Late one night as I stood on the deck of a two-masted schooner motoring up Lake Michigan, I had an encounter with history. The Malabar was a replica of schooners that worked the lakes by the thousands in the final decades of the 19th century. That was part of the history I sensed. Part of it, too, was personal history, the memories of a lifetime brought vividly to mind while seeing new places, or old places in new ways.
That night it was possible to imagine that the Great Lakes had not changed much in hundreds of years. I saw what the first people saw: The lake calmed to mirror flatness, the stars as bright on the water as they were in the sky, the shore a low shadow in the distance. I sensed the vast wash of time and an old longing rose in me — to engage more fully with the world, to get beneath the surface, to wrap my arms around this place about which I cared so deeply.
Lake Michigan has always been a powerful presence in my life. My mother's father, who died a few months before I was born, worked when he was a young man as a lifesaver at the U.S. Life Saving Station on South Manitou Island. He raised his family a short walk from Lake Michigan on the mainland, on the "little finger" of Michigan's mitten, and told his children stories of shipwrecks and storms and lives saved and lost. I grew up hearing those stories from my mother as we fished the lake or walked the beaches or climbed the dunes at Empire and Sleeping Bear to watch ships passing on the horizon. The Great Lakes have always smelled like home to me. It was inevitable that at some point I would want to write a book about them.
But even after a lifetime on the lakes, I don't think I really understood their magnitude until the four-week journey I took from Michigan to Maine on the Malabar. That trip across the northern quarter of Lake Michigan, the lengths of Huron and Erie, most of Ontario, but none of Lake Superior, was not a casual tour, but a job. I was one of five men of varied experience who had been assigned to deliver the boat to its new owner in Bar Harbor, and I went along not as a writer but as a volunteer deckhand. As such I would haul sails, sweat lines, pump the bilge, secure dock lines and pilot the yawl boat with which we nudged the Malabar into dockages. I would take my turn to cook and wash dishes, repair toilets and motors, help dismantle the rigging and step the masts for the Erie Canal (then raise the masts and re-rig before we reached salt-water). I would stand watch all hours of the day and night, in all weather, on fresh water brackish and salt, and take the helm during the worst storm most of us had ever seen.
By then, trying to get a truer sense of the lakes, I had already canoed and camped along the rugged north shore of Superior and on the rocky coast of Isle Royale. I had walked the exemplary waterfront of Chicago, which is the envy of every other Great Lakes city and, increasingly, serves as a model for new waterfront projects. At the Chicago Yacht Club, I talked my way onto a racing sloop for the Chicago to Mackinac Race, the longest and longest-held freshwater regatta in the world.
I fished on Lake Erie with the biologist most responsible for that lake's remarkable recovery as a world-class fishery, and hiked the Ontario shore of Erie with an octogenarian scuba diver who has probably discovered more Great Lakes shipwrecks than any living person. Part of one February and all of one March, I stayed alone in a cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan and walked the beach every day to observe the dynamics of wind, sand, water and ice. I circled all the lakes by automobile and at every opportunity talked with fishermen, divers, biologists, environmentalists, business owners and other people whose lives are affected every day by the Great Lakes.
During all those trips, I never lost sight of the lakes themselves. They wouldn't allow it. The Great Lakes are like five beautiful and charismatic sisters: willful, tempestuous, frequently charming, impossible to ignore. I had set out to know them, but it was not an easy task. Knowing a small place is hard enough — you can spend a lifetime getting to know your own back yard. The Great Lakes are probably impossible. They're too big, too varied; they sprawl across too large a swath of continent. Statistics could never do them justice, but they are part of the story. I would gather them by the armload.
The five lakes cover an area larger than England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined — some 95,000 square miles. Lake Superior alone is bigger than Maine. The lakes contain about a fifth of the liquid fresh water on the surface of the planet. More fresh water is locked in the polar ice caps and stowed in aquifers, but in no other place can you find a greater reservoir of potable water. They collect the runoff of a drainage basin encompassing 200,000 square miles, which are home to more than 37 million people. About 27 million of them use water drawn directly from the Great Lakes, and many work at jobs dependent in one way or another on the lakes: For water to operate industrial processes; on supplies and equipment transported via the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence shipping route; on fish caught from them; on vacationers drawn to them.
Of course, central to any history of the lakes is the story of human impact on them. In the past century and a quarter the Great Lakes have suffered so much ecological damage that it is astonishing that they remain so vital. Their resilience is remarkable, but it is important to remember that the challenges they face today are as serious as those that mobilized the environmental movement in the 1960s and led to such landmark legislation as the Clean Water Act of 1972. The difference is that today, instead of blatant industrial polluters, we have to contend with less obvious villains.
