Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  That far upstream, the Cuyahoga is a rural waterway. Alone on the river, Mark and I paddled between palisades of forest. Herons skimmed the surface on dragonfly wings. We passed a group of fishermen, standing on the soft bank, keeping one eye on their spidery line and the other on a case of Keystone Ice. Every mile or two, a raised highway transected the river at such an altitude that the cars overhead belonged more to the sky than to our aquatic world. Because the Cuyahoga is so naturally shallow, the bends were clogged with cattails, branches, and tree trunks, lodged against sandbars whose pebbly humps formed midchannel islands. The current eddied around these arboreal sheddings. This was only my second time in a kayak, so I struggled to keep my prow pointed forward in the turgid water.

  “Don’t fight the current!” Mark shouted as my kayak spun on the water. “Take long, wide strokes to get yourself turned in the right direction!”

  Finally, I drove my kayak right into the bank. As Mark tried to free me, I felt water leaking into the cockpit, and then I suddenly tipped over—from upright to sideways, from dry to wet. I lugged the boat to a sandbar and climbed back in. Once, that might have been a medical emergency—“If I fell in that river, I’d go to a doctor,” a young man from Akron told the Press in 1971—but now I just had to paddle to the lake in wet jeans.

  Six miles from its mouth the Cuyahoga becomes an industrial river. We heard the change before we saw it—a grinding that insinuated itself into our ears and then seemed to be coming from every direction, like an ultra-low-frequency siren. Turning a bend, we saw its source—the ArcelorMittal steel mill. (ArcelorMittal bought the old LTV Cleveland Works in 2005.) To our right, an iron mandible slid along an overhead track, dipped its jaws into a mound of taconite, and carried a mouthful back to the foundry. Now we were paddling beneath railroad bridges as dark as creosote. When Mark spotted a bridge with charred timbers, he floated to a stop and pulled his point-and-shoot camera from a waterproof bag.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is the bridge where the fire started.”

  Mark snapped photos and talked about this unremarkable bridge’s remarkable afternoon. We were floating at Water Zero of the modern environmental movement. To test the effectiveness of the Clean Water Act, I dipped a finger into the river and stuck it in my mouth. It tasted like well water, clean and mineraly.

  “It was one of those things that caught the nation’s attention,” Mark said. “Rachel Carson’s book came out. That’s why it became a big deal. And it’s a good thing that it did. The industries that remain, their practices have changed. For a hundred-plus years, the river was a dumping ground. There’s this question of balance. People need to work. You get kind of poignant thinking about Cleveland’s place in history. It was the sixth-largest city. It was the playground of the country. That wealth came from the steel that built so many other cities, but it was at the environmental cost of polluting the river. Cleveland was kind of used and cast aside.”

  It wasn’t just the scenery that had changed there on the lowest Cuyahoga. The river had changed, too. Dredged to a depth of twenty-three feet, margined by concrete walls, it was as smooth as an Olympic pool. I was no longer surprised that this river had once been so inorganic that not even flatworms could survive. Now I was impressed that it was the only living thing in downtown Cleveland.

  Mark’s marine radio alerted him to a freighter. We ducked behind a right angle in the riverbank and watched the seven-hundred-foot-long Dorothy Ann fill the channel, fill the sky. Our kayaks bobbed on her echoing wake of wavelets.

  “We’ve been approached about doing a kayak launch, but we’ve been nervous about novice kayakers dealing with freighters,” Mark said.

  From then on, we paddled into downtown Cleveland, as though the Cuyahoga were just a street that happened to be colored blue on the map. Our first landmark was the baseball stadium, then the basketball arena, then the Terminal Tower. An old railroad bridge, crosshatched with girders filling panels of sky in a one-sided game of tic-tac-toe. An automobile bridge whose railing resembled the classic façade at Yankee Stadium. A lift bridge, cocked toward the sky like a World War I German howitzer. Greenery clumped on the banks, thick as kudzu. Nonsensical graffiti—“HoBPJ,” “OMAR”—in lavenders, reds, and aquas. Grain elevators patched with decals, in drywall patterns.

  We passed the Holiday, Wayne Bratton’s pleasure cruise boat. I called his name and a bald head appeared on deck.

