The Water Lecture and the Idiom Lover

A group of high roller developers are ‘pulling out all the stops’---an 1800s idiom that makes little sense today unless you own a pipe organ---giving presentations around town to drum up excitement for a river redevelopment plan---not along the river, but in the river. They plan to remove five dams and put in its place large boulders to turn a two mile stretch of the river that runs through our downtown area into a place where people can kayak. Yes, kayak at a cost 45 million dollars. Although I’d already made up my mind before going to the lecture that I was against the project, I decided I should go so I could at least bad-mouth it with a little knowledge-based attitude before running around like I’ve got a bee in my bonnet. That ‘bee idiom’ is from the 1500s and I think we all know what that means.

I figured if they were going to be spending that much money sooner-or-later they’ll be coming to the tax payers with their hands out. Surprise, surprise. The guy who put on the presentation said they have it 75% funded already through grants and private money pledged from the city’s big wigs. (He didn’t say it, but I can smell the Betsy DeVos family money in the mix. I am reminded of their family money four times a day as their helicopter flies too close overhead going to and from their home on Lake Michigan and their private, roof top heliport downtown.) Development along the river bank to make new parks is not part of THIS 45 million dollar project, but I’d bet my soul that a millage for new parks will be proposed down the road when they’re finished playing around in the water. 

What I learned is it's a waste of breath to bad-mouth “the river for all” project because it’s a done deal. They’ve been working on this project for five years getting the permits and jumping through the environmental hoops, getting an Army Corp of Engineers study and those from the EPA and the DNR and like it or not, the project will move forward with no public vote. It starts soon and will take between five-six years to complete. The first thing they will do is build a “floating dam” to replace another dam that is preventing the invasive Sea Lamprey from spawning upstream. Sea Lampreys are a major problem in the Great Lakes and there is an international treaty that covers trying to keep them from spawning in our streams. The whole idea of the ‘floating dam’ is that it can be lowered when it isn’t spawning season so kayaks and canoes can get downstream. Once this new dam is in place they will remove the five existing dams and some of the sea walls that controls flooding. All this so we can---and I quote---“create a more exciting river experience for everyone.” Yada, yada, yada.

I live upstream from this project and already we get a ton of spring flooding along the river as they do in the downstream communities but the man/child who gave the lecture assured us all that the DNR would not give them permits to revamp the river if more flooding were a possibility. Supposedly there are five-six other towns in the USA that have taken on similar projects with rave reviews. Where does all that federal and state grant money come from that we can throw it around like confetti? 

“As the late Doris Day’s signature song says, “Que será, será, whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to see...” But in this case the future’s not hard to see. And my crystal ball tells me that the moneyed people are quietly buying up old buildings that front the river so they’ll be able to sell them to the county at a hefty profit down the road when the city fathers start talking about putting in a park system along the river. Wouldn’t want those kayakers not to have a place to have a picnic---I’m not making that up. The guy showed us an illustration of a future beach to pull up kayaks with picnic tables and tiny people meticulously drawn in colored ink.

Ya, I know, we wouldn’t have places like the fabulous Central Park in New York City without the visionaries in past centuries. We do need visionaries and I didn’t moan and groan when a wealthy owner of a grocery store chain here in town spearheaded a project with a gift of $300,000 that bought up 42 miles of abandoned railroad beds and paved them for walking and hiking trails. That project was accomplished with 2.9 million dollars in federal and state grants. I welcomed that project because nearly everyone who could breathe can and does use those trails which just goes to show that most of us will get behind a visionary project if we see something in it for us personally. But my kayaking days are over---actually they never started but that's beside the point. I'm too old to want to learn how to shoot the rapids like they claim the Native Americans could do in that stretch of the river back before the dams were added to help the timber industry bring logs down river to the furniture factories that our city was once famous for world-wide.

‘Shoot the rapids’, by the way, is probably a 20^th century idiom invented by people who don’t mind scaring themselves half to death while whitewater rafting out West. Try as I might I couldn’t find the origins of that phrase but it’s close to the 1920’s ‘Shoot-the-Chute’ which was the name of an amusement park ride in which boats went down a steep incline to a pool at the bottom.  ©

 

The photo above was of an annual raft race that my husband, me and assorted friends entered 4-5 years on the same river they want to reinvent. The races were discontinued after someone died and too many people got hurt. It was a lot of fun but very dangerous because so many people spent the day drinking and playing in the hot sun and water. We had a ten man Navy surplus survival raft that we turned into things like a giant turtle or a sea creature. The bottom line: when they build the rapids back into the river people will come and a 100 years from now people will thank the visionaries who took on this project. Sometimes we all have to look at our pasts to see the future---in other words the bees have left my bonnet.

Our survival raft and two of our friends