Finding Dugway Brook 

Many of our smaller urban streams have been turned into storm sewers—culverted, covered up and forgotten. It's not easy to find them, much less imagine what they might have been like long ago. The following describes EcoCity Cleveland director David Beach's attempt to find his own watershed — the west branch of Dugway Brook, which flows under Meadowbrook Boulevard in Cleveland Heights, passes through Lakeview Cemetery, and goes under East Cleveland before emerging in Bratenahl by Lake Erie. (The east branch of Dugway Brook flows under Washington Boulevard in University Heights, goes under Cain Park in Cleveland Heights, passes along Cumberland Park, and continues through Forest Hill Park and East Cleveland.)

My bicycle finds you. It coasts to the low spots in the suburban streets. Even where development has obliterated the natural contours of the land, where the gradient is almost imperceptible to the eye, my bike glides down to where you once flowed free. Where you still flow through the sewers.

In the middle of Meadowbrook Road is a sewer grate made by the East Jordan Iron Works. I peer into the culvert below and see a trickle of water—Dugway Brook, my watershed.

Years ago, they built over you, turned you into a storm sewer. Then they named the road "Meadowbrook" to commemorate what was destroyed.

Were there meadows here 90 years ago, before Cleveland Heights was subdivided? Today, there are trim lawns and single-family homes. On both sides of the street the lawns slope down to the curb, giving a hint of your old ravine. But I doubt the people in the houses realize they live along a creek. Most people don't know their watershed. They don't care where the rain goes, except when it backs up into their basements.

I climb on my bike and coast downstream, trying to trace your course to the northwest, where in about four miles you empty into Lake Erie.

Past Cedar Road, you escape from the underground culvert and cut between the houses. This is one of the few stretches where you look like a real brook. You flow over rocks at the bottom of a twenty-foot ravine. Overhanging maple trees shade your waters.

Then you play hide and seek for a few blocks, disappearing into culverts and rising to the surface again. You go right under a couple of houses, and I'm tempted to knock on the doors and ask the people if they can sense you underneath. Do they bend toward you like divining rods? Do they ever put their ear to the basement floor and listen?

You go back in the culvert for a quarter mile. Under Coventry Elementary School. Under a parking lot and stores along Coventry Road. The hillside behind the drugstore has been dug out for a parking garage, but I can still see the sandstone outcroppings that you exposed long ago.

You cross Coventry, go under a block of apartment buildings, cross Mayfield Road, and emerge in Lake View Cemetery. This is where you should be most joyful. You should be poised to tumble down the escarpment here, fall 150 feet down the edge of the Appalachian Plateau to the Lake Plain below.

The cemetery is a place of scenic vistas, the place Cleveland's ruling class chose for a burial ground. John D. Rockefeller. President James A. Garfield. The Hannas and Mathers and Wades. Stone walls and decades of solicitous landscaping have preserved them here on the heights above the grimy city.

You enter this chosen place through a double-barreled culvert about 25 feet wide. The weather has been dry, so you are only an inch deep. From behind a chain link fence above the culvert I can see bits of brown gunk floating by. A sanitary sewer line is blocked somewhere upstream and you get the overflow. You stink like an outhouse. And that is how you start your happy tumble down the escarpment.

I park my bike and follow you into the cemetery on foot. Just downstream are your waterfalls. You cascade over countless, thin layers of shale, churning and forming the buttermilk falls which are characteristic of the region. These show off your best face, but in your deeper pools the effects of pollution are obvious. All the submerged rocks are coated with brown algae, which have grown wildly on nutrients from the sewage. It looks like you are covered with brown fir.

I kneel down, wanting to touch it. But I hesitate. Who knows what your bacteria count is today? How would I wash my hands out here? If the water itself is polluted, it's impossible to wash. Finally, I reach in with one hand. The algal growth is slimy and delicate; it rubs off the rocks with the slightest touch. I then turn over a few rocks to look for insects. Healthy streams are home to a diversity of aquatic life, but you are home to pollution-tolerant sludge worms. I replace the rocks and head downstream.

In the middle of the cemetery is the dam, the Lake View Cemetery Flood Control Facility. To stop flooding in upstream communities they confined you in culverts, straightened your kinks, paved your wetlands, and, consequently, eliminated all the natural friction that used to moderate your flow. As a result, rainwater races off the escarpment to flood the downstream communities. So the regional sewer district took 67,000 cubic yards of concrete and built a dam, a 125-foot tall structure to counteract the structures upstream. In a 20-year storm, the dam will back you up into the ravine in the cemetery and release you through a spillway in a mannerly fashion.

I stand in the dam's shadow and lean against the concrete. Today it seems absurd—this massive wall for your gentle trickle. But, 20 feet up, I notice a watermark. If a good thunderstorm were to stall over your watershed and dump a couple of inches of rain, you could drown me like a bug in a puddle.

On the other side of the dam, you feed a couple of ponds full of urbanized Canada geese. Then you disappear into a culvert under the east side of Cleveland. For the next two and a half miles I can't see you, but I can easily guess your course because, although the city has engulfed you, there are lasting scars. In places there are open, grassy gashes through the fabric of the neighborhoods, places where you still won't let them build, where adjoining streets have been forced to depart from the city grid and follow your old curves.

It is in this stretch that you suffer your worst insults, or, as the sewer district calls them, "dry weather overflow events." The combined sanitary and storm sewers are antiquated and overloaded. Some pipes are within an inch of overflowing in the best of conditions; all it takes is a little blockage to make them spill into you. Such blockages happen all the time, and so do ruptures in the sanitary lines running within your culvert. Whole sections of rusted iron pipe fall apart, and the raw sewage pours out.

And that's during dry weather. During "rain events" the system is purposely designed to overflow. With your puny million gallons a day of "natural" flow you were supposed to wash it all away. When it became obvious that you could not, they buried you to hide the stench.

The culvert finally takes you under the Conrail tracks and the East Shoreway. Then you reappear one last time in Bratenahl for a lethargic, quarter-mile run to the lake. You are back in affluent surroundings again—a wooded ravine between lakeside mansions and luxury condominiums. But you spoil the scene. You are a pool of thick, green-brown water. Septic sediment covers your stream bed. Plastic cups, McDonalds filet-o-fish clamshells, and used condoms litter your banks up to the high watermark.

Few people stroll beside you here. The path is overgrown with prickly raspberry canes. I try to fight through on foot, but have to turn back. I go around to one of the mansions and ask to cut through the backyard. A chauffeur answers the door and, intrigued by my unlikely quest, escorts me under the oaks and through the English ivy to the path that leads to your mouth.

He leaves me there, and I descend into the ravine to follow your last oxbows. For a minute, I'm distracted by a kingfisher on stream patrol. The bird rattles furiously back and forth, from snag to snag, but I never see him dive to catch anything.

Around the next bend, the trees thin, and suddenly I reach the lake shore. In the space of a few hundred feet, I travel to a different world—from a putrid lagoon to the windswept freshness of the lake. A crisp northeaster drives the waves, bursting and spraying, into the armor stones along the shore. Here your pinched mouth disgorges the sins of the city.

Today, however, the lake is protesting. It's surging against your current, driving back your sewage. Litter is floating upstream—Doritos bags returning to the hands that dropped them.

I want to cheer out loud, tell the lake to keep fighting. If only the northeaster could grow strong enough, if the lake could surge high enough, then all the crap could be pushed back to its source. Then you and all the other imprisoned creeks could rise out of the sewers and run wild through the city.

I imagine you would like that. It would be sweet revenge.