For the Mill

Most days I can navigate past the news automat that is the opening page of the Yahoo internet home site. In many ways it reminds of the Horn & Hardart shops in New York City of ancient times, with their walls of glass windowed cubicles that contained a variety of prepared food items for the hungry visitor. Instead of plugging in your coinage to unlock the window and free your comestible of choice, one can now click on a given news item (for free) from a numbered list or transient, side-slipping slide show, and be made aware of, if not actually informed about, any given event in the day’s range of occurrences. In fact, many of these items, like the "one weird trick" info-ad boxes with their accompanying photos of unrelated, large-breasted info models, have little or no information that might provide intellectual nourishment or even a simple basis for rationally deciphering the essentials of day to day living. In some ways, they are a new form of entertainment, in that one can be amused by the utter lack of information they contain. One can also carry on to the comment sections afterward, and bear witness to either peoples’ disgust with how little can be gleaned information-wise from these articles, or be amazed at how ignorant people can be of both the practical machinations of thought process and reason, as well as the primal function of syntax and grammar, through the ways and forms in which they leave verbal traces of their stupidity in responses to these articles.
 
There was an article recently that I tried to avoid at all costs, even advancing the slide show forward whenever it came around again so I wouldn’t have to look at it. The story in question involved the dolphin that had showed up to die in the Gowanus Canal in the Brooklyn section of New York. From the way it was initially billed, it sounded as if this "wayward" dolphin had somehow gotten lost and trapped in what sounded to be an equivalent to Buffalo’s Love Canal, except that it was connected to the open sea and stood as a perilous and toxic trap to any unsuspecting marine inhabitant that might happen into its clutches. Of course, I had to look into it.
 
At the time it was built in the late 1860’s, the Gowanus Canal served the many grist mills that had been built in what was then an agricultural region, and soon became one of the main waterborne transportation hubs in the area. It also served as an open sewer, along with a dumping spot for a variety of toxics as the area became more industrialized. At one point in the early to mid 1900’s there was an ink factory located on its banks which regularly dumped various colors of ink pigments into its shallow depths. After one particular coloring the canal gained a new nickname: Lavender Lake. The biggest problem with the canal was and is that it dead ends two miles inland and there is no flushing action to clear it of its polluted load. This was somewhat "remedied" in the 1890’s by a sewer pipe that took the local effluent further out into New York Harbor. And in the early 1900’s a tunnel was built to pump fresh water into the inland end of the canal and flush accumulated wastes down its length and out into the open water, not that in the bigger picture this is any real kind of solution to this problem, and the pump that dorv this flushing finally failed in the1960’s without being replaced. After a number of various attempts at clean up the Gowanus Canal was finally declared a Superfund cleanup site by the EPA and placed on the Superfund National Priorities list on March 4, 2010. Some might wonder what it was that took them so long to make that decision.
 
There is a part of the film documentary ‘Lavender Lake’ that is available on line. It was released in 1999 and offers another look at how the locals perceived the canal. The smell from the canal is a topic discussed here, as well as the admission by some of the residents that after a while they just didn’t notice it. There is talk about what got thrown into the canal, which seemed to be just about anything that people wanted to get rid of, and ranged from the wastes generated by local businesses, to dead animals to allegations that the mafia used it to get rid of weapons and bodies. Two policemen interviewed here talk of the twenty to thirty bodies they have seen come out of the canal, as well as a large suitcase that the finders opened expecting to discover a pile of cash, and instead were shocked to find a number of human body parts from a number of different unfortunate victims.
 
Which kind of brings us around to the dolphin that drew me into this to start with. One of the stories that covered the necropsy of the animal, as it did die within a day of its first sighting in the canal, was that it hadn’t been eating and had kidney stones and liver parasites- it wasn’t healthy to begin with. On the other hand, there were numerous mentions in the documentary about people falling into the canal and not surviving, mostly because they had been overcome by fumes coming from the "water". There was also story of the baby whale that had been seen years before "frolicking" in the entrance waters to the canal, and who had been dubbed Sludgie" by the locals. Sludgie didn’t make it either. As for the dolphin, I suppose one could anthropomorphize its demise along the lines of a Kevourkian solution. One might be tempted to talk about a death with dignity here, but that seems less than plausible given the rankness of its final aquatic dying grounds. And by the way the stories were written, it sounded as though the dolphin had been trapped in this situation. Everything I’ve read, however, indicates that the canal is at least 12 feet deep all the way to its outflow. It is a story like this that tends to affirm my questioning of the sanity of people who swim in events like those at Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty and around Manhattan. Especially since the EPA is still trying to figure out how to clean up the likes of the Gowanus Canal, which dumps directly in New York Harbor just below Governor’s Island. My skepticism surrounding the viability of the human race also continues unabated, as one of the last lines in the Wikipedia article that was the source of some of this information reads this way: "Some express concern that the clean-up [of the Gowanus Canal] poses a health risk." All I can say is, tell that to Sludgie.