A couple of weeks back, we promised the launch of a new series about our experience tagging along with a pack of journalists brought together by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. You really should check that link; we’re quite smitten with the work the Institute does. in our view, their model should be replicated across the country and we’re totally impressed with Dave Spratt and Adam Hinterthuer. Today, we’re happy to bring you the first installment on our day with them at their Kalamazoo River Institute.
Dave and Adam invited us, along with phase two landowner David Gallagher (we’ll more on his story in another installment), to speak to the journos about our experience with the Line 6B replacement. And one of the journalists, Mark Brooks from Earthgauge Radio up in Canada has posted audio of much of our remarks. Even better, Dave and Adam were gracious enough to let us tag along with the group for most of the day. Since this was, believe it or not, our first-ever trip to Marshall and the site of the “dilbit disaster,” we were lucky to have the NWF’s Beth Wallace as an escort. On our way to the first stop of the day– the spot where Talmadge Creek meets the Kalamazoo River– we got to see the creek for the very first time. Here it is, quite lovely:
This shot is about a mile downcreek from the rupture. The creek carried the oil, which spilled over the banks more than 10 feet on either side, another half mile to the Kalamazoo River, which is where we met up with the journalists for a canoe trip a couple of miles in length all the way to Ceresco Dam, a key cleanup site following the spill and still today. At the landing where we launched is a new park, created by Enbridge. It’s very nice, which seems like a wonderful thing until you learn that on the day of the spill, the site was home to the Jeffery family, who had been there for 53 years. 
The sign, which cheerfully notes that “in 2011, the property was converted into a public park to enhance the community’s experience on the Kalamazoo River,” is a disturbing example of historical erasure: it makes no mention of WHY the property “was converted” into a public park– because Enbridge’s decaying pipeline ruptured, dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of diluted bitumen into the river and ruining the Jefferys’ property.
A bridge runs over the river at the park. If you look closely here, you can see a black line about a foot above the water; that line was left there by the oil, showing just how high the river was on the day of the spill. 
The line also serves, or se we thought, as another barely perceptible reminder of what happened in 2010. Of course, as with the plaque commemorating the Jeffrey property, one might never know that this is the site of one of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history. The signs remain, but one needs an experienced semiotician to decipher them. (In our case, we had Beth Wallace and Jay Wesley of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to give us the real story.)
And this is more or less the story of the Kalamazoo River as it currently exists. It has been scrubbed clean– washed, dredged, cleared, and restored. But it’s been scrubbed clean not just of dilbit (well, almost scrubbed clean of dilbit!). It’s also been scrubbed clean (again, almost) of why and how it was scrubbed clean. Because so much of the property along the river was purchased– by necessity– by Enbridge, there are no explicit references to the spill, its causes and its aftermath. That history is knowable only by subtle marks and traces, like the story the Jeffery family sign does not tell, like the black line left behind on the concrete bridge that only experts know about, Or by mile markers like the one below, which indicate the distance the oil flowed downriver (what do they signify to those who do not know the story of the spill?). 
Or by some Enbridge workers in orange vests doing who-knows-what at the river’s edge (this being a group of journalists, you can rest assured that they descended on those guys like a pack of wolves).
Just how clean has the Kalamazoo River been cleaned? Well, one experienced journalist-kayaker (not the person pictured: that’s Beth Wallace looking right at home kayaking) remarked upon how the river seemed to lack “structure.” That is, the farther you traveled along it, you had this odd feeling like the beauty of the river was somehow a little off, a little too neat, too tidy. There were no obstructions– no big rocks, no fallen trees, none of those things that a river just accumulates over the ages, the things that provide a habitat for all manner of critters: sunbathing spots for turtles, bivouacs for fish. 
So what you come to realize is that the Kalamazoo River, although quite nice, is now a man-made river, an artificial river, the kind of river one might encounter at, say, Disneyland. Honestly, it put us in mind of some fancy French theorizing we read way back in graduate school. In the 1980s, a theorist by the name of Jean Baudrillard wrote a little book called Simulacra and Simulations (in French). Baudrillard’s idea was that the world we now inhabit (the “postmodern” world) is so full of copies and reproductions (you can walk the streets of New York in a Las Vegas casino; you can visit Paris by going to Disney in Florida) that we have not only lost the “real.” Reality itself now seems to imitate the copies of reality. As Baudrillard puts it, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.”
Take Talmadge Creek, for instance: one of the most striking things we learned on our trip was that in order to clean it up, Enbridge essentially had to destroy the creek. They excavated a swath thirty feet wide (the creek is maybe three or four feet wide)– creek bed, vegetation, everything. Then they basically recreated the creek. How? Well, apparently based on Google map images, making Talmadge Creek a creek that quite literally copies a map. This is a textbook example of what Baudrillard called the “hyperreal.” Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River (a portion of it, anyway) are no longer “real” bodies of water. They are hyperreal. They are Enbridge’s recreations of bodies of water, corporation-created creeks and rivers that mimic real creeks and rivers. So when you walk along Talmadge Creek or you canoe the Kalamazoo, you are having an experience owned, operated, and created by Enbridge– whether you know it or not.
So while the river was, to the inexperienced eye, very clean, and while the canoe trip was quite pleasant on a beautiful May day, after thinking about all of this, after reminding ourselves of how the river came to be the river it is today, we still felt a little dirty.