A Legacy Project

I just re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And was struck by the fact that, at multiple points in the story, Huck and Jim actually get in the water. They swim, they float, they bathe in the river. And they are unharmed. I’ve crossed the Mississippi multiple times. Looking from Lacrosse to the Minnesota bank of the river, you can see a swimming area. And you think: That would be the mother of all swims. One day I would like to do that. But in lower Wisconsin, in Illinois and Iowa, the Mississippi does not look inviting. It’s a ruined river. 

I grew up next to a ruined river. The Tittabawassee was wide and smelly. In subzero temperatures, it did not freeze. It steamed, thanks to Dow Chemical, eight miles upstream, which used it to cool industrial processes. Nevertheless, it was our river. And the river flats was where we lived our Huck Finn days, fishing, learning to smoke, climbing trees, starting fires, digging holes, making forts, behaving and misbehaving. No one, to my knowledge, ever went in the water–on purpose, that is. On lazy summer days, the cottonwoods released a flurry of summer snow that floated over the slow brown current. We sat on the banks, baiting fish hooks with canned corn or doughballs we made by massaging Wonder Bread in our mouths. When carp (it was only carp in the river) took the bait, they dove to the bottom and lay there. You had to winch them in, drag them up the river bank. They were no prize, reeking of the smelly river. When you unhooked them and flung them back in the water, you looked at your hands and wondered, imagining radioactive slime. 

Some years ago Dow apologized. Where we played those Huck Finn years, history would show, was a dioxin flood plain. Dow came eight miles downstream and built a little park on the west bank of the river in my home town, with picnic tables and, down next to the water, a platform to fish from. The day I visited, the guy fishing was the son of one of my childhood pals. When I asked him, he said, “The Tib is coming back.” 

It was. It is. But it looked the same–brown and smelly. 

On the opposite bank I saw a young person walk down to the water’s edge. She was barefoot. I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. No, thought. Don’t do it.