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tion to your comparative distances from home. One car I saw had Alaska plates on it. This
was unbelievable. I had never seen Alaska license plates before. The man must have driv-
en over 4,500 miles, the equivalent of going from London to Zambia. He was the most
forlorn-looking character I had ever seen. There was no sign of a wife and children. I ex-
pect by now he had killed them and put their bodies in the trunk.
A drizzly rain hung in the air. I drove along in that state of semimindlessness that settles
over you on interstate .highways. After a while Lake Erie appeared on the right. Like all
the Great Lakes, it is enormous, more an inland sea than a lake, stretching 200 miles from
westtoeastandabout40milesacross.Twenty-fiveyearsagoLakeEriewasdeclareddead.
Driving along its southern shore, gazing out at its flat gray immensity, I thought this ap-
peared to be a remarkable achievement. It hardly seemed possible that something as small
as man could kill something as large as a Great Lake. But just in the space of a century or
sowemanagedit.Thankstolaxfactorylawsandthetriumphofgreedovernatureinplaces
like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Sandusky and other bustling centers ofsoot and grit, Lake
Erie was transformed in just three generations from a bowl of blue water into a large toi-
let. Cleveland was the worst offender. Cleveland was so vile that its river, a slow-moving
sludgeofchemicalsandhalf-digestedsolidscalledtheCuyahoga,onceactuallycaughtfire
and burned out of control for four days. This also was a remarkable achievement, I feel.
Things are said to be better now. According to a story in the Cleveland Free Press, which
I read during a stop for coffee near Ashtabula, an official panel with the ponderous title of
the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Water Quality Board had just released
a survey of chemical substances in the lake, and it had found only 362 types of chemic-
als in the lake compared with more than a thousand the last time they had counted. That
still seemed an awful lot to me and I was surprised to see a pair of fishermen standing on
the shore, hunched down in the drizzle, hurling lines out onto the greenish murk with long
poles. Maybe they were fishing for chemicals.
Through dull rain I drove through the outer suburbs of Cleveland, past signs for places that
were all called Something Heights: Richmond Heights, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights,
Shaker Heights, University Heights, Warrensville Heights, Parma Heights. Curiously, the
one outstanding characteristic of the surrounding landscape was its singular lack of emin-
ences.ClearlywhatCleveland waspreparedtoconsidertheheightswaswhatotherswould
regardasdistinctlymiddling.Somehowthisdidnotaltogethersurpriseme.AfteratimeIn-
terstate 90 became the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, and followed the sweep of the bay.
The windshield wipers of the Chevette flicked hypnotically and other cars threw up spray
as they swished past. Outside my window the lake sprawled dark and vast until it was con-
sumed by a distant mist. Ahead of me the tall buildings of downtown Cleveland appeared
and slid towards me, like shopping on a supermarket conveyor belt.
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