In the Watershed: A Journey Down the Maumee River by Ryan Schnurr (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Watershed: A Journey Down the Maumee River by Ryan Schnurr Edith Sarra In the Watershed: A Journey Down the Maumee River By Ryan Schnurr (Cleveland, Ohio: Belt Publishing, 2017. Pp. 152. Maps. Paperbound, $16.95.) In the Watershed takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the Maumee, one of those nondescript midwestern rivers usually seen—if at all—from the window of a car. The Maumee runs for roughly 137 miles between Fort Wayne and Toledo, where it empties into Lake Erie, having drained some 6.600 square miles of watershed. Author Ryan Schnurr walked most of the river's length in eight days during August 2016 ("when the stagnant heat of late summer begins to coax the algae into bloom"), two of those days canoeing, and portaging his canoe on foot. In recounting the trip, Schnurr lays out the major lines comprising "our uneasy entanglement" (pp. 18–19) [End Page 103] with the Maumee, penetrating the past of specific sites and linking it to the present: from thumbnail histories of native peoples who once dwelt along its banks; to their conflicts with white interlopers; to the conflicts of white settlers with each other and with the landscape (the now vanished Great Black Swamp the most notable victim of the latter); to chilling sketches of the ecological crises that entered mainstream discourse in 1956 with the great die-off of Lake Erie's mayfly population. The story culminates in our time with the spread of cyanobacteria—poisonous to the livers of mammals who drink or swim in the river. As Schnurr notes in his peroration: "no one great lesson here, only a thousand small ones: the rocks, the trees, the cities, the fields—and this holy water, coursing through us all" (p. 116). Schnurr was motivated by unease about algae blooms, and no less by Americans' unconcern "with ecological interdependence of places" (p. 59), including especially those places not scenic in the conventional sense. His point: The brown alluvial rivers we glimpse in passing everyday in the Midwest are 'holy,' a word that originates in the idea of 'wholeness,' and can mean "deserving of deep respect, awe, or reverence" (p. 86). The problem is not simply that we have failed to see all waterways as integral to the whole of life. We just flat-out fail to see: "No one seemed to notice the phosphorescent river. They went on picnicking and necking as if it were the most normal thing in the world" (p. 66). When the author describes falling smack down into the middle of the murky Maumee, "canoe in one hand and camera in the other" (p. 84), we recognize where we all are now: ass-deep in waters whose dubious properties spring from our own misuses. In the Watershed is punctuated by conversations with people met in small-town diners and lodgings, a feature that will remind some readers of William Least Heat-Moon's iconic Blue Highways (1982), and his epic River-Horse (2013). Others will recall Wendell Berry's long series of essays evoking agricultural communities in crisis in the Kentucky River watershed and beyond. Schnurr's slim volume is concerned with things we take for granted—but that fascination with the ordinary is essential to his message. Bent on making visible what has been obscured, Schnurr illuminates the value of the pedestrian—that literal going-on-foot that grants travelers time to really see what they are passing through. His book gestures toward the potential power of the average person who, although maybe "not your standard wilderness explorer type," might still make a difference (p. 19). Casual about the flora and fauna he encounters (relying on a Peterson's Guide to identify birds and trees, but lamenting his lack of one for wildflowers), Schnurr makes common cause with the Toledo Junior League housewife-activists of the 1960s. The latter's documentary film, "Fate of a River," exposed the consequences of dumping wastes of all kinds into the Maumee and helped catalyze the [End Page 104] 1972 U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which cut annual phosphate emissions into the waterways by nearly half—small-scale heroics, but...