Traverse City Record-Eagle

Loraine Anderson

Related Photos

  • Loraine Anderson

    CSS3F3F.jpg
October 24, 2011

Loraine Anderson: River stirs feelings

By LORAINE ANDERSON Local columnist

Nature calls on a walk along the Boardman River.

Geese honk as they fly over the exposed bottomlands upstream from Sabin Dam. Birds chirp and chatter. I listen, looking up into the canopy of hardwood foliage.

Color cascades across a canvas of deep blue sky, painting my day in maple red-oranges, aspen yellows, oak russets. It takes my breath away and replenishes something essential to me -- joy, reverence, a deep sense of connection to nature and the web of life in our Great Lakes ecosystem.

"Get to know a place well enough and it becomes part of you and you become part of it," local author Jerry Dennis writes in "The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes," his new book that explores, among other things, the relationship between humans and nature.

"We are in nature, and of it, and it is absurd to think that we are ever above, below or outside it," he writes.

I have come to the river to see the draw-down of ponds at Brown Bridge, Sabin and Boardman dams as Traverse City prepares to eventually remove them and let the river find its natural course.

Images, thoughts and questions flow through my mind:

• The history of the Boardman River -- glacial, Indian hunting and gathering, early white settlement, logging, extinction of Michigan's Grayling trout, power generation, nature preserve and now restoration.

• The environmental costs of the aging dams and financial liability of local governments for them.

• The deep sadness I felt in September when I saw smelly, rotting Cladophora algae wash up along the south shore of North Manitou Island, ironically a designated wilderness area in the Sleeping Bear Dunes Natural Area.

• Anger and disgust I feel for state and federal lawmakers who failed to take quick, effective action in the 1980s and 1990s to stop invasive species from entering the Great Lakes, contributing to today's algae problem.

• The same inaction that occurs now with the Asian carp. Just last week, federal authorities reduced power at an electric barrier designed to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes because it might interfere with operations at a nearby railroad -- only a week after the U.S. Corps of Engineers had turned up the electric jolt to make the barrier more effective.

We can't go on this way. We all live in the same house -- Earth. It's dirty, toxic, trashed and crowded.

The very nature of the lakes has changed in 20 years because of human engineering and politics that consider mostly business, not ecosystems. How can we keep the lakes healthy if we don't protect the ecosystem from mistreatment, abuse and death?

What kind of world are we creating today for our children and future generations? Would we want to live in it?

Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com or 933-1468.

Text Only