Gently down the stream

Me, Late Pearl Jam Era

I don’t remember whose idea it was, but one fall day in ’96 my buddy John Dzielski and I set out to canoe a forlorn stretch of creek that ran under the highway near the office park where we worked in suburban Chicago. We were into exploring urban wildlands - those forgotten places you see at the edges of the built-world where nature flourishes in the cracks of the municipal infrastructure. It took some research to learn this creek had a name, the East Branch of the DuPage River.

The morning was crisp and bright as we slipped our borrowed canoe into the stream, with no real foreshadowing of the absurdities about to unfold. The East Branch is more of a creek than a river, and in several heavily-engineered sections it’s more of a glorified drainage ditch. It runs south through back yards, under toll roads, behind strip malls, and at one point it snakes - in a very planned way -  through the Western Acres Golf Club. If you ever canoe through a golf course, let me strongly suggest you bring a helmet. Putting greens are often located near water features, referred to as “hazards,” to make the game more challenging. I’ve done a lot of canoeing over the years - many hundreds of miles in all kinds of conditions, and I can assure you that paddling through a bunch of novice golfers is right up there with being stuck on open water during an electrical storm - much to be avoided. I can still see the stunned looks of the golfers as we rounded a bend alongside their fairway. “Mornin, fellas!” we hollered as we drifted past. They said nothing back, just stared, slack-jawed. The trick to pulling off absurdist behavior is to do it with utter confidence, like Bugs Bunny or civil war re-enactors. It was our challenge to make the colored-pants men feel like they were the ones who didn't belong. John and I choked back our giggles for several long minutes until we were out of earshot.

East Branch of the DuPage River

In several places the creek was choked with fallen trees and floating wads of plastic debris. Aquafina and Pennzoil bottles, Starbucks cups, sticks and leaves and pieces of fence, a baseball cap, KFC buckets, six-pack rings and tampon applicators. On and on it went, in places so dense we had to take the canoe out of the water and portage around the clogs. It was clear that beavers had something to do with some of these stretches, though it was hard to tell whether the junk was simply snagged in their dams or whether the beavers had actually incorporated trash into the structures. Nature’s little engineers being above all, practical. But the most surreal surprise of the day was just beyond the golf course, where the river fanned out into a marsh. The tea colored water was only a few inches deep at this point, and I kept seeing these round whitish things on the bottom that I figured were some sort of eggs, except many had algae on them. Finally I reached down and scooped one up. It was a golf ball. So this is where they came to rest. In the slow waters of the marsh they settled out among the cattails by the hundreds, maybe thousands, to degrade in whatever way that golfballs do in six inches of tannic midwestern bog water.

John Dzielski

Further downstream the river became wide and shallow and we began to scrape bottom. The old canoe had been lent to us by a friend who warned us that it’s days were few. The fiberglass was worn and cracked along the keel and with each scrape and bump we began to take on more water. Finally we pulled ashore to assess our options. When we flipped the boat over we were dismayed at the ragged state of our hull. John and I hiked up the steep bank to take a look around. We were thrilled to see a Target less than half a mile away. I was hoping to find some sort of fiberglass patch, maybe in their camping or automotive departments, but that proved a fool’s errand. Instead we made due with duct tape. Lots of it. We made our way back to the boat which was left hull-side up to dry in the sun, but the frayed fiberglass was still water-logged. The tape wouldn’t stick to the damaged areas, so we extended it way up onto the sides of the boat for increased gripping power. It worked. For a while we were thrilled with our ingenuity and continued on. But eventually, as all half-ass duct tape solutions go, our patches failed and we were forced ashore again. By this time it was getting dark and we were cold and wet and the hilarity of our misadventure had dimmed considerably. We had a pretty good idea where we were since most of the bridges were labelled with street names on their undersides, for some odd reason. I figured we were a mile or so from where we’d left the second car, but walking along suburban highways at night would have been idiotic, so instead we crunched our way across a dry cornfield toward the lights of a middle school that I figured backed up to the forest preserve we had parked on the far side of. Bingo!

Back at the car, I rummaged my backpack in the waning light for my keys. A plastic shopping bag caught high in a nearby tree flapped in a stiff breeze and made a disconcerting buzzing sound. Nature had made a wind instrument of trash and was blowing a hellish protest tune. For a second I wished I could photograph the bag, but then I thought of all those tiresome trash-in-nature photos you see in Beginning Photography classes, and thought better of it. It seems no matter how startling the juxtaposition of garbage in nature, there is rarely a photo created that can disarm the cynicism by which we regard such images as hackneyed, preachy or naive. So commonplace is the degradation of the natural world we live closest to, that if we were to see its wounds, abuses and insults as they truly are we'd find that world unlivable. The creative challenge, which I did not feel up for, would have been to find something ineffable, haunted, or elegiac in the buzzing plastic bag, and thereby restore its irony. But instead I just drove home. There would be other days to make art about such things.

Wet and bone-tired, I pulled the car to a stop in front of my house and turned the engine off. Rivulets of water from the battered canoe on the roof ran down the windshield. After collecting my thoughts in preparation for my return to the normalcy I craved, I went inside to a dinner already in progress. In a little while I’d make the call to let my friend know about his boat’s last voyage, but for the moment I was deeply content to enjoy the sweet disorientation of being home with my loved ones on an otherwise ordinary evening. I was happy for the experience of seeing my world from a jarringly different angle, the details and texture of my strange day already settling into a tale.