Dog Days
How to beat the heat in the
dirty city.
By August, the heat of summer begins to curdle in the city. The lifeguards are sunburnt, the flowers have gone to seed, garbage bins are toxic, tempers are short, the milfoil metastasizes, and mid-term elections thunder just over the horizon.
One of our favorite hot-weather palliatives came from the mouth of Bob Dylan many years ago, when the lakes and rivers of Minnesota were still fresh in his memory: A hard rain, he said, is gonna fall. And while we can appreciate the comfort of such assurances, praying for change when change is what’s most needed, we know that when the cleansing rain does come, all that sweat and filth has to go somewhere. In the figurative world, it will end up in think-tanks and newspaper columns. In the real world, it will drain into our lakes and rivers.
When the mercury is up, Twin Citizens have options for cooling off, but maybe not as many as we’d like. It may be because of the ubiquity of lakes and rivers that the cities are short on public swimming pools; we count just three of them in Minneapolis, and three in St. Paul—for a population of five hundred thousand. It is true that wading pools have been installed in nearly every city park, but adults and teenagers feel silly spending any serious time in them—not just because they are intended for toddlers, but because if the lifeguards don’t get you, the urine content or the massive doses of chlorine will. On the other hand, there has been a gratifying growth in friendly water parks for children of all ages, especially in the inner-ring suburbs like Edina and St. Louis Park. But admission to these can cost as much as ten dollars per person per day, or three hundred dollars for a season pass. That is beyond the reach of many middle-class families, who can stay at home to get hosed.
There are the lakes. Personally, we love Nokomis, Harriet, Rebecca, and Phalen. It is heartbreaking enough that city lakes are being choked by milfoil and algae, but after a good downpour, we also have to contend with E. coli. It is a small comfort that water at city beaches is tested almost every day during the summer, mainly to prevent embarrassing public outbreaks that can be measured statistically. Minneapolis keeps a constant, publicly accessible tab on bacteria levels, which can be reviewed at its website, minneapolisparks.org. So far, our beaches have stayed generally clean and within EPA standards. Still, aside from the fact that we have less and less confidence in the EPA these days, we prefer to think that really acceptable levels of E. coli would be around—oh, about zero. If the east beach of Calhoun is closed due to high levels of fecal bacteria, how confident are you about the north beach? You just wanted to look at the hardbodies and windsurfers anyway, right?
The secret culprit is the lawns and driveways and patios of the city. Water quality is only as good as the local runoff. One of the reasons we can swim in city lakes at all is the prescient green belt that city fathers delineated around every lake. But toxins and muck still leech into the water. Why? It is not as if we intentionally route sewage into the water stream (anymore). Rather, it is because manmade structures and surfaces act like flumes, moving unfiltered odds and ends directly from lawn, garden, and driveway, where they are relatively harmless, into public waters, where they are not. (E. coli, by the way, is introduced primarily through neglected dog waste in your yard.) Incidentally, this is why outstate the Department of Natural Resources has nanny-state regulations that prohibit homeowners from building too close to the water. This is also why urban developers in the future must be required to install things like hedgerows and rooftop gardens. Water quality and clarity are closely linked, and urban runoff has a negative impact on our perception of both. Worse than that, by swimming after a hard rain, you may be endangering your health, just when you wish to preserve it from heat stroke. It is no great leap from swimming pool to lake to holding pond to sewage lagoon.
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