Watching an unremarkable devastation

I am watching, waiting for the signs of devastation to reveal themselves.

The patch of land and water between a row of industrial plants and rail yards appears as an idyllic Midwestern wetland. An inlet situated near downtown Saint Paul, Pig’s Eye Lake is a stillness of the Mississippi River.

Here the river that carved the city into its separate parts, its caves and cliffs, resists its own impulse. It stalls out, lingers in a backwater that is still Pig’s Eye, historic Saint Paul, the part that didn’t have its raucous drunken soul soothed over by the Catholics.

The land has become some strange mutant, but it doesn’t reveal itself easily.

 The wind alternately blows the scent of clean, melting water and a sweet, acrid smell of chemicals. Dead yellow grasses scratch noisily against each other, rising above my head.

Ignoring the industrial sounds, screeching boxcars and semi trucks, I let the movement of grasses and birds seduce me into believing that this is a natural beauty.

Between the river and the lake sits Pig's Eye Island, home to one of the largest night heron rookeries. Overhead a blue heron flies with its uneven, prehistoric grace.

This wetland was one of the most toxic dumps in the state. Piled a story deep, most of the landfill still lies below this thin skin of wild plant and animal life.

Beside a creek, a horizontal-growing branch has been eaten away by deer and from several spots it leaks a clear fluid, tapping out a steady, liquid patter. Perhaps it’s a watery sap. But I prefer to think it is molting, shedding its wintery coverings for a skin of spring-like air.

The falling sound of the creek gives a sense of insistence, of movement, but the water languishes, slugging its way toward the lake, easily distracted, turning back upon itself, giving up easily with the faintest push of a north-blowing breeze.

From below the water, large bubbles emerge. Sometimes just a few in an orderly line. Other times there is a chaotic fomentation, as if one tiny portion of the creek were spontaneously celebrating, raising itself champagne-like until it has expended its portion of joy.

Hazardous waste, burning tires, car parts, batteries, appliances, building materials were dumped here. Sometimes they emerge, strange gifts pushed upward out of the mud and water.

The tree branch continues to molt, dripping off its winter pelt through the deep-toothed gouges.

Is this beauty less real because it grows out of hidden toxins and trash?

This is no place for reveries, any moment quickly broken open by the loud rush of traffic and trains. And yet these sounds seem to belong to the same conspiracy of the backward-floating water, the dripping tree.

It is a conspiracy of the unremarkable. An unremarkable flatness of grasses and passive blue sky.

And the devastation is unremarkable, the land holding its damage under an ordinary surface.

It swallows its poisons and wears a steady Midwestern face for the birds, trying not to reveal the toxins that will feed their young.

Its ongoing change is un-dramatic, marking the passage of time by seasons, marking history with those unkind offerings, wastes of human life bubbled up from the past.

- Nuria Sheehan