at my passing. Golf course security squads, sheriff’s deputies, municipal police, cemetery watchmen, maddened homeowners, muggers and restless hordes of dope-crazed teenagers might lie in ambush along the river.
Any modest rainfall could dramatically – and dangerously – raise the river level and swing open the sewer gates that each week spill chrome and coal tar, cucumbers, chemicals and condoms into the river from Birmingham to Melvindale.
Finally, the source itself seemed shrouded in mystery. The best cartographers of the U.S. Geological Survey betray uncertainty by tracing the Rouge through the swamps and ponds and drainage ditches of Oakland County with a hesitant, broken blue line.
The people of Michigan see the Rouge as medieval Europe saw the Atlantic: a ghastly place where the only sounds are the wind – and the primal scream of fools who have sailed past the edge of the earth.
There is horror and disgust on the Rouge, a river shamed by sewage and shunned by people.
There Is Also Great Beauty, And Great Promise.
I found rope swings and swimming holes, turtles and the tracks of deer, waterfalls and Irish tugboats, a pioneer woman and a buffalo, a Coors-drinking farmer – and long hours of solitude in the heart of the state’s most populous region.
I found the True Source, and I even learned why the river is called the Rouge.
None of the river’s beauty was evident when I turned the canoe into the river mouth discovered in 1670 by Sieur de LaSalle. On the left, a huge freighter eased forward to feed coal to the furnaces of Great Lakes Steel. On the right, steam hammers on a moored construction barge pounded I-beams into a new pier for Allied Chemical, while bulldozers rearranged mountains of coal for Detroit Edison. A helmeted foreman ran to the edge of the barge and shouted urgently, soundlessly, pointing to a hole on the side of the coal ship that drooled black goo and wisps of smoke.
The canoe shot through the tiny, turbulent gap in an instant, then coasted on the still, oily waters of the Rouge.
The river’s mouth had provided a “good harbor and sandy bottom,” according to a 1752 French map. The Rouge was, in fact, a special, even sacred place in the years before 1800. One of the largest Indian burial mounds in Michigan, more than forty feet high and many hundreds of feet long, stood on the right bank for generations.
Thousands of freshwater springs bubbled up from the ground here. Awed French explorers called it the Place of the Beautiful Fountains, and the early English settlers named it Springwells. French merchants and military officers fought the boredom of Michigan winters here, traveling down from the fort at Detroit to bet large sums of money on sleigh races. The light sleds, pulled by sturdy Canadian ponies, flew like the wind on the smooth ice of the Rouge.
By 1810, seventy-two families had settled along the river, operating farms, grist mills, a lumber mill and a shipyard. One entrepreneur built a toll bridge over the Rouge and mistakenly tried to collect from Indians who had ruled the river before Rome ruled Gaul. After collecting his scalp, the Indians burned down all the nearby houses and barns.
No sign of this history remains today. The water at the mouth of the Rouge is an ugly, milky grey, covered with the glistening rainbow swirls of petroleum wastes. Rusty railroad bridges, counterweighted for the passage of ships, hang in the sky like angular black skeletons.
But… there! A very large fish leaped languidly from the viscous water, splashing heavily as it fell. It hardly seemed possible, yet… Again! A carp more than two feet long rolled and splashed in the murk.
Surely, this was how life began. Some large fish, unable to breathe in the volcano-fouled waters of a prehistoric river, had risen repeatedly to gasp for oxygen at the surface, finally crawling desperately up on the land to find air.
Dissolved oxygen is a fundamental measure of a river’s health. The terrible smell of the water here and the anguished rolling of the carp confirmed the formal chemical analysis made five years ago by the Michigan Water Resources Commission: the mouth of the Rouge contains less than one-fifth the dissolved oxygen needed to sustain aquatic life.
The water actually flows upriver in this channel, then down, as though uncertain of its course. Old boats sat rotting behind the sagging houses of Delray on the right shoreline. Incredibly, just beyond the second of ten bridges that span the Industrial Rouge, a spring bubbled out of the hillside. Hidden from a busy roadway by a board fence and decades of debris, it bubbled merrily into the river, the last of the Thousand Fountains of Springwells.
This is an eerie, still stretch of the Rouge. Immense, ruined cement buildings, abandoned to the pigeons, rise on the right. Great mountains of slag rise on the left, on Zug Island. In the distance, black furnaces silently belch smoke into the sky. There are no people here, only the desolate cry of gulls. The shorelines are held in place by broken paving stones, bricks, chunks of concrete and cinder block. Here, recycled to curb the Rouge, are the shattered pieces of an older Detroit, the shards of historic churches and streets and sidewalks and homes.
A lone mallard exploded off the water and flew toward the towering tubes that step up and over another channel leading from the Rouge to the Detroit River: the Short-Cut Canal. Henry Ford had it dug at the beginning of this century to give ships easier access to his factories upstream.
