Where The River Burned

Biking through a sun dappled cottonwood grove. A river, slow and wide, meanders on my left. A stagnant canal, thick with duckweed, oozes rather than flows to the right.

Turtles sun themselves on mossy logs.  A Great Blue Heron, perched on spindly legs, seems deep in a reptilian slumber, until I notice alert, ink-black eyes staring into the murky canal slurry. It darts its head below water, and emerges with a fish flopping in its beak. Spindly legs remain planted and have not moved from their perch in the pea green sludge.

A fawn, still speckled and furtive, stares me down from the middle of the path. She darts her head to the left and the right, unsure which direction to retreat. She chooses the river. Leaping over brambles and boulders, in an instant white spots blur to white tail, and then nothing.

The canopy opens.

I am in a clearing, the sun beats down on wildflowers and red crested sumac. Above the canal, on a mountain made of slag, the carcass of a wire factory looms. Chemical distilleries and petroleum tanks. An enormous blast furnace's mouldering hull.

For hours previous, my sylvan idyll was interrupted only by the ruin of an occasional sandstone canal lock, lichen crusted and mossy, or an old iron bridge trestle, picturesque with rust. Now, looming before me, suddenly, the dregs of the Industrial Era. I find myself, after 37 languid miles, engulfed in Cleveland's Industrial Valley.

My journey along this old river, my river, this winding Cuyahoga, is full of surprises.

My hometown's eponymous river has a reputation that precedes me.

In 1969 she burned. A conflagration that lasted just 30 minutes, it was extinguished without much fanfare, perhaps because it wasn't the first time. 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and 1952 also brought flames to the thick oily sludge the river became once it reached Cleveland.

In my  travels, my hometown's namesake sometimes got a funny reaction. Cuyahoga? Isn't that where the river burned?

A lifetime of that barb perhaps made me defensive.

My prose turns downright purple when I describe her craggy cliffs, her mossy glens, her silver barked beech trees, stretching sinewy arms to a cerulean sky, anchored to a tenuous steep sandstone foundation, flecked with lucky rocks.

I explain to people, my part of the river, upriver, is where she bends, at the great gorge, and cascades in virile cataracts through sandstone canyons. She then makes a sharp turn north, to eventually dump into Lake Erie, just thirty miles from her headwaters after a meandering 100 mile course.

But all they know is the burn.

I have paddled her headwaters at Hiram.

I have searched her source in Geauga County.

When I was away from her, I felt the primeval need to dip my toes in her sweet, oleaginous waters whenever I returned.

I know, in quite deep particularity, her shores and her islands, at her massive bend here at Summit County, her highest point, the base of her "U."

But, in all these travels, I have never traced my river to her destination. I had never seen where the mouth of my river meets the placid Erie shore.

So on this day, halfway through my fortieth year, I set out to see where the river burned, on a 1977 French Motobecane racing bike, perpetually stuck in low gear.

I start at that old beauty spot, the Prospect Street Bridge, above the Highbridge Glens, where Victorian ladies in bustles descended to amble along picturesque riverside trails, and mustachioed gentlemen trolleyed in for a day's excursion. They marvel in sublime awe at sandstone caverns. Otherworldly ice formations drip from steep ravine walls.

By my earliest memories, at our nation's Bicentennial, it was just machine shops and old rusty turbines, auto dealers and parts stores perched atop those canyons walls, with barely a hint of what lay below. I remember the old Glens restaurant, dark leather booths and special steak dinners. I assumed it was named after some guy, Glen.

Along the lip of the Gorge I continue, past rows of postwar houses. At Babb's Run I begin the descent, down North Hill to Merriman Valley. This is where things bottom out, the rest of the journey is flat, along the towpath, where mules once trod.

Through the old Western Reserve villages of Peninsula and Boston and Brecksville, Greek Revival farmhouses and bank barns, old mossy canal locks and rusting steel bridges, portend the industrial ravages ahead.

Boston Store, circa 1836.