Many biologists consider invasive species to be the most immediate threat to the lakes. When the sea lamprey entered the upper lakes nearly a century ago, it needed only a few decades to eradicate most of the economically important native fish. Today, with vigilant chemical treatment and physical barriers, the lamprey is kept (barely) under control. But other invaders, such as the zebra mussel, round goby, spiny water flea, Eurasian watermilfoil and more than 100 other non-native animals and plants, are impervious to human control and have permanently altered the biological landscape. And new invaders constantly threaten.
Another perennial menace is pollution from persistent toxins, many of them carcinogens dumped into the water long ago, in the carefree decades before environmental regulation. Found in sediments at dozens of sites around the lakes, the toxins are called persistent for good reason: They never seem to go away. They re-emerge every time boats or storms stir the bottom and continue to accumulate in the body tissues of every member of the biotic community, from micro-organisms to fish to humans. We seem to have no choice but to wait the problem out (though it might take centuries) or dispose of contaminated sediments one expensive shovel-full at a time.
Other problems are equally daunting and just as difficult to solve. Cities with outdated waste-disposal systems (and that includes almost every city) pour raw or barely treated sewage into the lakes every time their storm sewers are overwhelmed by rain. Agricultural lands drain fertilizers and pesticides into the lakes, causing algae blooms that can lead to "dead spots" such as the one at the center of Lake Erie. Petroleum products and chemicals are accidentally spilled into the lakes and their tributaries.
Commercial and residential developments erode shorelines, fill wetlands and threaten endangered plants and animals. Every year, more water is diverted from the lakes for human use and the pressure to divert even more is certain to mount. (If projections are accurate, two-thirds of the world's population will face water shortages by 2025, and many eyes will turn eagerly to the Great Lakes).
Hardly a day goes by without news of some setback. As I write this, a study arrives on my desk from the Canadian Environmental Law Association revealing that every year for the past decade Canadian industries and public utilities have pumped a billion kilograms of toxic chemicals into the skies over the Great Lakes basin. Much of it, including 3 million kilograms of carcinogens and 2,000 kilograms of mercury, enters our waters by way of rain and snow.
How can we accommodate such news? Most people, of course, don't bother. It's naive to think that more than a tiny percentage will ever be willing to take action. Yet I remain optimistic. As I listened to people during my journey on the Malabar and other travels around the lakes, one consistent message came through: Many people take the lake's problems personally. I find this terrifically heartening. The lakes are an enormous commons, owned by all of us, and when people accept ownership, they accept responsibility.
Aldo Leopold, the renowned conservationist from Wisconsin, did not write much about the Great Lakes, but he articulated many influential ideas about the lands around them. In his view, it is all part of the same story. What he wrote half a century ago about land use in his beloved Wisconsin remains relevant to all lands and waters. "Health is the capacity of the lake for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity," he told us in A Sand County Almanac.
In that book, he also told us, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." And, in his journals, he warned us, "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."
The wounding of the Great Lakes continues. But one difference between Leopold's age and ours is that we are no longer alone in recognizing it. Last summer, while visiting Washington Island off the tip of Lake Michigan's Door Peninsula, I met an 80-year-old commercial fisherman. He had some questions for me, he said. He was furious because the city of Milwaukee had a few days earlier allowed 3 billion gallons of human waste to escape into Lake Michigan. The sewage had flowed northward, fouling beaches all the way to Washington Island and raising a figurative and literal stink. The old man had spent his life on the lake and his history was inexorably entwined with it; yet he admitted that he had never gotten involved in environmental issues. That was, in part, he said, because he was always working, but also because he resented any sort of government interference and thought that environmental laws and the people who advocated them were intent upon taking away his personal freedoms.
Now his thinking was changing. More and more he reflected on ideas that Leopold addressed in 1949 in A Sand County Almanac and that citizens raised repeatedly in the 1960s and 1970s, when Lake Erie was "The American Dead Sea" and all the lakes were suffering abuses that threatened to destroy them.
But he had never read Leopold and wasn't particularly interested in ideas from the environmental movement. Nevertheless, in a voice trembling with emotion, he asked two questions that lie at the heart of ecological philosophy:
"What right do they have to dump their sewage in our lake? Don't they realize that what they do affects all of us?"
Jerry Dennis, a Traverse City, Mich.-based environmental writer, is author of several books, including the award-winning The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas. His essays have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Smithsonian and Audubon.
Illinois Issues, July/August 2005