Ford’s Short-Cut Canal transformed one-and-a-half miles of the winding Rouge into a polluted backwater, created a 324-acre industrial island named for Samuel Zug, a founder of the Michigan Republican Party, and opened up the river to ocean-going ships. In 1977, 3,031 vessels carried more than twelve million tons through the canal. Even now, two powerful tugs were pulling the Koh Eun, of Inchon, Korea, up the canal.
The mountains of coal and slag began to give way to the tank farms of oil companies and the dull red hills of iron scraps. A giant magnetic crane plunged its clawless, scoopless pod into the piles, switched on, and magically lifted a ton or so of shavings and filings to fill the waiting trucks and trains. The Koh Eun, empty and riding very high in the water, took its place beside the other foreign ships waiting hungrily for the red scrap iron.
Interstate 75 soared high over the river on the only bridge that does not have to be lifted to allow ships to pass. Swallows swooped from mud-jar nests under the piers. On the west shore, the lost graveyard of double-pup tankers appeared. Banned from the highways they tried to torch, the scorched hulls squatted on the green lawns of an oil company tank farm like fat, black beetles.
Further up the river was a colorful cluster of tugboats, the Kinsale, the Shannon, the Donegal and others, white and green and decorated with shamrocks. The Gaelic Tugboat Company, explained tankerman Roy Chance, 23, moves barges of coal tar and fuel oil to industries on the Rouge, sometimes sailing as far as Buffalo or Duluth.
Fordson Island was next. Like Zug Island, it was created by Henry Ford, this time to provide a turnaround point for the ships that visited his factories. Since then, a newer and larger turning basin has been dredged on the doorstep of the Ford Rouge plant. Today, Fordson Island is a ghost, dusted white by powder from Plant Number One of the Detroit Lime Company and surrounded by a silted moat. Dead carp slosh in its weed-choked waters.
It was exactly noon when I tied the canoe to a tree at the place where Baby Creek had once entered the Rouge. Farmer James Baby had stood in his fields and watched the 150-ton brig President Adams slide down this creek from a lake and a shipyard where Woodmere Cemetery stands today. Baby Creek has disappeared into the sewers of Dearborn. A small stagnant pond in Patton Park is all that remains.
I ate lunch in a perfect oasis, a broad field of thistles and clover and wild morning glory and grape, of grass and grains and blossoming flowers. The seven-foot riverbank had been rip-rapped by pieces of pillar and column, broken chunks of carved block and numbered stones. I was looking for a clue to this ruined temple when the Donegal stood out to mid-river with an authoritative toot.
Only twenty per cent of the water beneath the tug had actually come down the river. Eighty per cent had flowed from the settling ponds, sluiceways, tailraces and aerators of the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge plant, a sprawling complex of rust-red buildings, smoking chimneys and roaring machines less than a half mile away. To dilute the chemicals and cool its furnaces, the Ford Rouge plant needs 650 million gallons of water a day. Since the Rouge River provides only 100 million gallons of water daily, the plant drinks it directly from the Detroit River through a three-mile straw. It then flushes the used water into the Rouge, multiplying the river’s flow six times or more.
From the Rouge plant, and dozens of other industries along the river, comes a mind-boggling load of pollutants each year, including: 130 million pounds of oil and grease, 124 million pounds of suspended solids, one million pounds of ammonia, 30,000 pounds (fifteen tons!) of cyanide and 24,000 pounds of iron. Nevertheless, industrial polluters rank a distant second among the villains ruining the Rouge. Sewers, I learned, rank first.
I pulled the canoe against the far shore of a turning basin in front of the plant, beneath an apple tree that bowed over the water with the weight of hundreds of green apples. Giant carp pushed through the shallow murky water like bulls, shouldering waves ahead of themselves and sometimes thrashing violently. Thick clusters of grapes hung from vines along the shore.
Across the basin, an open door on the side of the electric furnace permitted a glimpse into a sinner’s view of Hell. Flame boiled and leaped. Trucks raced up to feed the demon coal, while other trucks scurried away with smoking loads of slag. Crushers ground the slag to dust and conveyors carried the grit across the Rouge to build new mountains in Detroit.
More than eighty Michigan rivers have hills and meadows and forests and trout. Only one can boast mountain ranges of salt, coal and recycled glass, of gypsum, slag and gravel.
And The Rouge Is By No Measure The Worst River In Michigan.
Water quality in the Rouge, the State of Michigan told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this year, ranks ahead of the Flint, Saginaw, Grand and Clinton rivers. Even “clean” rivers, as bitter sportsmen have learned, can be poisoned by toxic chemicals, heavy metals and gene-altering pesticides. The Michigan Department of Health has warned that fish, any fish, from major stretches of the Pine, Tittabawassee, Chippewa, Saginaw, Shiawassee and Kalamazoo rivers should be eaten “NOT AT ALL.” The warning declares, “Children, and women who expect to bear children, should [also] avoid eating [fish] from… Saginaw Bay, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River, Lake Erie, Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron [and tributaries]...”
