Our river wasn’t always so sluggish. It used to patter through this neighborhood, a serpentine meander through cottonwoods and willows, bouncing against the sandy rise to the east and the ancient lake bottom gently sloping up to the west. On the 1905 plat map the river snaked right through my alley. My neighbors on streets to the north and south have their houses set right on the old riverbed or where oxbow islands sported a lush prairie ecology. Superimposed on this true Chicago River are the harsh lines of the deepened channel–how God might have designed it if she’d gone to DeVry. Wherever the channel strays from the straight and narrow, the angular deviation is penciled in.
After the waters recede and the CD players are dried with the leaf blower, we scratch our potato heads and build right back on the floodplain.
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Chromium, for example–a metal commonly used in plating, alloying, and photographic processes–is toxic to plants and animals and a suspected carcinogen. In an attempt to quantify what it is that defines elevated levels of trace metals in our rivers and streams, the Illinois EPA established a five-tier classification system for each metal that runs from nonelevated through slightly elevated, elevated, highly elevated, and extremely elevated ratings. Chromium was found at elevated levels at every single site assayed, except at Dundee Road. Every site south of Foster ranked as extremely elevated. By my house at Montrose the levels leap past extreme and then get worse, until at Grand Avenue they’re stratospheric.
The Water Reclamation District’s 1990 assay of the North Channel found 28 species of annelid worms (Tubificidae and Naididae), 4 species of leeches (Hirudinidae), and 23 species of midge larvae (Chironomidae). Together they made up 97.9 percent of the invertebrate community. To these humble creatures–the most pollution-tolerant forms of the diverse families that once thrived here–and their bacterial and viral cousins, we’ve left the task of processing industrial toxins up the food chain.
One afternoon in late October I heard workers bellowing as they were “clearing debris” from the banks of the river south of Montrose. The “debris” consisted of live shoreline trees suspected of leaning off the plumb line. This work crew was hard at the task of separating the top half of a tree–the branches, nests, and trunk–from its base and roots, which were tangled in the shoreline soil, securing the bank.
The river changes, depending on how you look at it. It can be a passage to a natural, spiritual world. Or it can be a Porta Potti. Right now it is both things at once.