Stanford Farm Bank Barn, circa 1830s

Deep Lock, Peninsula, Ohio

Alexander Mill, at Valley View, circa 1852

1888 steel trestle bridge, spanning the Cuyahoga, at Brecksville, built in Massillon, Ohio.

And, everywhere, the bridges, dwarfing you at Stumpy Basin, looming at Boston Mill, positively Brobdingnagian at I-480. This old river, meandering and languid though she seems, carved herself a chasm, deep and wide.

Brecksville Viaduct

I-480 overpass

Art Deco canal overpass, at Valley View.

Shortline Trestle, Cleveland.

Finally at her destination, my river meets the inland sea beneath colossal industrial ruins. From a rusty freight train trestle, I view my river, wide and concrete walled, excavated for freighters. There is no discernible oily sludge, her waters almost smell sweet.  Towering all around me, ruins of an era slowly folding in on itself, and I can't help but think: this old river's best days, may be those yet to come.

Someone once said, do something new every day. If you've lived beside the bend of a river all of your life, and never thought to trace its course to that place where it ends, this might be the day. You might find yourself in an unexpected place, the place where the river burned.

Of Red Bricks and New Vineyards

It is said, Rome was built on seven hills.

North Hill Viaduct, Akron, Ohio.

My Dad once told me, Akron was, too. I know each of those hills, as well as how, if I am stuck down in the Cuyahoga Valley in low gear on an old bike, to get back to the top: you go halfway up the Howard Street Hill, terrace laterally across Glenwood, and then portage up the crumbly back steps to Waters Park, from whose precipice we watched them take a wrecking ball to the North Hill Viaduct decades ago.

I am from this place: born in Sister Ignatia's St. Thomas Hospital, on the North Hill of Akron, where my people settled after Germany, and made a go of it.  I know this place: its hills, its river, the way the canal was forced to elevate itself to its hardscrabble summit, by locks and by channels.

Of course some things change with the decades, but not the soil. Not the clay. Not the bricks.

The little house I grew up in, built the year before my birth (and just in time) was on a piece of an old farm. The red brick farm house, next door, was built of Metropolitan Blocks. They are still fired, by the fifth generation, down in Canton, right here in Ohio, from our substantial red clay.

I like that. A lot.

For some reason, the Mays, who lived next door in the old red house, had a lot of extra old bricks. Each week Mr. May threw away exactly one Metropolitan Block, in each steel trash can, to weigh it down.

The red brick farm house, and metal trash cans, 1970.

Eventually, I convinced him to give me the extra bricks, and I lined my first garden with their substantial red clay bulk.

This week I sojourned down to Canton, and saw a beautiful roadway of Metropolitan Block, at Gervasi Vineyard and Winery.

It is fifty five acres of sun-drenched vineyard: artfully composed vistas, a majestic old orchard, a swan filled lagoon, a sun dappled Boccie court, a dining room of rough hewn barn timbers buffed to a loving sheen. But, they had me with the Metropolitan Block.

Reclaimed barn timbers and re-purposed barn stone, some from the old Massillon State Hospital, now burned.

A Metropolitan block roadway: a small detail among many such grace notes, on a picture perfect June afternoon, where harp music wafts from the pavilion, down this lane of red fired clay, to an Adirondack chair on the shore of a spring fed lake. In this chair, on this shore: a glass of Vidal Blanc never tasted so sweet. A perfect blend of place, taste, tone.

Willow trees ring the lagoon.

In every direction, a composed vista.

A gracious, hospitable lawn.

Northeastern Ohio is full of surprises, to one who is seeing it anew after several decades away. This, the last working farm in in the city limits of this old industrial burgh, which after bricks and ceramics became known for steel and bearings.

All around, things decades ago we would never predict:

In the valley where a smoky metropolis once dumped its untreated waste, Blue Herons now swoop majestically from tree top rookeries, skimming the water and emerging with beaks full of fish.

On the craggy sandstone banks where the Vaughn Machine company once banged out its wares and then its turbines rusted for decades as its brick walls slowly crumbled, a restaurant and lounge overlook a raging torrent. Walkways to the original Glenns have been restored, and there is talk, increasingly viable, that the big dam is coming down, restoring the Great Falls of which these impressive rapids are just a vestige.