“Water quality is like a blood sample,” explained Steve Buda in the Comprehensive Studies Section of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. “A patient who is told his calcium is this high, his potassium is that low and his blood sugar is at point X will still say: ‘Yes but how’s my blood, Doc?’”
The blood of the Rouge rated a sixty-two on a Water Quality Index (WQI) scale that ranged from zero (“Cleveland’s Cuyahoga,” suggested Buda, recalling the only river in America that not only caught fire – but actually burned for several hours) to 100 (“Rocky Mountain high”). The Water Quality Index measures seven river ingredients but gives greatest weight to fecal coliform counts and dissolved oxygen levels as the most critical parameters of water quality.
WQI readings, of course, are annual averages and do not clearly reflect seasonal lows or unusually polluted stretches of a river or stream.
Just above the Ford plant turning basin, and for all of the next four miles, the Rouge River is at its worst. A 1978 study by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments reported a WQI of thirty-seven on the stretch, the lowest reading anywhere in Michigan. The volume of warm water and waste water from the Ford complex is so great it actually improves the quality of the river by sixteen points, to fifty-three at its mouth, by diluting the pollution.
Graceful bridges and drooping willows still arch over the gentle bends of the Rouge in this area of Dearborn, but the river isn’t there to see them.
It flows instead in a V-shaped, concrete ditch – dammed and diverted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Here, in the very heart of the Ford Motor Company empire, the smell of the river is most like sewage. Clumps of ugly, green-black guck, fringed with tendrils, float heavily in the water. The banks rise like tilted freeways to a shoreline shaped for flood control and clothed in soft grasses.
Trains from Greenfield Village tooted to me from another era as the rust-red reflecting glass of the Hyatt Regency loomed on my right. The thought of cold beer and air-conditioned accommodations tempted for only a moment.
Just under Michigan Avenue, the river changed dramatically. Nine miles from the old mouth at the Detroit River, the first trees and bushes and mudbanks appeared. A bright yellow bird with black markings flashed a greeting, a turtle plopped off a log and two muskrats swam along the shore.
It Was A Deceptive Picture.
The ooze at the bottom of the river here contains the heavier chunks that have fallen out of the sewage wastes of millions of Detroit-area citizens. It is a heavy, disgusting sediment that gives off methane bubbles which rise to pop silently, greasily on the grey-brown surface of the river.
The Lower Rouge River, a small tributary, slipped in oilily on the left, with hardly a ripple. Rising in the hills of Washtenaw County’s Superior Township, the Lower had already traveled down through Canton Township, Wayne, Westland, Inkster, Dearborn Heights and Dearborn, picking up pollutants all the way. For the last eight miles, it had slid past sludge banks composed of sewage solids.
Still, this looked like a restful part of the Rouge. Huge oaks, willows, poplars and elms canopied the river. The sounds of traffic and industry were gone. Here, for the first time, it was possible to hear the whisper of the river’s current and the song of bobwhites.
The only strange sound was a slowly increasing murmur that sounded very much like, but could not possibly be…
A Waterfall!
The river tumbled magnificently from an outcropping of white limestone, a miniature Niagara framed by the arching branches of green trees. It was perfect. Too perfect.
This was Henry Ford’s personal waterfall, constructed by imported artisans as a private source of pleasure and electric power for his 7,000-acre estate, Fairlane.
On April 17, 1947, the Rouge spilled over its banks here and flooded Ford’s powerhouse, cutting off all electricity. That night, Henry Ford died as he had been born, by the flickering light of candles and lamps.
The Rouge could be vengeful, I marveled, as I hauled gear and canoe up a stone wall and through the woods to the shore above the falls, pausing only a second in the miasma of mosquitoes to admire a milky white puffball that grew almost as big as a volleyball on a rotting black stump.
Silence, almost complete silence, marked the next hours as the river ran through the bushes and tangles, dense woods and swamps.
Yet only a hundred yards away on either side, people played softball and picnicked, jogged, bicycled and walked dogs in the first of many beautiful parks which line seventy per cent of the Rouge River. The meadows and picnic grounds might as well have been in Manitoba. Climbing the greased banks was extremely difficult and, except for an occasional curious youngster, the park-goers never approached the river. The Middle Rouge entered next, on the left like all but one of the other tributaries.
