This story first appeared in Monthly Detroit magazine in October 1979. The author is Robert L. Pisor, who passed away in July 2017
The grin was tighter in his tanned face when he talked about the future. Hilly Acres Farm once sold milk and ice cream at an outlet further down the Rouge, in Birmingham, on the spot where Jacobson’s now stands. Malburg leased the land first from the retired owner, then an estate, a bank and, most recently, a development company, Biltmore Properties.
“They put sewers in on the seventy acres across the river in April, and they’ll start moving on the rest next spring,” he said. “We understand how farming ties up the property they spent millions for, but it doesn’t make us any less bitter.”
Then Malburg laughed, popped another Coor’s, extended permission to camp and started to tell about the time the Troy police asked him to be more quiet as he raced to harvest his last twenty acres of corn before they were claimed by an approaching blizzard. When I saw him last, he was cleaning centers by the light of the setting sun.
Hot and hazy dawned the sixth and final day, with forty-four miles of the Rouge behind me. In the first hour I watched six young Canadian geese take flying lessons from their parents on the lake at Northfield Hills. New backyards came down to the narrowing stream on the left, and untended meadows awaited the bulldozer on the right.
Ahead loomed the low, square tunnel under I-75, an all-fours crawl to the open country beyond. Thick, humming clouds of mosquitoes – Guardians of the Source – rose hungrily in the wet brush of morning.
The river was tame here, ditched by farmers for drainage, but as it turned to the west it found its course once more, rippling beneath low, bushy tangles. Survey stakes, piles of fill dirt and signs of new subdivisions were everywhere, and rows of sewer pipe sat open-mouthed, awaiting their turn to dump in the Rouge.
Margaret Mehney lives by the dam at Lake Charnwood, a spring-fed pond just above a Troy nature preserve on the river. She has an artesian well in her backyard, an iron-colored spring that has flowed steadily for the sixteen years she has lived there.
She brought out a scrapbook of pictures of her family, old floods and great catches in the lake, dozens of ten-inch perch and almost-trophy bass. “It’s not quite as clear now, with the drainages from Charnwood Hills One, Charnwood Hills Two, Adams Woods, Chapel Hills…” Mrs. Mehney said, her voice trailing off.
The small gurgling stream above lake Charnwood emerged from deep swamp west of Adams Road. Twice I tried to break a trail into the bog and twice more I tried to find the stream from inside the development at Adams Woods. It was impassable.
Determined to walk down the mile or so of river that I had lost, I went next door to the corner of Square Lake and Squirrel roads, to the deep, clear lake behind the Bloomfield Hills Academy that is alleged to be the source of the Rouge. It is not. No water flowed over the tiny dam that held the lake.
I walked around the shore of the lake, found a stagnant drainage ditch and followed it to a rust-colored rill that trickled down between two houses. There in front of 2826 Masefield, an iron-tinged seep pretended to be the birthplace of a river.
It was clear now why the French, and undoubtedly the Indians who had used it as a path to the straits, called this river “Red.” Like all the other springs on the Rouge, this seep rad red with iron – but it was not the True Source.
I headed downriver again, passing Roy Casey and his wife as they worked in an acre of community gardens. They confirmed that the Rouge was intermittent in summer below Academy Lake. The unusually high, strong fence around the gardens, Casey explained, was to keep out the… buffalo.
The Bloomfield Hills school district owns and operates an educational “farm” at this corner, complete with courses in quilting and churning, soil science and the ways of horses and cows and ducks and sheep. And buffalo.
When I found the pipes under I-75 dry of water, I knew the source of the Rouge lay hidden in the swamp behind Adams Woods. I returned to Adams Road and prepared to force my way in.
It was midafternoon of the sixth day when I pulled on long wool pants, a long-sleeved shirt and a wide-brimmed hat. The kiss of some poisoned plant had raised clusters of bubbles on the back of my hands. The last drops of 6-12 squeezed from a plastic bottle.
My last roll of film was gone, and I pushed into the swamp with nothing but a five-foot staff.
The tiny stream wound aimlessly in here, fed by springs and seeps. It burbled wetly beneath my feet, hidden from view by thick clumps of grass and grain and bogweed that stood taller than my head. The last sounds and sights of the suburbs slipped away.
Three times the staff, probing blindly ahead for firm ground, slipped smoothly into the much for more than three feet without finding bottom.
I crashed through fallen tangles, small gardens of skunk cabbage, thickets of thorn and tiny tributaries only five feet long. I stopped occasionally to check a stream fragment for flow by dropping a seed on its surface.
And then I saw it – a tiny place in the woods.
Several trees had fallen across the stream. Above the debris, the water stood still and stagnant, covered with a film of dust and small traces of natural petroleum. Below the tangle, from a place on the bank that was stained a deep rust-red, a spring flowed into the water, giving it life.
Raccoon tracks marked the spot, and there! A tiny flash of color, hardly three inches long. A trout! Waiting for the resurrection of a river.
Here in the swamp below Adams Woods, protected by a sucking quagmire and vigilant hordes of mosquitoes, the Rouge River takes its first deep drink of iron-tinged water and begins its trip to the sea.
Here is the True Source of the Rouge.
