Of Time And The River

The Kalamazoo River rises from wetlands in southeastern Michigan and flows north and west across the state for 200 miles, emptying into Lake Michigan. The Potawatomi Indians, once the dominant nation in this region, gave the river its name, which translates approximately as "boiling pot." According to some accounts, the riffles in the river reminded the Indians of bubbling cooking water. Another theory is that the name was associated with a Potawatomi rite of passage. To demonstrate their maturity, youths were required to run from camp to the river and return before water—which was in a pot over the fire as they took their marks—boiled. There are no surviving records of times or distances for this event.

The wars between the white man and the Indian in the Upper Midwest ended in 1813 with the death of Tecumseh. the great Shawnee military and political leader. However, remnants of the Potawatomi remained in the Kalamazoo Valley for several more decades and got along reasonably well with the first white settlers. A principal chief of one of these bands was Wopkezike, who was well regarded by both races even though he was known to drink excessively on occasion. One afternoon, he brought furs and venison to a trading post on the upper Kalamazoo. The chief took his pay in raw corn whiskey, which the trader had thoughtfully watered, as was the custom. The chief drank all of the whiskey during the course of the evening, and a few days later he died. His friends claimed that he had succumbed because there had been "too much Kalamazoo in the firewater." This is the first recorded comment on the quality of the river water. There have been many since.

In the administration of Andrew Jackson—who thought his predecessors had been soft on the red man—most of the Indians living east of the Mississippi were displaced by white settlers and forced westward. At about the time the Potawatomi left the Kalamazoo area, several of my ancestors arrived in it. Some of their descendants have lived there ever since, most of them around Kalamazoo city, the principal community on the river and now the center of a metropolitan area of nearly 220,000 people. I grew up there during the 1930s and '40s.

At present, the senior member of the family living in Kalamazoo County is my 89-year-old mother, Marge. She says she knew the river best in 1919 and 1920, when she and Roy Gilbert, my father-to-be, canoed on it. She was then a student at a local college (now Western Michigan University), while he was attending Michigan State in East Lansing. He customarily returned to Kalamazoo on weekends for purposes of courting. When the weather was good, the two would borrow my grandfather's canoe and spend the day floating on the river. "It was beautiful," my mother recalls. "Quite wild, and the water was so clear that you could see white pebbles, fish and little animals on the bottom. Those were very, very happy days."

Canoeing is a tradition in my family, and I learned to do it—on a lake where we spent the summers—when I was about six years old. I eventually came to canoe some fairly exotic waters in North America and other parts of the world. Despite this, it never occurred to me—or anyone I knew—to canoe or otherwise mess around in the Kalamazoo. As for my mother, she says that from about 1925 to 1988 (when she was reintroduced to the river under circumstances soon to be described) she had absolutely nothing to do with the Kalamazoo. She, I and everybody else who had any choice avoided it for the same reasons one avoids open garbage dumps and sewers.

When I lived in Kalamazoo, the river stank to high heaven, and its putrid odor sometimes permeated the downtown section of the city. However, the river was largely invisible, hidden behind factories, warehouses and railroad yards. The only times I actually saw the Kalamazoo were when I crossed it on a bridge. Viewed from above, the water color varied from mildew white to bilious green. There were reeking bars of greasy, gelatinous sludge in the river, and along the banks were piles of waste of uncertain composition and foul appearance.

I have not been a permanent resident of the area since 1950, but I have returned often to visit relatives and friends. During the past several years, I have heard that it has become possible to approach the Kalamazoo without risking your health or holding your nose. So, last fall, my wife, Ann, and I decided to take a look at this river we had known forever (Ann is also a Kalamazoo native) but only from a distance. The trip was motivated by curiosity, not nostalgia: the only sharp memory we had of the river was the stench that had risen from it one humid summer 40 years ago.

The first day, we paddled 10 miles through metropolitan Kalamazoo, where the river is about 100 feet wide and five or six feet deep. This is something of a canyon run, for factory and commercial buildings—some of them empty—line the river. These structures face inland and have no imperative connection with the water, and are separated from it by walls or chain link fences. From canoe level these barriers are screened by thickets of maple, willow and mallow, typical wet-bottomland flora in these parts.

We were pleased to find, among other things, that the Kalamazoo smelled like a regular river—a bit rank, but rich and organic. It had rained heavily during the previous week, and the water color was muddy, but in a wholesome way. There were extensive rafts of curly pondweed, and there were obviously fish, because diving ducks and kingfishers were looking for them. The most impressive metropolitan birds were the great blue herons. Every hundred yards or so, we came upon one of these stately creatures stalking in the fiats, occasionally striking down to spear a minnow or frog with its long beak. At noontime we met two men whose testimony supported the evidence given by the birds. They worked in a riverside sheet metal plant and had climbed down from a loading dock, through the scrub, to the bank, with their spinning rods. They said it wasn't the best fishing spot in the county, but that they caught smallmouth bass often enough to make it worth spending the lunch break trying for them.

As we drifted down the Kalamazoo, it seemed to be, in terms of biology, scenery and recreation, an interesting and attractive example of a meandering, marshy, midlands stream. It is now much more like the river my mother remembers from 1920 than the wretched mess Ann and I knew in 1950. This change is what makes the Kalamazoo such a marvel of natural and social history.