This branch of the main river starts polluted, thanks to a daily million-gallon infusion of effluents from the Walled Lake-Novi sewage treatment plant. It actually gets cleaner as heavier wastes fall out in the lakes near Northville, Plymouth and Livonia, then sickens again as it comes through Westland, Garden City and Dearborn Heights. The last twelve miles of the Middle Rouge are characterized by sludge banks, high concentrations of lead and zinc in the sediment, high bacteria levels and other river illnesses.
Looking like thick, soured cocoa, the Middle Rouge mixed before me with the main river’s grey-brown waters in the heart of a swampy wilderness. The only other witness was a bedraggled muskrat, sitting on a muddy tree limb chewing bark.
These were hard miles in a canoe. The river-blocking tangles were more frequent, and slick mud waited at every portage.
Just north of Ann Arbor Trail, where I located an overnight camping spot, I was inching down a steep bank when my feet shot out and I began a headfirst fall toward the vengeful [sic]
I heard in that instant the voice of the Water Resources Commission official who said:
“Uh, we classify Michigan waters as Total Body Contact, which means swimming; Partial Body Contact, which means some boating and fishing; and No Body Contact. The Rouge is definitely a No Body Contact river.”
A chart of confirmed Rouge River additives flashed before my eyes:
Ammonia, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium (“causing adverse psychological and other deleterious effects when ingested”), chlorine, chromium, copper, cyanide, iron, lead, mercury, nickel, the phenol family of bad tastes, bad smells and bad vibes, the pesticides – aldrin-dieldrin, chlordane, DDT, demeton, endosulfan, endrin, guthion, heptachlor, lindane, malathion, methyoxychlor [sic], mirex, parathion, toxaphene – and of course the PCBs, selenium, silver, sulfide and zinc.
Yet none of these chemicals had befouled the river as terribly as combined sewer overflows. This single problem, SEMCOG declared last year, had made the Rouge “a serious health hazard.”
“If you fall in,” a sewage plant supervisor had warned, “for God’s sake, don’t open your mouth to call for help.” The owner of my canoe had put it this way: “The problem you’re going to have if you fall in is dissolving, not drowning.”
Desperately, I dove at the canoe. It shot out from the bank under my weight, dipping two-thirds of me in the river and shipping exactly 971 red bandannafuls of the Rouge – just enough to soak my camera and maps and fresh water jugs.
Late in the evening, I found an old dam on the river, now a riffle of a broken rock, and a shoreline stepped with giant stone blocks. Seven times, tangles of trees had forced me to the slimy shore. Just north of Warren Avenue, sixteen young boys swung fearfully on a long rope over a polluted pool in the river. Letting go was unthinkable.
Twelve hours and fourteen miles from the mouth of the river, I pitched a tent in the trees at the edge of Rouge Park and washed with hot water and soap in a community building at the corner of Spinoza and Sawyer in Detroit.
Much refreshed, I settled down to sleep as three small rabbits practiced standing starts on the lawn in front of my tent, and a downy woodpecker drilled for grubs in a nearby tree.
As I dozed, David Kimpel, who lives in Livonia, was just taking the beeper off his belt and preparing for bed. Dozens of times in the past year, the beeper’s buzz has jolted him awake in the wee hours of morning or ruined his dinner or weekend. Kimpel works for a firm that is trying to determine the precise impact of combined sewer overflows on the Rouge so that better facilities can be designed. When the beeper goes off, Kimpel races to predesignated sites along the river to check testing equipment and prepare ice packs in which water samples are rushed to laboratories for analysis. Tied securely to a bridge, he has leaned out over the turbulent floodwaters of the Rouge to collect samples by the light of lightning bolts.
“I’ve seen it come out black, like black coffee,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the memory. “It doesn’t just bubble up like a sink overflowing, either. I’ve seen those sewers shoot across the entire river, washing out the bank on the other side.
“You can spit in some of those sewers and they’ll back up,” Kimpel warned. “I would not be on the river during a storm event.”
It was shortly after one a.m., just about the time Kimpel’s beeper went off, that I woke to hear heavy rain pounding my tent. Rain, which cleans the air and refreshes the spirit, is the trigger for environmental disaster in the Rouge.
As recently as thirty or forty years ago, rain splashed down through great forests of trees and bushes, trickled down through the grass and percolated deep in the soil, making its way to the Rouge days, weeks, or even months later.
Now, rain falls on hundreds of square miles of freeways and rooftops, sidewalks and parking lots – and rockets through the gutters and sewers to the Rouge in hours. In minutes.
Like Boston and New York, and Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and many other cities, Detroit has just one set of pipes to carry water to the treatment plant. Six days a week, the plant cheerfully accepts the most terrible pollutants through these tunnels and, with uneven but increasing success, transforms them so that reasonably clean water pours into the Detroit River.
On the seventh day, it rains.
