Reflections on Lake Erie (Comments: 0)

Walt Whitman famously wrote of “Blue Ontario’s shore” and just as famously never saw that lake outside of his endlessly colorful imagination – but by the goddess, he should have been biking with us along true-blue Erie’s shore. I’ve never seen the second smallest (in surface area) of the Great Lakes in better hue. It’s a testament to the success of the clean-water laws and programs that were inspired by Lake Erie’s moribund condition forty years ago (some say it was actually dead, except for algae, etc.) and sideshows like the combustion of one of the lake’s most infamous tributaries, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

It’s not just the blue water, though, that makes for beauty. The shoreline between Fort Erie and Point Pelee is verdant, slightly rolling (unlike the back country here, which is quite flat), and festooned with new wineries, apparently prosperous small farms, and patches of hardwoods. hardwoods, including deep-rooted old oaks, were taken down by microbursts and tornadoes recently; the towns around Leamington are still dealing with cleanup, and it’s remarkable how selective the wild winds were: you’ll see a few acres of trees devastated, and acreage nearby almost untouched – hardly a twig torn off.

There are far too many lakeside cottages cluttering up the fringes of beach, but still enough openings to preserve the viewscape, that sometimes underappreciated part of the public domain. Speaking of views, Ontario and regional municipalities here have been installing wind farms at a rapid pace. Parts of the region reminded me on northern Germany, with white-shafted and _bladed windmills dominating the skyline. They look a lot better here than they do, say, in the hilly Southern Tier (NYS) town of Cohocton, where they seem like vertical insults on the ridgelines, and banks of intrusive red warning lights at night. (You might have guessed my support for wind development is qualified.)

One thing’s beyond debate: the Ontario windmills should presage the long-awaited shutdown of coal-fired electric plants like the one at Nanticoke, a major source of ground-level ozone, etc., that plagues a wide swath of points east, including Toronto, Buffalo, Rochester, and the rural areas between. I seem to recall that Toronto now gets more than 100 ozone alert days per year, thanks not just to Nanticoke, but to other obsolete, poisonous coal plants like Huntley in Tonawanda and the Dunkirk plant on Erie’s south shore. So the US is doing its part, too!

Nanticoke is also ugly as sin. What a contrast it makes with so many other features of the north shore.

Next post: I’ll finally get to the US Social Forum and its biking connections – not to mention the eminently bikeable city of Detroit and its eco-transportation potential.

-Jack