  “You’re the guy I want to talk to about the river!” I shouted.

  “Well, when are we going to do it?” he asked.

  “As soon as I finish this kayak trip.”

  “You’ve got about two and a half miles to go.”

  Near the site of Lock 44, where the Ohio and Erie Canal once emptied into the Cuyahoga, warehouses showed their brick backsides to the water. These were the Flats, site of the first great river fire and scene of another catastrophic chapter in Cleveland history. The 1990s were as bounteous to urban America as the seventies had been disastrous. Cleveland opened the I. M. Pei–designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, built a baseball stadium that sold out 455 straight games for a team that fell one run short of a World Series title, and transformed its oily, charred, tumbledown riverfront into a nightlife district.

  Unfortunately, it took only a dozen years for the Flats to go from hipness to respectability to dereliction. First, underground music venues set up in the old warehouses. They were followed by Joe’s Crab Shack and Hooters. Finally, like pimps arriving at a convention, the titty bars moved in. The crowds became rowdier. After three revelers fell in the river and drowned, the city raided the Flats, closing six bars in one night. Now, the derelict Flats were another melancholy Cleveland monument.

  “In the nineties, it really seemed like Cleveland was coming back,” Mark said. “And then …”

  I could finish the sentence myself: … it went back to being Cleveland.

  Finally, there was nothing ahead of us but open water and open sky. This was the mouth of the Cuyahoga. Past dunes of gypsum on the right and an abandoned Coast Guard station on the left, we paddled into the choppy lake, turned left, and beached the boats.

  I rushed back to the house where I was staying to change out of my wet jeans, then raced back to the riverfront, where I found Wayne Brat-ton. He was ordering around a two-person crew painting the Holiday with the same crusty authority that had once commanded an ore freighter.

  “Be careful you don’t step where they’re painting,” he roared at me, at the volume of a man who is both used to command and, at seventy-five, trying to make himself audible above his own hearing loss. He sat down on a padded bench in his galley and explained why I’d been able to kayak a river that was once too rancid even to walk alongside.

  Soon after the 1969 fire, the state of Ohio closed a silt distributor and a metal plater who’d been dumping into the river by using a nuisance statute written to shut down whorehouses. Sherwin-Williams was slapped with a $1.5 million lawsuit, to stop it from treating the Cuyahoga as a liquid palette. Republic Steel spent $38 million on a cooling tower and a settling tank that prevented the discharge of scalding water and heavy metals. That summer of the fire, a sewer main broke, spewing twenty-five million gallons of shit every day for months. Cleveland spent billions of dollars on a network of tunnels to hold rainfall that would otherwise have washed through the treatment plants and forced them to release raw sewage. After the fire, Mayor Carl Stokes declared the dirty river as much a threat to his constituents as nuclear war.

  “We have the kind of air and water pollution problems in these cities that are every bit as dangerous to the health and safety of our citizens as any ICBM so dramatically poised five thousand miles from our country,” said Stokes, who lobbied for federal cleanup money and stronger environmental laws.

  Some of those laws were more effective than intended, shutting down factories they’d only meant to regulate. Unable to meet the EPA’s air-quality standards, U.S. Steel shipped its mill to China, where polluters ca
n write their names on the sky. Fewer factories on the river meant fewer ships, and fewer ships meant fewer oil terminals: Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Sun, and Gulf all shut down after the steel crisis of the 1980s. The Cuyahoga’s revival was tied to Cleveland’s economic decline. And of course, with half its peak population, Cleveland is dumping half as much sewage and garbage. Within six years of the fire, the Putzfrau’s cleanup mission ended, astonishing its captain.

  “The way the river looked in the beginning, I was sure that I would retire and there’d still be plenty of work to do,” he told the makers of the documentary The Return of the Cuyahoga.

  Since the Cuyahoga is a federal navigable waterway, open for ships, Mark Pecot’s “question of balance” had not quite tipped in favor of recreation, but a rowing club has established itself on the Flats, a sign that the lowest Cuyahoga can function as both a shipping channel and a lifestyle amenity. Water is the one advantage every Rust Belt city has over its suburbs and the Sun Belt.