The flow of water to the sewage plant, even in rains of less than half an inch, leaps spectacularly as the storm water flushes quickly into the underground drains. No treatment plant in the world can handle such a flow on short notice. The storm water, now mixed with the pickling fluids from industrial acid vats, the garbage and toilet wastes of a million homes and assorted salts, oils and poisons, backs up in the sewers.
To keep our basements dry, emergency overflow gates larger and heavier than barn doors swing open under the great pressure and spill the whole boiling mess into the Rouge.
It happens forty times a year. Sometimes fifty. And it happens at any one, or all, of thirty-nine combined sewer overflows that line the Rouge and its tributaries.
Storm water and sewer overflows, every year, give the Rouge:
Ninety-four per cent of the disgusting ooze that sits on the bottom eating oxygen and burping methane…
Ninety per cent of the phosphorous…
Fifty-six per cent of the nitrogen…
Fifty-three per cent (71,000 metric tons!) of the suspended solids…
And, of course, all of the shit.
Record floods produce stunning increases in the flow of the Rouge. The spring flood that pulled Henry Ford’s plug in 1947, for example, was eclipsed on June 26, 1968, when the river’s flow at Plymouth Road rose from 113 cubic feet per second to 13,000 cubic feet per second.
People living along polluted waters generally pray for a good gullywasher every once in a while, something to scour the river bottom and carry away the wastes to some poor sod downstream, to Lake Erie, for example, or Cleveland. The Rouge is past such help. Each flood in this river merely deposits more filth. The tangled trees decrease the already languid flow. Somewhere, engineers and cement companies are dreaming and plotting to enclose it formally. A sewer, at last.
It would cost billions of dollars to build a separate system of tunnels, and the sewage plant would still have to treat the storm water. Basic standards of human health and decency, and federal law, now require the treatment of storm water because it picks up an enormous load of pollutants on the streets and alleys and rooftops of the cities it washes.
Antenore Davanzo, supervisor at the Detroit Sewage Treatment Plant, battles the problem from a central monitoring room in the Water Board Building. Trained operators, like WACs in a war room, read the messages of blinking lights and chattering printers.
They report not on the course and speed of German bomber formations, but on the rising levels in sewers, the exact location of rainfall in the metropolitan area and which overflow points are approaching pressure levels that will open flood doors. Remote control gates can be opened from this room, and potential overflows can be diverted into still-empty tunnels beneath ground.
Davanzo took a group of VIPs to the monster overflow gates at the Jeffries Freeway bridge one day to show how effectively his system controls overflow. He gestured grandly at the gates to make his point – then saw to his horror that his monitored gate was shut while the other was spewing sewage and, spectacularly, 10,000 gallons of red paint into the river.
Embarrassing moments aside, Davanzo feels the system has located and begun to make use of about 150 million gallons of storage space. It’s a small beginning on a storm water problem which can approach two to three billion gallons in every good rain.
“When the combined sewer system was built, it was assumed that overflows would be infrequent, brief and diluted,” Davanzo said. “All three premises were wrong.
“We paved too much of the land with the development of all the suburbs, and now we get overflow almost every time it rains. Some of the overflows are still spilling thirty-six hours after a rain.
“As for the dilution effect,” he said, “some of the overflows are worse than raw sewage.”
Davanzo’s dream is a series of immense cement caverns below Rouge Park where the overflows could be stored for a few days until the plant was ready to handle them. Despite dreams and federal court orders and increased bills for consumers, the final solution seems more distant than a McDonald’s on the moon.
My search for the Source of the Rouge, for all these reasons, began its second day much later than planned. The underlying philosophy of this delay was: “Let the heavy pieces settle.”
The current was much stronger today, more and more Insert two photos, captioned “Unreliable source: A deep blue, quiet lake in Bloomfield Hills which Pisor dismissed as a mere pretender as the Rouge’s source. Inset: White hills of the Rouge. Pisor paddled past many of these man-made piles, of many materials – gypsum, salt, limestone, recycled glass, blocking tangles of trees appeared, and the rain-slicked banks were greasier than ever. Mother mallards tried desperately to lead me away from their brood, flailing the water with the classic broken wing trick while their fuzzy babies peeped and peeped and then popped – Oh, no! – underwater to hide.
Most of the overflow gates, some of them fourteen feet in diameter, were closed as I struggled up the river. One, however, a modest-looking sewer that pointed up instead of out, was building itself a peninsula of pale grey excrement. The bubbling flow of thick, oily milk from the sewer had cut new little channels of slime through the mound of wastes.
At the golf course at Rouge Park, I suddenly hallucinated a man standing in the middle of the river up to his armpits. A creel hung high on his chest and he was walking, probing the river bottom with a stick, every bit a Two-Hearted River trout fisherman, lost, irretrievably lost, in a stream of poison. He came toward me, ho-ho-hoing with a broad grin, and pulled the canoe through difficult rapids to calmer waters.
