The Stacks

I told the writer Peter Markus I’d take a walk with him to Pointe Mouillee that Friday morning, March 15th, when the stacks were set to come down. We walk there together once every couple months along with his dog Moonshine. The Pointe is a peninsula of land adjacent to the Humbug Marsh that juts into Gibraltar Bay. It’s hard to describe this area of bays and points and bights, tombolos in western Lake Erie sand that are visible some days and other days submerged, which is to say it’s hard to locate yourself among them without the aid of the industrial monuments that populate their shores. Our digital locations via GPS satellites tell us little about who we’ve been. To really understand we must look up and resist the impulse to imagine a different sky.

There was a time when the Trenton Channel Power Plant supplied power to our region’s grid, running everything industrial and residential alike. I think of this as I pull up to Peter’s house at 6:30 that morning—Peter’s brick ranch house and thousands of subdivisions full of postwar ranch houses identical to his, all the dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, televisions, overhead lights, lamps, stereos, were powered by coal burned at that little square-quarter-mile plant. With the decommissioning of the plant by DTE Energy a couple years ago, our power has gotten only nominally cleaner; now we run on a fossil fuel plant twenty miles south of Trenton in Monroe, MI.     

The candy cane-patterned smokestacks of the Trenton Channel Power Plant were iconic. They hovered 600 feet above that southern stretch of the Detroit River mouth where it rushes into Lake Erie’s Gibraltar Bay. Everyone who lived Downriver internalized them as part of the landscape, and boaters used them for navigational purposes. Before GPS, fishers coming in from the bay would keep the stacks in their sightlines to get back to the channel. As of today, they’ve been pulverized into talc and a cloud of dust by an explosion involving 1,000 tons of Alfred Nobel’s concoction; their poured concrete lengths dropped in less than a handful of minutes.

I already miss them. 

Others say they’re happy these landmarks are gone. It represents something—a rupture, a break from Trenton’s dirty industrial past. And the fact that a fossil fuel power plant is no longer belching coalsmoke into the sky above the river and the Great Lake into which it flows constitutes progress, or at least points in the direction of progress. It’s a clean energy future, and McLouth Steel and the Trenton Chrysler Chemical Plant, riparian neighbors of the Trenton Channel Power Plant, have also been demoed. They kept finding old paint barrels that Chrysler was supposed to have disposed of buried in the ground of the chemical plant, and it was unclear if any of the degraded chemicals made it into the river. Let’s assume they did. It still seems to me the riverain is healing. It seems the birds and fish and minks, even the river otters are coming back.

The implosion of the stacks left a hole in the sky for many of us though. And it’s hard to argue that the Downriver skyline is better for this void. The vision of those coal-belching monsters lives inside us, and if the vision is bad, we ourselves are somehow bad. If the nostalgia for our industrial past is misguided, then we are maudlin purveyors of what has been. We suffer from the banality of what we lived through. We who take consciousness for granted and love the riverain and love the lacustrine views of what thrives perfectly well without our attention.

I saw somebody online call them “the Dr. Seuss stacks,” resembling as they did the stovepipe hat worn by the Cat in the Hat, and I often think of Dr. Seuss when I think of Lake Erie. Before the Clean Water Act of 1972, the lake was dying due to point source pollution from sites like Mclouth Steel, (which hovers over much of Peter Markus’ writing, especially his book We Make Mud), the Chrysler Chemical Plant, and the Trenton Channel Power Plant and resulting microcystis, a blue-green algae that starves the lake of oxygen in a process limnologists call “eutrophication.” The first version of The Lorax contained the line, “I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.” According to Liz Neroni’s Essay, “The Lorax and the Lake,” “Two research associates from the Ohio Sea Grant Program [Claudia Melear and Margie Pless] wrote to the author in 1986, explaining to him that people were working on cleaning up the lake and the reference wouldn’t help their cause. Dr. Seuss responded by removing the line from the book.” Lake Erie’s relative, precarious health, is one of the great ecological success stories of the twentieth century.

