From Flames to Free: The Symbolic Restoration of the Mighty Cuyahoga River

Soundtrack: Burn On by Randy Newman

There must be a thousand rivers like the Cuyahoga in America, and ten thousand around the world.. it runs only 84 miles, only drops 500 feet, drains only 809 miles of America's 3 million.  On top of that it drains in the ignominious City of Cleveland, which Eddie Murphy implied many years ago in Beverly Hills Cop was not much of a place for classy execution, well before I ever got to see it with my own eyes and give it a personal judgment of coming back but hardly Paris.  Never been off the highway in Akron, but they did produce LeBron. The River Cuyahoga might be able to flow a half million CFM into Lake Erie, and it's got a reputation for some pretty scenery and ledges in it's upper reaches, so impressive they were made a National Park, but it's hardly a world class waterway. What made if famous beyond Ohio was this:

This is a picture of the Cuyahoga someplace I am pretty sure in Cleveland, on fire in 1952. It caught on fire some 13 times between 1868 and 1969 it is reported, about every 7 years it sounds like, and who knows how many minor fires were snuffed out that didn't make the broadsheets.

The Great Salt Lake Causeway Bridge: Balancing the Salinity & Saving the Life of America's Dead Sea

      

I've got a thing for Utah.. it's wild, it's serene, and it's beautiful. Say what you want about Mormons, they run a tight ship and make great neighbors.. it's a pretty good place. While I spend most of my time when I am there exploring the canyon's of it's southern reaches, one of American's world class locations, I've been all over it, and one adventure took me over one of it's rare and actually closed landmarks, in an RV with a crazy homeless dude no less. This is how I came to care about the topic of this blog, the bridge over the causeway that will hopefully contribute to the restoration of saline balance in this great body of water, the largest salt lake in the western hemisphere, and one of the most unique places in America.

People know the Great Salt Lake from the city named after it.. few actually see the lake proper.. you can spot it landing at SLC airport if there isn't a layer of fog or a bad inversion, or see it's edges from I-80 as you head to Nevada, past Bonneville, or maybe from the houses on the hills above the city that shares it's name, but to the majority of the people of Utah, the lake is something you don't think about much, it's useless and somewhat in the way; Thus is the practicality of the Mormon pioneers. While Brigham Young said "this is the place", this place had a big salt lake that wasn't much use for farming or industry until brine shrimp and magnesium harvesting were figured out in this century.. but it was a nice barrier to moving further west, and the rivers that fed it fed their new civilization, which they eked out of Ute land and made into a successful civilization, territory, and then state of the great United States of America.

Renegotiating the Colorado River: It's Return to the Sea

Perhaps all it took was a conversation.. 58 years avoided... but it looks like the Colorado River, the long standing symbol of the tragedy of the Cadillac Desert of the American West, might very soon be rejoining it's old amigo, The Sea Of Cortez, or the Gulf of California if you like, since semantics no longer are going to stand in the way of this symbolic waterways attempts to travel to it's destiny. It might be a momentary meeting of any consequence, to be measured in days for anything above a small base flow, a bit like when the big wigs sat down together to ink what is letting it happen, but it promises bigger things. To quote vice president Joe Biden's famous gaffe, when this happens, perhaps even next spring, it's gonna be a "Big Fu*&ing deal!" for anyone who loves the West, The Colorado, or Sonora, Baja and El Mar De Cortez.
Before I go into the minutiae of how a negotiation of something called Minute 319 to the Treaty of February 3rd, 1944 might be in fact a big f@#ing deal (trying to imagine Secretary Ken Salazar and the Mexican Border and Water Commission Head Roberto Salmon making the same lovable flub, since that's who it would be in this case), how's about a little color and background, before your restless mouse wanders to that Viagra commercial flashing on the left of the screen...

The Restoration of the Mesopotamian Marshes: Twice the size of the Everglades, but being in Iraq makes it..umm.. complicated..

Here's something I never expected to see coming out of Iraq. It looks more like Moab, it just seems too normal, the anal tepid CNN anchor and all:
http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2013/04/03/inside-middle-east-iraq-babylon-e.cnn.html

I am better aware than most that the US went to War with Iraq the second time under some pretty attenuated public reasoning.. trust me... I might have heard some of the guys who trumped the whole thing up, in person and privately, in a different phase of my life, scheming about it, but that aside, and with all due respect to Sean Penn, Saddam was a pretty bad dude, and no friend to the environment...
We sometimes make a very Muslim mistake when we get frustrated with a political situation in our country, and we declare the enemy of our enemy to be our friend... and almost no one likes War, and well, if you are going to win a war, you need to so called 'Win the Peace', but no such luck in this case... However, Rummy, W and the boys, they did know a bit more than the average Tom, Dick, and Mustafah about Iraq, and even as they sharpened their knives and pens to `help Iraq rebuild it´s oil and national infrastructure', in that order, they were aware of one or two little things that they didn´t necessarily think would sell as well as the 'Goebbels perfect' WMD fiasco. You see, in addition to Saddam´s mal-treatment of the Kurds, with Chemical Weapons at times, and the Shiites, and the Iranians.. and, well, the Kuwaitis...and any Environmentalist who remembers the burning wells after the Mother of All Battles, which burned 1.5 billion barrels, perhaps only 17 days use at current rates for the world, but straight into the atmosphere which caused perhaps a sharper than usual high in the saw tooth patterns of world atmospheric Carbon charts, should be as pissed as I was.. (that was pure Saddam), he had also destroyed one of the world's distinct Ecosystems, the Mesopotamian Marshes.

A Percolating Renassaince for The LA River

I don't want to ruin the movie magic.. I don't want to impose fact where fantasy should reign supreme, shatter the illusions that drive the American Fantasy Machine, but have you ever wondered what the heck this was?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08DChU5qsg
or hows'about this Greese reprise from the cult classic Repo Man:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN2AXsF-kwc
Oh wait, we got one more! God I miss the 70's.. how's this for a svelt action hero:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF-dgroq4TI
Go Cannon!
That was so random that it looks like the last time I played bumper cars at Lake Quassapaug as a kid...
So kidding aside, it's the LA River, and what makes the LA River so vital in it's current form is that, well, it's kind of a natural disaster, and it has grit, and well, grit can be in short supply in Sunny La La land, but fantasy there is a business (and tongue in cheek, I will say fantasy is a business even more so up in the San Fernando Valley where the river originates, but I will leave that joke up to the adults to figure out!). So when you are too cheap to film on location like The French Connection, why not run people through the world's biggest drainage ditch to supply a little cement bottled desperation to spice up the visual, even though Paris Hilton is tweezing her dog's eyebrows a few blocks west.. it's what's called character in the land of Sun and Fun.
But I bet a few of you didn't even ever figure that was a river, ever.. a few of you figured it was just some massive public works thing in the Home from Nowhere landscape of the American industrial nightmare, and I wouldn't blame you, but a river it is.. and it used to, and upper parts of it still do, look like this:
LA River Kayakers
http://activerain.com/blogsview/3380586/kayak-down-the-los-angeles-river-
Does this photo seem like they have no association with the videos above?