He spoke then, and revealed himself as the first of a common species on the Rouge: a professional gatherer of shanked golf balls. More serious than most, he used waders and sophisticated equipment, and maintained a tight collection schedule at good (golfers read “bad”) spots along the river.
I passed him later in the day as I glided downstream, defeated by the tangles south of Outer Drive and searching for a place to take my canoe out of the water.
One of the amenities of the Rouge, conspicuously lacking on most Michigan rivers, is a pay telephone within a five-minute walk of any spot on the river. I called for the family car at Plymouth Road, then lay on the grass to watch men and women in white hats, white shirts, white pants, white skirts and white shoes bowl on the lawns. It took only three minutes to lash the canoe to the roof of our car, but a pair of police officers arrived just as the knot was being tied.
Did I know, one asked sternly, that my car was on the grass?
Impossibly perfect and impeccably polite answers occurred to me the next morning as I stood on the high ground above the Rouge at Outer Drive, in the midst of an old piece of farmland dotted with apple trees that had somehow escaped development.
The canoe had carried me nineteen miles in two days. From here, it would be by foot.
Just north of the Jeffries Freeway, the scene of Davanzo’s humbling, the Upper Rouge River squirmed around a mudbank and quietly joined the river. It looked tired, and dirty, from its long trip through Farmington Hills, Redford Township and Livonia.
The river seemed to change here, on the threshold of Detroit’s Eliza Howell Park, looking faintly cleaner. Despite huge logjams, including one that was locked in place by an orange Volkswagen, it flowed deep and broad and brown. The paths were wide and beaten and some were covered with wood chips. A second rope swing appeared, and black raspberries ripened in the sun. And here were the first backyards that had been mowed all the way to the river’s edge.
Charles Bennett, a forty-four-year-old millwright, lives here on one of Detroit’s most unusual lots – thirty-five feet wide and 389 feet deep. He recalled the Clean Up the Rouge Committee crews that came through here in the early 1970s, pulling cars and cash registers, grocery carts and tree snags, business machines and even a body out of the river. His oldest son talked about rafting trips, then shivered when he remembered the fiery bite of the “stinger weeds” that line the banks.
Mrs. Edna Gaynor now prepares meals in what used to be her one-room cabin along the Rouge, where she has lived since 1923. “It’s polluted,” she shouted through the storm door of the handsome bungalow which sprouted from that single room. “When I moved here it was fine,” she went on. “I have five children, and they all learned how to swim in the river.”
Mrs. Gaynor, 82, smiled as she recalled the popular Polish picnics held across the river every Sunday in the early years, “with a band and dancing and everything.”
Her oldest son was killed on Iwo Jima, and her other children are long grown and gone. She stood in the door waving when I left her front porch.
“It stinks!” declared Mrs. Manola Logan, who moved to the river in 1940. “Once we saw two trucks with ‘Industrial Waste’ written on the side emptying big hoses in the river, up near McNichols. We called the police and they took our names, but nobody ever came.”
Green Lawn Cemetery’s well-tended gardens and swards mask an almost impassable jungle along the river. Still, in the deepest part of the woods, a tree had been felled recently to bridge the stream. On the far side, a high branch dangled a rope swing over a deep hole. The footprints and skid marks on the muddy bank had not been made by otters and were quite fresh. Here was the first swimming hole on the Rouge.
Henry Tullius, 73, was working the deep water of the Redford Municipal Golf Course with a telescoping ball retriever when he paused to talk about the river.
“I’ve been up on the hill there for forty years,” he said. “We used to catch perch and walleye, but now the only thing you see are little bitty goldfish.”
Water broke musically over a small shattered dam at Seven Mile, shushing the squeals of young children and the squeaks of old rides at Edgewater Amusement Park. Once again the paths were broad and clean. A gold retriever came down the opposite bank to drink, then stood in the water to cool. For the first time in twenty-two miles, I was tempted to wet a line in the Rouge. And I did.
It was on this very pleasant, winding stretch of the river that the first intact fence appeared. All previous barriers had been snipped, cut, removed or bowled over by earlier explorers. The Stalag-style, eight-foot hurricane fence topped with three strands of barbed wire firmly declared the privacy of the Bonnie Brook (Can you believe it? Bonnie Brook? The Rouge?) Golf Club. Members looked up from gimme putts as I crossed the court in hiking gear, and their icy glares followed me into the woods.
The disgusting and dangerous gully called Evans Ditch now entered on the right, the only tributary to do so. It was shallow enough to wade, but the grey mud on the banks and the memory of a SEMCOG study reporting soggy toilet paper in the ditch during storms made me detour to a crossing point. Carrying engineer poo from Lawrence Institute and Action News residue from WXYZ-TV, Evans Ditch trickles into the Rouge. Except during storms. A DNR study in 1973 recorded a rise from two cubic feet per second to sixty-five cubic feet per second during a rainfall of four-tenths of an inch. The flow boomed to 903 cubic feet per second in the 1968 flood.