  Bratton had seen the Cuyahoga’s potential back in 1982, when he bought the Holiday and chartered scenic tours of America’s unsightliest body of water. Environmental groups traveled to Cleveland from all over the world to see the river that burned. On Saturday nights, Bratton piloted spa cruises.

  “I never thought in my life that we’d have these people,” Bratton said, lifting his eyes to look at the glittering water. “People swim in the river. Are they goofy? Yeah. They’re not well. But they’re swimming in the river.”

  5.

  I’m a Flintoid

  By winning World War II, the United States also won imperial responsibilities. Among those was the protection of Israel, created by the Allied powers as reparation for Germany’s massacre of six million Jews. A Jewish state was resented by the surrounding Muslims, but the Arabs were just emerging from colonialism, so there was nothing they could do about it. From the Crusades to the Allenby Declaration, the Arabs had been kicked around by Westerners for nearly a millennium. But now, the West’s economy depended on a resource Allah had placed beneath Arab feet: oil. From 1948 to 1972, sedan-driving Americans tripled their use of oil, from 5.8 million barrels a day to 16.4 million barrels a day. The fuel efficiency of the average American car was 13 miles a gallon. Power plants switched from coal to oil. It was cleaner, and they didn’t have to worry about a mine workers’ strike. The oil industry had been born in the United States, but by the early 1970s, American cars and TV sets had drunk so much of the country’s supply that we were importing six million barrels a day—over a third of our consumption.

  In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Three years later, Anwar Sadat became Egypt’s president and began plotting a revenge war to reclaim his country’s lost territory and build his stature as an Arab leader. In early 1973, Sadat asked Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal for support. Not only did the king agree to fund a war against Israel, he told the Western press that “America’s complete support for Zionism and against the Arabs makes it extremely difficult for us to continue to supply the United States with oil, or even to remain friends with the United States.”

  Egypt attacked on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar, when Jews rest, reflect, and fast. As Israeli forces retreated, Prime Minister Golda Meir begged President Nixon for help. Reluctantly, Nixon sent ammunition, helping Israel repel the Arab attack. The Saudis retaliated by cutting off oil shipments to the United States. The price of gasoline increased from thirty-six cents to fifty-three cents a gallon—when drivers could get it. Filling stations raised flags—green for “gas available,” red for “no gas,” yellow for “trucks only.” To prevent hours-long lines, stations sold to cars with odd-numbered license plates on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, even plates on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

  Since World War II, the nation’s wealth had increased geometrically, so much of it generated by the auto industry. In 1949, America’s automobile fleet stood at 45 million. By 1972, it was 116 million—more cars than we could fill up from our own wells. The alpine graph of the American standard of living had finally reached its plateau.

  Nixon, the most farsighted politician of his generation, had predicted this would happen. He had, in fact, decided to spend his second term reconciling his people to the diminishment of the American Dream.

  “Nixon had … become convinced that one of the reasons he had to serve a full eight years was because he grasped what was true in the intimations of the apocalypticists on the bestseller lists: the imminence of America’s decline as the world’s number one power,” wrote Rick Perlstein in Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. “He believed Nixon, and only Nixon, in a second term, safely removed from the requirement of ever winning another election, could cushion the blow by teaching Americans to live within limits.”

  Nixon lowered the speed limit on federal highways to fifty-five miles per hour, extended daylight savings time, and asked Americans to car-pool and turn down their thermostats. This was followed by the first Corporate Average Fuel Economy law, which gave automakers until 1985 to double their fleet-wide average to 27.5 miles per gallon.

  Our other imperial responsibility was to the nations we defeated: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Failures at world conquest, the Axis countries redirected their national ambitions into industry. Following Winston Churchill’s admonition to be “magnanimous in victory,” the United States rebuilt their factories and assumed their military duties. During the Cold War, America’s best engineers went into aerospace and defense—those fields offered more money, thanks to big government contracts, and offered the patriotic satisfaction of keeping up with the Commies. In Germany, Italy, and Japan, the best engineers designed cars.

