Toxic Adventurers

Hacking into hazardous realms

BY SAM WILLIAMS

[Originally Published 10.28.99 in GettingIt.com.]

In one of the best lines in last summer's hit film The Blair Witch Project, a lost film student tries to cheer her colleagues, reminding them that the forest they are passing through will inevitably give way to a highway or subdivision. "After all, " she says, "this is America -- we've destroyed all our natural resources."

In an age of cell phones, GPS-devices, and sport utility vehicles, it's easy to buy into Heather's smug attitude. Four hundred years of systematic paving, plowing, and polluting have reduced the North American continent to little more than a giant theme park.

Or have they? For some explorers, our culture's legacy of ecological antipathy is bearing some interesting -- albeit chemically laced -- fruit. Urban rivers, dumps, and underground catacombs have become modern-day versions of the forest primeval -- forbidden zones scary enough to test your inner-Puritan while at the same time remote enough to offer moments of soul-stirring solitude.

Diving Detroit

Rich Blumenfeld, a scuba diver who hails from the Detroit suburb of Roseville, Michigan, has a playful term to describe his near-daily romps in the St. Clair River, the international waterway linking Lake Huron to the north with Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie to the south.

"I call it 'freighter tag,'" says Blumenfeld with a dark chuckle. "You can always tell whether they're going upstream or downstream by the difference in sounds."

Overhead traffic is just one of the many hazards of scuba diving the Great Lakes and surrounding waterways. Blumenfeld recalls encounters with police, bacteria, diseased fish, and the occasional high-suction vortex created by uncharted municipal marine intake tubes.

"I didn't know what it was until my mask started fluctuating wildly on my face," says Blumenfeld, recalling a recent intake tube encounter. "Fortunately, I reacted quickly before it could suck my upper torso in."

Despite such scary moments, Blumenfeld says rust-belt waterways offer a combination of fish and underwater artifacts rarely seen in any other marine habitat. Free to explore in seclusion, Blumenfeld says his underwater experiences have given him new insight into the evolving relationship between man and his underwater neighbors.

"One time, when a freighter came in overhead, I dove for cover beneath an old Chevy on the river bottom," he says. "When I got there, I found all the fish had beaten me to it. They were using it for shelter just like I was."

Blumenfeld says he logs more than 200 dives a year, devoting most of his underwater time to the upper and lower St. Clair. Occasionally he'll go diving near downtown Detroit, but like the French voyageurs who first explored the Great Lakes region four centuries ago, Blumenfeld approaches local natives with a heavy degree of caution.

"If the Detroit police catch you launching out of the city parks, they'll take your gear and your car," he says. "Whenever I do go diving down there, I usually wear an old suit and drive a beater car."

If Detroit offers more opportunity for danger, it also offers the best artifacts. Blumenfeld reports a "treasure trove" of anchors, milk jugs and whiskey bottles dating back to the days of Prohibition and the Purple Gang. Other artifacts include the numerous guns that offer silent testimony to the motor city's rough and tumble reputation. "Near downtown Detroit, the whole bottom is littered with them, " Blumenfeld says. Although pollution has decreased significantly in the Great Lakes and surrounding tributaries since the bad old days of the 1970s, Blumenfeld says scuba diving in the industrial Midwest is still not for the faint of heart.

"My experience is the farther south you go, the more tumors you see on the bluegill," he says. "Up in Lake Superior, where the water is cleaner, you don't see any tumors on the fish. When you get to Lake Huron and the upper St. Clair [River], about one in 10 have tumors. In Lake Erie, it's even worse."

For humans, Blumenfeld says the primary concerns are bacteria and their attendant side effects: colds, fever, and inner ear infections. So far, Blumenfeld says he's managed to avoid these drawbacks by using a dry hood and by limiting his down-river dives to the winter and spring months when the water is cleaner.

" Once a winter, I might get a bad cold but nothing worse than that," Blumenfeld says "

Kayaking L.A.

Finding solitude in a city of three million inhabitants is no easy task, but for Los Angeles resident Denis Schure, it's simply a matter of hoisting a canoe over his head, crossing the street, and dropping into the nearby Los Angeles River.

"You can be in the heart of the city and get on stretches of the river that are essentially unknown and invisible," says Schure. "We're talking green, attractive... teeming with wildlife. It's quite amazing and quite reassuring."