Skirting the golf course along Eight Mile, just before rejoining the main river, I reached into the tall grass and picked up a Top Flite 7 in mint condition. I had learned from experts.
In the short stretch past Telegraph Road, the underbrush was so thick it blackened the sun. I suddenly broke through to a terrible seared place on the ground, a lava flow or napalm burn, with stunted weeds cringing at its edges. It came down the hill to the river from a road-salt storage yard owned by the Wayne County Road Commission.
North of Eight Mile, where the river swings in a great westward bend for two miles before returning to cross under Telegraph at Ten Mile, the stinging nettles began to take their toll. My legs seemed immersed in fireweed. Inch-long needles tore at my shirt and face.
Eve Havard (like Harvard without the “r”, she said) looked up calmly from her two fishing lines when I staggered out of the underbrush behind the Hidden Valley apartments, where she works. She fishes every weekend in Canada, and had just discovered the Rouge.
“This is the one that goes down to Ford’s?” she exclaimed when she learned its name. “My, my.
“We call this a bayou where I come from,” she went on, checking the worm below one of her bobbers. “It was flowing real nice yesterday and I caught two rock bass. Today, I’m only getting little ones, and crawdads.”
Behind me lay twenty-seven miles of the Rouge on the morning of the fourth day, when I walked down a slope at Beech Road in Southfield and onto a beautifully manicured lawn that was so broad the house was not in view. It was a wondrous beginning for a morning of magnificent lawns, landscaped woodland paths – and acres of impregnable thickets of thornbush, grape vines and the omnipresent, omnipotent stinging nettles.
I paused just south of Nine Mile where a small tributary entered on the left. This branch had come down from the parking lot of the Benchmark, where I had borrowed the canoe. Parting a curtain of mosquitoes and plunging once more into the dense briars, I thought about how easy this trip would have been had the river been cleared of snags.
The city of Southfield does clear the river each year, and one of the most enthusiastic workers is Jon Heinrich, a Rouge resident who drives to work at the Ford Motor Company each day, past “that, that atrocity, the cement gully” that cradles the river in Dearborn.
“I have it in my mind,” says Heinrich, “that some day I can go down in my backyard with a fly rod and catch my breakfast.” He serves on the Southfield Planning Commission and city’s Watershed Council, and every June, “as soon as it’s warm enough,” he wades down the Rouge with other volunteers to cut and clear the trash.
THIS IS THE LAND OF THE FIRST FARMER ON THE ROUGE – AND THE LAST.
Southfield is rethinking construction of a thirteen-foot storm drain that would dump into the Rouge. The city has enacted stern silt and runoff controls, and has begun to buy up large sections of the floodplain. Parks, nature preserves and “a canoeing system” are also under consideration – and so is a lake on the site where a mill pond powered a grist mill in the 1800s. Possible Lake is tucked into a low-lying, broad valley between Telegraph and Northwestern, a natural preserve filled with strutting pheasants and the songs of red-winged blackbirds, bobwhites, cardinals and meadowlarks.
I was sitting there crunching peanuts and raisins and M & Ms, thinking of a beer at the Hilton which rose like a mirage above the trees, when I heard a great “Awwwk!”
A Great Awk? Was it possible that this strange bird, long believed extinct, could have found sanctuary in a forgotten byway of the Rouge?
Or could it be some exotic specimen from the Detroit Zoo, just down the road? I had grown up in Pleasant Ridge, the zoo’s nearest neighbor, and it was not uncommon to spy a peacock or parrot in the yard. A few weeks earlier, a Buick had killed a wolverine on Ten Mile as it raced from the zoo to Pleasant
I crept silently through the thistles and saw-weed, ignoring their caress of fire, stalking, creeping, closer, closer. Just as I reached to part the last weeds, the loudest “AWWWWWK” of all rent the air. Waving stalks of grass marked where the bird had fled.
I resisted the lure of the Hilton by pulling brass and silver spinners and a green wiggly thing with white rubber feelers through an unfished pool between the lanes of the Lodge. Shaarey Zedek temple loomed like the prow of an ark above the river. Just beyond the temple I startled a turtle that had startled me. It was huge, as big as a garbage can lid, and flat, with a long neck. It was uniquely adapted to life in the Rouge: the Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife identified it as the spiny soft shell, the only species of turtle that can breathe through its anus.
Hundred-thousand-dollar homes cantilevered over the river forced me into the streets of a new subdivision. I walked between two unfinished homes and found myself on a deserted country road on a bluff high above the place where the brook from Franklin enters, just behnd the Tel-Twelve Mall.
I fished again, above Twelve Mile, because the meadow beside the river was soft and green, and because minnows swam in the shallows. None rose to my skillful casts.
