“Ghosts of River Road”

Inevitably, one morning late each year sycamores appear along the banks of the Chagrin River. Rising up the steep slopes bounding the river, deciduous trees of all manner crowd the hills for six months draping the landscape in a mantle of green, then briefly in October fire. All the while, sycamores wait silently unnoticed until winter’s first storm arrives in the night, its gusts and freezing rain borne on the edge of a cold front. Broad leaves of maple, white and red oak, mature beech and cherry, even sycamores are stripped in torrents of wind and rain, papering the forest floor in bronze and rust only to fade in brief days ahead.

As a child I recall the magic but also the melancholy of seasons past as we would drive along the river, observing the ghostly sycamores, their white trunks, sclerotic branches and fingers imploring us closer – only the marescent leaves of young beech and black willow, tenacious and withering through winter remained.

Humbly, just out of river’s reach, a trinity of sycamore have stood year after year silent and still, obeisant, tethered to shale bedrock. Today, diverse woodlands carpet the Chagrin Valley and native hemlock and white pine stipple and texture the eastern slope of the river.

This image captures the same copse of sycamore, just south of Gates Mills village on the banks of the Chagrin river, the same I’ve photographed and written about before; one of life’s touchstones as gracious time has spared us both into a seventh decade.

“Past Visible” Tummonds Bog

In 1986, with little fanfare, the “Charles Tummonds State Nature Preserve” was designated Ohio’s first scenic river preserve in the small, rural community of Mantua. The Upper Cuyahoga river forms the southern boundary of the preserve, its glacial moraine overlooking the wetland as it continues south, falling precipitously through kame woods into a broad marsh and sphagnum bog.
As the Pleistocene era ended 11,000 years ago, Ohio’s last glacier receded leaving rich sand and gravel deposits known as eskers (narrow ridges) and kames (hummocky irregular mounds) that would define this wetland. Pin oaks, white oaks, beech and shagbark hickory flourished and persisted, tracing the wooded hummock slopes to the water where rush and sedge still support nesting areas for waterfowl, provide construction material for beaver and food for deer and small game – a symbiotic ecosystem, self-sustaining yet fragile.

Tummonds bog is visible evidence of northeast Ohio’s last glacier, its geologic record contained in the silt, sand, and gravel of retreating ice. The survival of this wetland, at least until now, is deeply ironic as the mineral deposits that constitute and have sustained the land and wetlands, the bogs, fens, and marshes, even its geographic aesthetic, contain seeds of extinction planted by those who “harvest” its sand and gravel at the expense of vegetation and wildlife. The same materials that created the moraines, eskers and kames, ones that have textured and contoured the landscape for thousands of years are now under siege – in this instance by the “Oscar Brugmann Sand and Gravel Company,” a 5th generation local mining company that sells the natural resources for construction materials and golf courses. After mining 700,000 tons of sand and gravel each year the inevitable problem now confronting the company, is depletion. The area’s natural resources, those that have enriched the Brugmann family since 1929, are now running out and the rich deposits beneath Tummonds marsh are now in their sights – after almost a century in business and strip mining hundreds of acres of land, the company is moving to extract minerals that lie next to and beneath the marsh.

The story of this local mining company is repeated in other locales across the country as land is stripped of its resources to enrich families and shareholders. Hopefully, we can bring awareness to interested parties and organizations in the year ahead, to find a solution to what appears to be the imminent loss of a natural treasure.

*Perhaps even Brugmann can be enlisted. After all, their tagline is : “Since 1929, Putting Natural Materials to Use, Leaving Nature at Its Best.” Oscar Brugmann Sand and Gravel, Inc.