Walden it ain't, but in a city long derided as soulless and superficial, the Los Angeles River has become an interesting symbol. Once a life-giver to the region, the river's transformation into a cement-lined, sewage-filled ditch began in the 1930s when the city's explosive population growth overtook the river's expansive flood plain. For a half century, the river spent its life like most L.A. residents isolated by chainlink fences and forbidding razorwire. What little contact angelenos had with the river usually came in the form of movie chase scenes and the occasional graffiti-filled glimpse from the freeway overpass. Over the last decade, however, the river's forbidding reputation has become attraction for some. A dedicated kayaker, Schure says he first decided to test his kayaking skills on the river after spotting an verdant stretch north of Studio City. "To get isolation in Los Angeles, you usually have to drive up to the Kern County or the lower Sierra," Schure says. "Here was an opportunity for isolation literally across the street."

Schure knew the risks. According to the Environmental Protection Association, the Los Angeles River falls under the definition of an "effluent-dominated" waterway, meaning that the majority of the water filling the river south of the Sepulveda basin comes from treated waste. Although clean by EPA standards, the river still offers the occasional over-concentration of lead, hepatitis, and E. coli to keep the faint hearted away.

As scary as it may be from a recreational perspective, however, Schure doesn't hesitate to throw in a few Thoreau-like descriptions of afternoons spent floating past cottonwood trees and the occasional rusty shopping cart. "There's something about... being on moving water," Schure says. "With the surrounding vegetation, it's physically and spiritually possible to leave the city at times."

Schure, a member of the organization Friends of the Los Angeles River, has ulterior motives when waxing poetic. Although east coast environmentalists have long viewed the Los Angeles River as a lost cause, Schure and his FoLAR colleagues see the potential for a Travolta-like comeback. Granted, the river will never be as powerful as it once was but with a few trees here and a dirt bottom there, Schure sees it reclaiming some of its past riparian glory.

"I usually view the Los Angeles River as a worst-case scenario," Schure says. "Just think of what recreational opportunities would be available with just a little concerted effort."

For the moment, the entire Los Angeles River is one giant no-trespassing zone according to both the city and the Army Corps of Engineers, the government agency currently charged with guarding the river's 22-mile channel. In an effort to play pioneer Schure has spent the last decade getting friendly with the various permitting agencies and avoiding run-ins with the law. He has also become more cognizant of personal safety in recent years. Since escorting a few reporters on a headwaters-to-mouth run in the early 1990s, Schure says he now keeps most of his exploring to the less-polluted areas north of Elysian Park. "I've been physically immersed in that water for 10 years and have not had any physical effects to show for it," he says. "At the same time, I'm less willing to get wet than I used to be."

Tunneling Toronto

While many toxic explorers provide a modern day twist on the age old back-to-nature impulse, 20-something Toronto native "Ninjalicious" offers a less romantic attitude: "I have no idea why people get so excited about nature," writes Ninjalicious -- an explorer whose many spelunking adventures within the sewer lines and storm drains of Toronto provide the primary material for the Infiltration.org Web site.

"I find trees and grass very boring and vastly prefer the possibilities offered by concrete and steel." Spurred on by the Internet, the sport of "draining" -- also called "vadding" or "sewering" -- is by far the most popular form of toxic adventure. The Yahoo Recreation/Hobbies/Urban Exploration page lists more than 25 sites, most of which have a subterranean theme.

"If you've explored one forest you've pretty much explored them all," he says. "Generally speaking, forests and other natural areas have far less historical significance and relevance to our daily lives than manmade structures."

Ninjalicious, or "Ninj," says he prepares for most tunneling escapades by putting on work clothes, boots, and bringing along a flashlight, pen and pad, camera, and a "couple of drinks" as accessories. So far, his activities have taken him to almost every corner of the Toronto netherworld. "I once took a large-scale map of the city and shaded in every location I'd explored and the downtown core was quite thoroughly inked up," he writes. "Toronto's suburbs house a few treasures, and suburbs are always a good place to look for easily-accessible storm drains."

If Ninj, Schure and Blumenfeld share a common impulse, it's the belief that one doesn't have to travel hundreds of miles to find a decent site for exploration, something to think about in the age of packaged "adventure" travel. Indeed, as the rest of the world gets safer and more sanitized, many of the most dangerous, and rewarding, adventures lie under our very noses in the storm drains and effluent-dominated waterways that most normal people prefer to ignore. Call it the smelly frontier, a place where the modern-day voyaguer or voyageuse, can be free to to exercise his or her own exploratory judgement, or lack thereof.

"The way I see it, why should I have to go all the way down to Florida to go scuba diving," says Blumenfeld. "There's plenty of unexplored places right here."

Sam Williams is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. His favorite environmental pollutants are benzene, selenium, and polychlorinated biphenyls.



Copyright © 1999 Sam Williams. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium if this notice is preserved.