I was born in Ohio. Dad was in the military, so in my first decade or so of life we lived near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (Dayton), then overseas in England, then on the west coast of California, then back near Dayton, in the small community of Union. I don’t remember much of the first half of that decade, but I do remember much of the latter part, while living in Union. About the only rule Mom made was “be home my dark” and out the door I went. I cherish those days, walking through corn fields, climbing trees, and laying in the grass watching clouds blow by.
When I was in late elementary school we moved from Union to Hamilton, Ohio. The street we lived on in Hamilton defined, for junior high school anyway, the break between having to walk or ride a bus. My siblings and I had to walk. Both Mom and Dad worked so catching a ride was generally not an option. The distance was roughly 1.5 miles and involved walking across a bridge that spanned the Great Miami River. That bridge is shown in the picture below.
At that time, flood flows of the Great Miami were “controlled” by a small dam just north of town and a straight, concrete-lined trapezoidal channel through town. Heavy industry, such as chemical plants and paper mills, lined the concrete banks and their effluent was shotgunned directly into the river through pipes protruding out of the concrete. It was common, as my sister and I walked to school across the bridge, to see a rainbow of colored streaks of who-knows-what flowing down stream. And the stench flowed right with it. Additionally, storm drains from city streets dumped directly into the river, scouring deep holes along the river’s edge. One such hole was directly under the east side of the bridge, where my sister and I watched monster-sized goldfish thriving in the nutrient rich water, after being dumped into the river by owners who no longer cared to clean the fish bowl.
Shortly after starting high school we moved to a sub-division on the edge of town, where I would spend my free time walking wooded acres yet to be developed. With time, developers started new sub-divisions across the wooded hills, by first removing all the trees, then building the streets and homes, then replanting trees. I never understood why they couldn’t build within the trees so they wouldn’t have to replant.
Little did I know that in just a few short years, I would graduate from college with a degree in forest-watershed management, and become a public servant hydrologist, heavily engaged in point and non-point pollution, applied fluvial geomorphology, land-use planning, and land management.