On Saturday mornings, police officers and park rangers have to direct traffic, in the meadow across from the beaver pond just south of Szalay's farm, because the demand is so great for local berries and honey and Swiss chard and peas. Earnest young farmers and wizened old pros preside over stalls of produce grown right here.

It is said we are losing our sense of place, that our kids are addled by too much screen time, can't tolerate peanuts because they have never played in the dirt, don't know that a cherry is a fruit that grows on a tree.

Not quite. There is hope. At the last working farm in the city limits of Canton, owners have burnished and artfully placed bricks of our local clay, the same bricks my neighbor once tossed as ballast for his garbage cans. They have planted new vineyards in an old industrial town.

New vines on an old farm.

And at the old red brick farmhouse, next to my childhood home, three little girls take turns on a giant rope swing looped over the bough of a silver maple I planted three decades ago. Their giggles and shrieks fill this old neighborhood as the fireflies come out, the train rumbles down by the river, and the scent of baking bread wafts up from the Schwebel's plant.

I like to think, in a few years, we will also be hearing the distant roar of the Great Falls, released from their slumber, behind a superfluous dam built to power electric trolley cars abandoned many, many decades ago.

This place where the river bends: to see this familiar place with fresh eyes, and to imagine what it might sound like one day when its dammed up potential is released, that is the gift of time, and perspective. The patience of one who plants a vineyard. The faith of harvests to come.

Stalking the Fragrant Catalpa

Just north of the village of Penninsula, alongside the winding riverside road that parallels the turgid mud brown Cuyahoga, in front of an old Western Reserve farmhouse, I spy them: four perfect specimens.

Arrayed evenly across a rolling front lawn, thick stout trunks and round leafy canopies, they have the perfect proportion of a tree a child might draw in front of an idealized house. Except instead of the perfect round red apples a child is wont to draw, these graceful rounded crowns are studded with creamy white orbs of vaguely vanilla scented blooms.

Catalpa.

The name rolls off my mind's tongue in a honey-sweet Southern drawl.

One of the sweet pleasures of returning to your homeplace after 22 Junes away is seeing familiar terrain through the lens of a life's experience.

I have a vague memory of identifying, using a dichotomous key, a Catalpa on the grounds of an old, overgrown arboretum during my horticulture school days. But I am fairly certain I have never seen one in bloom, and I had no idea the extent to which they studded the banks and mud flats of the river that wends its way crookedly through my old home grounds. Like Stuckey's Pecan Logs, Goo Goo clusters and Moon Pies, I considered them, for some reason, a purely Southern pleasure.

As with many things, my first acquaintance with the Catalpa was literary, a story I read in fourth grade. A child's beloved horse is grievously injured during a fierce storm. Stranded on the muddy bank of a steeply-gorged creek, immobile with a broken leg, the child watches helplessly as an overhanging creek bank, with a small catalpa sapling rooted in it, collapses in a muddy rumble, entombing his loyal steed.

Each spring he visits the spot, where the tree grows and blooms with abandon.

Even viewed through a windshield on a winding country road, at some distance, I knew with a certainty that is not quite rational, that those four perfect specimens with the giant heart shaped leaves, bigger than my outstretched palm,  with strangely graceful trunks and branches, were the Catalpas of my adolescent memory.

And then, like most things that have been there all along but you never before noticed, I see them. Everywhere:

On the banks of the old beaver marsh across from the Botzum farm.

Beside the Everett Road covered bridge.

Next to the glacier-carved lake where I spent so many carefree summer days.

On the steep ravines of the Cuyahoga's deepest gorge.

In the front lawn of a house not two blocks from my old childhood home.

A Great Blue Heron silhouetted against stark branches in the old beaver marsh.

 I had never before set out to stalk the fragrant Catalpa, but I felt an urgent need that afternoon. Like the trilliums that are our state wildflower, and other spring ephemerals, I knew the show they put on would last but a few days.