The river cut through a corner of Bingham Farms, behind Detroit Country Day School, and into Beverly Hills.
Precisely where the river crossed under Lahser Road I had a flashback to 1954, to a shrieking madman who had chased me through the woods with a heavy wooden paddle at this exact spot. I was a pledge on Hell Night, an initiate in a Ferndale High School fraternity that required new members to run a gauntlet from Nine Mile to Maple at midnight. I had run in terror through these very bushes, and I vividly remembered the microsecond that I had hung suspended in the pitch-black night, puzzled, before falling into the Rouge.
At Evergreen Road I found a perfect campsite on a patch of sunlit grass on a bend in the river, just below a ten-foot waterfall. Someone had built a handsome brick fireplace and gazebo here, but it was vandalized now and partly flooded by a spring the color of rusted iron. Above the falls was a series of large ponds, the power source of mills that had vanished from memory, more backyards and fences of the Birmingham Golf Club.
The fifth day began at Northlawn, at the southern tip of Birmingham’s Linden Park, the very place where a sample of water taken at 5:20 one July morning in 1973 revealed 4,200 fecal coliform. It was still a No Body Contact river.
Beautiful parks, wood-chipped paths and spreading willows line the Rouge in Birmingham. It is here that one learns the bitter truth of sewage: like perfume, the faintest scent is enough to arouse passion. Still, the river begins to chuckle here for the first time in thirty-eight miles, and gravel banks become more common.
North of Maple, the river makes a sharp turn away from the seven-step waterfall and broad lake which grace a tributary from Cranbrook and Brookside and Bloomfield Hills. Then the Rouge slips almost unnoticed through downtown Birmingham, hidden in a deep ravine behind the city’s churches and shops.
Don Wuerful loves it.
“I can throw a stone from my front porch into the parking lot at Jacobson’s and I’m only a couple hundred yards from Woodward,” he said. “Yet he Yet here we are, just above an oxbow in the river, with a wilderness view both summer and winter.”
The next miles were backyards and private neighborhood parks, a broad valley of green lawns and tiny bridges that had once been a vast dahlia farm. In a garden of wildflowers, beside a one-, two-, three-step waterfall built to make it a lovely place to listen as well as to look, I met Pat O’Brien and Charlie McGarity, “almost fifteen.” They recommended hot dogs or baloney for bait, but added: “You only catch already-caught fish.”
Walter Cornelius of Troy remembered when there were trees along the river bent unnaturally close to the ground – the ribs of hogans. “The Indians used to camp along here,” he said. “I found a fine arrowhead in the soil just a few weeks ago.”
He recommended the pond behind a neighbor’s house where, he said, a friend had caught a pickerel while waiting for the corn to roast one day. I caught several bluegill and a fourteen-foot willow branch there, and snag-hooked a giant carp which took nine minutes to snap my line. Success at last.
Aging farm dams turn the river broad and deep again just before Long Lake Road. There was an old mound here, covered with tall oaks and maples and the whispering of lost tribes. A large hawk rose from the bleached arms of a dead elm, cried harshly and flew away.
For six years, Tom Malburg has worked these fields, planting corn in early May and beans in June. True to the Rouge, he works for the Ford Motor Company, doing his chores at night and on weekends, and splitting his four-week vacation so he can plant and harvest.
“If we could swing it full-time, farming, we’d do it in a minute,” he said, “but 300 acres is nothing these days.”
His “we” seemed to include the tractors and trucks, the farmhouse and milksheds, the acres and crops, but especially the huge farm machines parked in the barn. “There’s a lot of money tied up in the iron,” he said, shaking his head, grinning and snapping the top on a cold beer.
Malburg was born into a farming family of ten children in Utica, spent his childhood Saturdays looking agog at the strange crowds in Eastern Market where his dad sold vegetables, and took a job with the Ford tractor division because he loves farming.
“We bitch and complain all the time, but we do it year after year,” he laughed. “It gets in your blood and it’s hard to get away. I tried for two years, and look at me now.”
As the only farmer in Troy, Malburg encounters unique difficulties. The nearest elevator is fifty miles away, in Richmond. Suburban cowboys in four-wheel-drive vehicles love to do wheelies and spinouts in his fields. Once, as he was “cleaning centers,” a final run with the cultivator for fastidious farmers who abhor even a single weed between rows, he came upon hundreds of marijuana plants lovingly planted in the exact middle of his cornfield. Young boys built a playhouse in his standing corn one fall, using cut stalks and chicken wire for the roof and walls. He discovered it at eleven one night when the wire wrecked his combine.
He laughed and finished a second beer as he told the stories.
Let’s go get the good stuff,” he said, leading the way to a bachelor’s kitchen in an old farmhouse – and a twelve-pack of Coor’s.
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