In The Living Great Lakes, Jerry Dennis recounts a friend’s tale of “motoring from Maumee Bay to West Sister Island, traveling the entire twenty miles through a mat of bright green algae so thick the trail his boat made was still there when he returned at the end of the day.” Lake Erie still faces challenges, but there’s no question that the EPA, along with local democratic politicians and community activist conservationists, have made it much better for recreationists, sportspeople, and wildlife alike. During the height of its eutrophic period, you’d be hard-pressed to pull many walleyes or perch from the lake; most of what was caught were dogfish, what Dennis calls “garbage fish.” And I can’t help but think of a line from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake I find myself quoting often: Bring about it to be brought about and it will be, loke, our lake lemanted, that greyt lack, the city of Is is issuant (atlanst!), urban and orbal, through seep froms umber under wasseres of Erie. The lack of oxygen in the water, algal blooms so dense, the water so occluded that the lost mythical city of Atlantis could’ve been down there, waiting for archeologists to find it, for all Joyce knew.

In other words, there’s poetry to this area. There is a poetry to the perdurant, nearly ruined waterways that allow us to save ourselves while pretending to save them. This is to say that though it might seem idiotic to insist upon the beauty of smokestacks whose teleological purpose was to send coalsmoke into a fragile ecosystem’s sky, I’m of the opinion that such dispensers of poison can stand as relics, transcending their teleologies.

Peter’s We Make Mud enacts this sort of post-industrial aesthetic. The brothers in the book are ever gazing upward, unaware that somewhere there are vistas of sky not stunted by smokestacks and smoke… The sky the brothers love is right here, the sky that’s interpellated them, The sky above the river, the black metal mill shipwrecked down by the river’s muddy shores… In an Althusserian sense, this love of what symbolizes the exploitation of our natural resources for profit constitutes an ideological state apparatus (ISA). But I can’t help adoring what has no use for adulation, in finding a navigational purpose in a husk of industry. What we love in the stacks is what we love in Giacometti’s leaning men, in Camille Claudel’s tortured obsidian busts, their sculptural, not their utilitarian beauty.

Peter’s already standing on his porch waiting for me. It’s still dark out when I climb into his old white F-150 and he drives us down Jefferson and up the poorly-grated, muddy, potholed dirt roads that lead to the refuge. When we arrive, DNR officers are directing traffic with glowing orange safety batons. We follow a line of cars, mostly Fords and a handful of Ram trucks. This is the heart of UAW country. We find one of the last parking spots on the east end of the refuge, right near the fishing pier. Typically one couldn’t see the western shore of Grosse Ile from here at this dark hour, but today it’s a wash of police lights and strobing lights from the DNR boats that shut down access to the Trenton Channel from just south of Elizabeth Park to the south end of the main island of Grosse Ile. At the edges of those wild halations, I make out the shadow of a shoreline. A DNR officer who recognizes Peter speaks to us for a few minutes.

“Normally I’d tell you to go up that little hillock in the center there, but it’s really muddy from the rain last night,” he says. “Your best bet is probably the fishing pier.”

As Peter thanks him, a septuagenarian in a Vietnam veteran hat climbs out of a Ram truck. “How’s it going?” the man asks the DNR officer.

The DNR official nods. “We’re ahead of schedule,” he informs the man. “I just got radio that they’re dropping the first stack at 6:58, two minutes ahead. We’ll see,” he adds, and shrugs.

“I used to work in that plant,” the Vietnam vet says. “Kind of a sad day.”

“I’ve talked to a few former employees out here,” the DNR officer tells him.

“Yeah, a guy died in the south stack when I was there a couple decades back. Big gantry crane collapsed while he was going up there to do maintenance work. Nobody really talks about it.” He looks up at the tower as he speaks. “I’m gonna miss seeing them. I live down in Rockwood and they always let me know I’m close to home.”

“Yeah, the sky around here is gonna look a lot different,” the DNR officer tells us. He tells us they are keeping the Grosse Ile Municipal Parkway Bridge closed for part of the day to make sure the vibrations from the dynamite don’t shake the bridge abutments loose. That 150 year old bridge spent the majority of 2021 closed for emergency underwater pier and abutment repairs.

Peter asks the DNR official if we should be worried about asbestos dust or anything.

“Nah, they had HAZMAT and the EPA in there to clear out all the environmental hazards. And Trenton Fire is over there with pressurized water misters to keep the dust down.” He smiles and shrugs as he reassures him though, as if to say, It’s Downriver, man, who the hell knows? Enjoy the show.

I glance at my phone. It’s 6:52, six minutes until the first blast.

“We should get over there,” I say to Peter.

“Your best bet is the fishing pier,” the DNR guy repeats. “It’s nothing but mud up on that hill.”

