I first encountered the Pine River of central Michigan in May 2024, a season when I was reading Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance as meditation. The robins were nesting a second time on the drain pipe of our house outside Traverse City and indigo buntings had taken up noisy residence in the field grass. Cassie Weck Wun, a legal intern from Detroit Mercy law school, and Alma College environmental studies professor Murray Borrello were in the car. We climbed out at the Alma impoundment to take a look.
The Pine – this Pine, in a nation full of Pine Rivers – has its headwaters in the rolling green glacial till country of Isabella County, near a small town called Remus that hosts a traditional folk and fiddle camp in June. Berry says, and I believe he’s onto something, that we must consult the genius of the place. Consulting a watershed is a deeply complex exercise that could take a lifetime, because the waters will change and you will change. As another sage, Norman Maclean, puts it:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
The waters are a living thing, with a history, lessons, and power. To consult them is to gain wisdom.
It is my great good fortune, and my curse, to have been born to a long line of curmudgeonly Montanans who won’t take anyone’s word for anything. We will, however, take the word of the waters. My primordial training is to stand knee deep in a trout stream and listen. If I’m patient, the river always tells me something better than anything I learned or could learn in school, which is not to espouse anti-intellectualism but to say that intellectuals need humility at least as much as anyone, maybe more, and a river teaches humility.
ABOVE: Photos of the Pine River algal blooms from agricultural runoff.
Above the Alma dam, we encountered a river that says, first of all, it’s not in a hurry. Remus sits at 1,027 feet of elevation. Alma, some 47 miles of meander downstream, is at 735 feet. Travel this route and you’ll scarcely feel a slope. You’ll want legs for this, human or horse, because wheels are unsuited for the bumpy, overgrown banks. The river itself is so silted and grassed in from nutrient pollution that it’s barely floatable. This is a problem for much of eastern Michigan because, just above Midland (elevation 636’), the Pine joins the Chippewa River, which in turn meets the Tittabawassee, draining 2,100 square miles in its journey to the Saginaw River, for the final run through Saginaw and Bay City to Lake Huron. There, the heavy nutrient load turns into a toxic algae bloom.
Seventy-nine percent of land use in the Pine River drainage is agricultural, exceptionally high in modern America. You might think that a river running through farm country, only the occasional house on the horizon, would be mostly untouched, but you would be wrong. Straightened, dredged, and defoliated to accommodate the business of farming, the Pine suffers many indignities. We’ve come to learn about them, to sit by the river and hear.
That’s what I’ll be writing about – what the Pine has to tell us.
To be continued.