I traded the car for my trusty French racing bike, which is stuck in low gear, and descended toward the river, into the Valley that is now a National Park. I knew if I wanted to see Catalpas, the lower and wetter I took myself, the better.

Alongside the old canal towpath which I remember as overgrown and sapling-studded, before it was paved into a recreational trail, and all along the twisted muddy Cuyahoga that seeps listlessly beside it in a sandstone flecked gorge, I saw and smelled the creamy white panicles of ruffled, yellow-throated Catalpa blossoms.

Across from the old Greek Revival Mustill Store, an 1840s stop on the Ohio and Erie Canal, they grow in the crevices of the old stone Lock.

Old stone Lock at the Mustill Store

An artist has set up an easel on the precipice the lock forms, and paints a bend in the river decorated with the Catalpa's lush green leaves and trumpet-like blooms.

Following the towpath's winding, level path, I am rained on by the fluffy seeds of unseen Cottonwood trees. A visceral memory of summertime on my friend's block of 9th Street, where each year at this time a giant cottonwood rained down on us and our banana-seated bikes, while we invented a game called Dodge the Fuzzies. I stop to watch the seed fluff land and float on the inky black surface of a dark, boggy pool, and look up to see that same pool shaded by a graceful Catalpa.

This is also the time the mulberry trees drop their messy purple fruit, and every so often I scatter a gaggle of voracious, perhaps slightly inebriated, cat birds who seem oblivious to my presence, until I am almost on top of them.

I take a back trail to a little pond I know, which is filled every spring when the Cuyahoga predictably overflows its banks. I see a tangle of abandoned bikes heaped in the tall grass, their riders so anxious to get their fishing poles in the water they let their bikes fall where they may. I pause for a moment to take in this most Tom Sawyer-like scene, boys and bikes and fishing poles and and croaking frogs.

Of course, the fishing hole is ringed by Catalpas, which despite visiting this very same spot innumerable times in my youth, I had never noticed. I approach the shoreline to view the blossoms up close, and out from the brush wades a sharp kneed and impossibly slender Great Blue Heron. It is all sharp beak and spindly legs, and unlike the drunken oblivious cat birds, it seems wise and aware of my presence but not particularly concerned.

And then, it holds its great wings aloft, and lifts off silently and gracefully, disappearing like a dream that vanishes at the cusp of dawn.

I was on quest for Catalpas but found so much more. Blooming after the magnolias and apples and dogwoods and other springtime show horses, in a bit of a late spring lull, they light the velvety green foliage of the season's new leaves, before they are scorched and munched on and subjected to the ravages of a hot and steamy summer.

I discovered despite I-pods and Gameboys and air conditioning, boyhood is still about bikes and fishing poles.

I discovered that you think you know a place, but can be humbled by enormous showy trees that are all around you, that you never took the time to notice, perhaps because you were never out three days before June's Full Strawberry Mon to stalk them.

I discovered that words and imagery from a book read decades ago can live in you, and come to you when you spy a perfect specimen of a tree you previously only knew in a story.

Thinking all these things, down in the lowlands of the canal and the river, it occurs to me that I somehow will need to ascend these steep valley walls, and my bike only has a low gear.

I trace the topography in my mind.

If I take a left at the old Mustill Store, I can likely make it about halfway up the Howard Street hill under my own power. I can then turn down Glenwood, and terrace my way midway across the Little Cuyahoga's valley, until I come to the old crumbly steps at the back entrance to Water's Park, from whose peak, across from the hospital of my birth, I watched so many decades ago a wrecking ball pathetically try to tap away at the old stone North Hill viaduct, to make way for the new Y-Bridge.

I portage my bike up those steep crumbly steps. I stand on the peak and look down on the valley from which I have ascended.

To know a place, to feel its topography in your bones, is a good feeling, even if you were unaware until this picture perfect June afternoon in your fortieth year, that the place is lousy with Catalpas, which always bloom at the time the Cottonwoods rain their seed fluff, and the cat birds get drunk on mulberries, and the Full Strawberry Moon is about to ascend this beautiful, fecund valley.