  And so, when an oil-starved world demanded subcompacts, Germany gave us the Volkswagen Rabbit, Italy gave us the Fiat 131, and Japan gave us the Honda Civic. America gave us the Corvair, the Vega, and the Ford Pinto. The Pinto was the worst car in automotive history. It wasn’t just a lemon, like the Edsel, it was a lemon that burned people to death. Ford president Lee Iacocca was so desperate for a small car by the 1970 model year that he accordioned the Pinto’s design schedule to twenty-five months, from the usual forty-three. In crash tests, the tube between the gas cap and the tank was torn away in rear-end collisions over thirty miles an hour, spewing gasoline. Ford engineers considered placing the tank above the rear axle, instead of between the axle and the flimsy bumper, or installing a plastic liner in the tanks, but either solution would have added $11 to the production cost. A cost-benefit analysis determined that the Pinto’s gas tank would fry 180 passengers, maim another 180, and burn up 2,100 cars. Settling the lawsuits from these infernal accidents would run the company $47.5 million, far less than the $137 million to fix the problem. Mother Jones, a muckraking magazine out of San Francisco, published the memo. The next year, a California jury awarded $128 million to a teenager burned over his entire body while riding in a rear-ended Pinto. The only consolation to Henry Ford II was that Pinto replaced his father’s name, Edsel, as a synonym for a shoddy car. When Johnny Carson wanted to insult the National Enquirer for yellow journalism, he called it “the Pinto of newspapers.”

  My first car was a Chevy Chevette. Successor to the failed Vega, the Chevette was just as small, and just as flimsy. Its floorboards were so rust-prone my mechanic diagnosed the Fred Flintstone hole as Chevette Floor Cancer. He slid a metal plate under the floor mat, but when I drove through a puddle, dirty water gushed through the unsealed sheet, soaking my trousers. In the summer of 2011, I saw a man trying to crank one final ride out of a primer-gray Chevette on Fort Street in Detroit. I wasn’t surprised the car wouldn’t run. I was surprised the owner had kept it running for twenty-five years.

  The American automakers lost Generation X forever with the crap they put out in the seventies and eighties. I can’t convince my import-driving friends and relatives that twenty-first-century American cars are just as good as twenty-first-century Japanese cars, bec
ause so many started out in GM beaters. Even my father drove a Toyota, until he got a job with the governor of Michigan, who forced him to trade it for a Ford Escape.

  “I don’t need to drive foreign cars anymore, anyway,” he said. “The American cars are just as good now.”

  They were just as good thirty years too late.

  “The 1970s were the decade that undid Detroit,” Paul Ingrassia wrote in Crash Course. “During the 1980s and 1990s, the Big Three would mount periodic, and sometimes spectacular comebacks, and undergo especially dramatic crises. But never again would Detroit rule the automobile industry unchallenged and unbowed.”

  Actually, the 1960s undid Detroit. The city that never recovered from the 1970s was Flint, Michigan.

  IN 1980, shortly after the Rolling Stones released their trashy disco vamp “Miss You,” a Flint rock and roll station cut a parody—a tribute to the industrial life entitled “I’m a Flintoid.”

  I work Buick all day long

  Building car doors makes you strong

  I’m a Flintoid.

  To be a Flintoid was to live on the most prosperous planet in the GM universe. In any universe. No city benefited more from the generous contracts negotiated by the UAW. That only seemed fair, because Flintoids had been beaten, gassed, and shot to establish the UAW. Flintoids enjoyed the highest per capita income in the United States. Flint was not the wealthiest city on Earth, but it was the most middle-class. Two out of every three Flintoids drew a paycheck from General Motors or one of its satellites. Eight decades after Billy Durant had the brainstorm of lashing a gasoline-powered engine to a buggy, the Genesee County shoprat population had multiplied to eighty thousand. General Motors owned more real estate in Flint than the Catholic Church owns in Rome. It was running three shifts a day at factories that occupied more ground than every Big Ten gridiron combined. Chevrolet plants were so multifarious that if you built cars in that low-lying area along the Flint River, you worked at Chevy in the Hole (as opposed to Chevrolet Assembly, on the south side). There were multiple Fisher Body plants—Fisher One, site of the Sit-Down Strike, on the East Side, and Fisher Two on the South Side. ACDelco made spark plugs. Truck and Bus installed them in Chevy Blazers. The local identity was spelled out on the black iron arches spanning Saginaw Street, the downtown drag: “VEHICLE CITY.”