For Thursday, January 14, 999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 713 words

Sleeping giants?

Went to see the movie Civil Action with the Missus the other night. It's about polluted water in New England killing a cluster of children. They died of leukemia.

It stirred up some murky memories of the rivers of my childhood, back before pollution was politically incorrect. Back before the Clean Water Act of 1972. Back around the time of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, before most folks had read it. Back when DDT was being sprinkled about like baby powder.

The Clarion, the big river that flowed through the heart of our industrial Pennsylvania town was as polluted as a river could be without catching fire.

Eight miles upstream from us was a super gigantic, huge, large, big, stinky paper mill. The flush pipes gushed thousands of gallons of paper-processing chemicals directly into the river. Below the paper mill was a Weyerhaeuser wood mill. Below that for a long while in my own home town was a tannery, just like the one in the movie.

My friends and I played along this river throughout our childhood, but we seldom touched it. We knew it was deadly. The river bottom was covered in brown slime. The rocks were hairy with algae. We would sit along the banks and watch it roll by, because that part was beautiful and harmless, but we never swam in the Clarion. Yuck!

Sometimes we fished down by the tannery and pulled out small carp and shiners and catfish, but we never ate them. We didn't believe that fish life proved the river wasn't badly polluted because just upstream from the paper mill the Clarion was clean and clear. It was stocked with healthy trout. Fishermen flocked to it every year, but no one ever fished below the mill. We believed our fish just hadn't died yet and would later downstream.

We had a friend, Steve Anderson, who lived along the river and died in his teens of cancer of the everything. The rumor among kids was that Steve had once drunk river water on a dare. I'm not an oncologist.

Up Elk Creek, which flowed into the Clarion in the middle of town, was a long sprawling tangle of gray buildings known as the ink plant. Some days Elk Creek would flow bright green, some days red, some days blue. It would blend into the murky brown of the Clarion and continue on its vomit toward Pittsburgh.

Nobody in town seemed to care enough to do anything. We just accepted that our rivers were polluted, and that it was a shame, but people had to make a living.

Besides, it would flow into the ocean 1,200 miles south and thin out.

Besides, we had plenty of other clean rivers all around us for swimming and fishing: tributaries to the Clarion.

Besides, every industry in the country seemed to be flushing poisonous toxins into rivers. Only pee and poop got "water treatment."

The ignorance of the impact of what we were doing was widespread. It wasn't just the factories that polluted. We all did. I recall a dirt road that led to a wooden car ramp in the woods just outside of town. People would pull onto that ramp, stand under their cars, unscrew their oil plugs, and let the motor oil drain onto the ground. Sometimes it was so crowded at the ramp we had to wait in line to change our oil. The ground was mighty sloppy, but someone would occasionally through a few shovels full of fresh dirt over the oil as a carpet.

Civil Action is an OK movie. The subject matter is great. I hope the deadliest part of our environment ignorance has past, but a ground-water or air disaster may still be a big part of our future.

Presently, CWA statistics state that at least one-third of the United States rivers, one-half of the estuaries, and more than one-half of the nation's lakes are not safe for swimming, fishing, etc. Thirty-one states have reported toxins in fish exceeding FDA levels. Every pollutant in an EPA study on chemicals in fish showed up in at least one location.

Well, enough of this morbid talk. I need to relax and lighten up. Maybe we'll go see another movie. I wonder where Virus is playing.