“New Year Trepidation”

This is the new year view that greeted me Friday as I approached the woodland just beyond the dried banks at the north end of Schweitzer marsh. There are untold poems that reside within. One can imagine Robert Frost pronouncing it “dark and deep.” And as this old woodland sprawls atop glacial drift and a garrison of pin oak, beech and hawthorn fortify what remains of the marsh, a line from Keats comes to mind; “The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing.”

One year after the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway created a channel and added a new culvert, the wetland has been largely drained and transformed. Waterfowl and wildlife that have depended on the marsh for nesting and food and that animated the wetland for at least a century have disappeared and with them its spirit. Countless individuals who will see this post have written entreaties to the W&LE, signed and helped fund a national petition, and encouraged the Ohio EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, Summit County Parks and Tinker’s Creek Watershed Partners to bring to bear responsibility and a sense of stewardship to the Railway. The solutions are within easy reach and of little cost to the company but the W&LE refuses to correct its poor judgement – the product of corporate insouciance perhaps or simply inflated ego.

In a final attempt to save the marsh we asked the Army Corps of Engineers to begin an investigation last September based on the Railway’s failure to obtain permits to create the drainage canal. To date, the Corps has provided none of its findings as we continue to request status reports. As they become available or other information surfaces we will keep you all apprised.

My choice of title was not “Happy” New Year, as you no doubt have deduced from the content of this post. “Trepidation” strikes me as the operative word, not only for the tragedy of a wetland but for the overwhelming dread that has our Republic in its hold. Sadly, the notion of hope seems a bit quixotic if not quaint in this year of our retributor, 2024.

“Schweitzer Marsh, New Year 2024”

As a coda of sorts to the update on Schweitzer Marsh, the image below was taken the same day (Jan. 6) as the original post. I’ve rendered it in black and white, in part as a metaphor for the destruction of the wetland but also as a tribute to its enduring beauty, even in its transformation.