Peter thanks him as we set out across the parking lot toward the pier. We take the little gravel path down to the river, and it is indeed muddy. The shadows of the enthralled crowd feel like something out of Dante, while the mud feels like something out of Markus’ work, insistent and atavistic.  In Peter’s collection of lyrical stories, We Make Mud, characters walk through mud in work boots, they eat mud, become mud, confuse mud for the river, confuse fish for mud, build houses out of mud and attend shifts at the black metal mill shipwrecked down by the river’s muddy shores.

Peter doesn’t usually say much when we wander around these parts. He gestures toward trees where eagles have built nests. He pauses to listen to the sonations of swans landing in a muskeg, his favorite sound in the world, he tells me, likening it to the silence Jack Gilbert hears in a waterfall in one of his poems, a sound from the wings and not the throat, a silence of a sound; he says the best sounds, the best music, the best poems, lull us into an experience of silence; he nods toward coyote scat to point out how ropelike it is. He points to the ravaged carcasses of swans.

He did tell me a story one day while we were walking that still haunts me. One of Peter’s friends lived across the bay on Elba Island, in a brick Victorian with French doors and half-roundels that faced the northern shore of Erie. She disappeared while swimming one evening years ago. Her drowned body twisted through the currents and undertows of the strait and washed up at Pointe Mouillee. Three years later her husband flipped his 39-foot console boat on a wake in Brest Bay and drowned alongside his parish priest who had comforted him in his widower’s grief. A rare feat, to comfort anyone with words. The husband also washed up there, soggy and bloated among the rip rap crags. Death’s cartography is seldom so precise. The priest never surfaced on his own. They had to dredge him from the waters to the south.

I can hear the silence Peter speaks of when we stop halfway down the pier, the silence of the estuary where the dead convene. But I can also hear the voices of those who have come to elegize our region’s past.

The small red lights near the top of the stacks, required by the FAA to warn off small aircrafts, stopped blinking five minutes ago. The stacks are now lit by the first traces of the rising sun and the halogen light of the erstwhile coke yard beamed through Fresnel lenses. At 6:55 a threnody of sirens blares between the river banks. Sirens of coastguard boats, DNR boats, cop cars, the tornado siren of Grosse Ile.  

I snap a couple pictures of the stacks, knowing it’s the last time I will see them. I flash back to a Jet Ski ride I took with my late friend Brad Morris as a teenager. I rode on the back as he flew from the western shore of Grosse Ile to his father’s place on the Huron River in Gibraltar. I remember how the nose of that Jet Ski sliced the reflections of those stacks in the water. That feeling of fear and exhilaration, a Downriver version of what the romantic poets called “The Sublime.”

We can barely see the first stack, the north stack fall, but the sirens all go quiet and the explosion rattles a flock of sparrows from paper birches on a small barrier island a hundred yards from the pier. I have a vision of animals scurrying—the shadows of foxes pass through the parking lot in the beams of headlights (did I really see them?), minks dive from their sleeping roosts below the pier in search of depths this river does not possess, depths to shield them from the booming earth, stunned bass the color of the dawn float belly-up in the dirty river.

Because the stacks were part of the ecosystem, they possessed a consciousness that we shared; they were alive, and the animals that lived inside their shadows knew them. Limnologists discovered in recent years that the walleyes had adapted to spawn in the coke sediment of the riverbed there, that they preferred it to natural shoals elsewhere in the river. Any time there is such a drastic environmental change, the animal in us startles, panics, and submerges itself in a poignant, ineffable sadness.

Minutes after the north stack falls, preceded by a red flash, we see the south stack, the one where the man is rumored to have died, half-topple, half-implode into dust. We walk away briskly as soon as it is gone. The dust begins to billow, despite the firefighters’ efforts, in a northwest wind toward Grosse Ile.

“That was quick,” a guy comments. “That’s what she said,” an old timer retorts.

Peter rolls his eyes. He asks me if I want to go back to the house to grab his dog Moonshine and walk the trail along the Pointe.

“Sounds good,” I say. It’s almost daylight. When I climb into his truck, I’m startled by a large turtle that sits atop his dashboard. I hadn’t noticed it this morning. The claws and the dark green arms striped with yellow look alive. The head is gone. I can’t quite fathom how it died. The shell of it is perfectly preserved.

 We drive down Jefferson in the morning sun and pass the gleaming bus work bearing heavy electrical cables westward, toward Stellantis, toward Peter’s subdivision and beyond. They look Edenic in the late-winter light.