Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2010 Author Event: Author Jerry Dennis Discusses 'The Living Great Lakes: Searching For The Heart Of The Inland Seas'

Fri, 02/17/2006 - 1:07pm

When: January 28, 2010 at Washtenaw Community College: Morris Lawrence Building

Acclaimed author Jerry Dennis will discuss his book in the Towsley Auditorium of the Morris Lawrence Building at Washtenaw Community College (located at 4800 Huron River Drive in Ann Arbor Township) and offer his own thoughts on the Great Lakes and his personal 4-week journey through the Lakes as a crew-member on a tall-masted schooner. Dennis' book, 'The Living Great Lakes: Searching For The Heart Of The Inland Seas,' has been chosen as the focus of the 2010 Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads program. This appearance is a key event for the Reads program, which this year focuses on the subject of Michigan. A booksigning will follow and books will be on sale at this event, courtesy of Nicola's Books.

Transcript

• [00:01:49.45] JERRY DENNIS: Writers are presumptuous bastards. A musician records an album and is delighted if you listen to it for 45 minutes, or even if you turn it on in the background. An artist is thrilled if you hang a painting on the wall and pause now and then to look at it. A filmmaker asks only that you sit passively in a dark theater and lose yourself for a 120 minutes.
• [00:02:12.52] But a book author expects you to set aside your life for many hours or days, and give your full attention to the labors of his mind. He's the ultimate party bore. Not only does he pin you in a corner and start telling you long stories, he expects you to climb inside his head and live the stories with him. There's no other way to read a book then with full immersion. By its nature, there's no way it can be passive. It's the most active and the most intimate art form.
• [00:02:41.26] It demands so much that I'm always surprised to meet somebody who's read one of my books. I've never gotten over the feeling that it's a tremendous honor, so you can imagine how honored I am to have my book selected for this program. I want to think everyone involved. I talked to Tim Grimes about whether I should list everyone, it's too long a list. It's a great group of people, and they've made me feel pretty wonderful here in Ann Arbor and Ypsi.
• [00:03:10.20] I want to thank you all for coming tonight. You and your community have given me a really tremendous gift. I thought I would talk a little about the origins of the book, a little about what I hope to accomplish with it, and share some stories about the research and writing. Afterward, if you have questions, please, please let them fly.
• [00:03:30.27] When did the book start? That's always a tricky question. I can trace it back to the summer in Empire when I was five years old that I wrote about in the first chapter of the book. We lived on a house, above the beach, with a view out over South Bar Lake and Lake Michigan beyond it. It's hard for me to believe this is true from this perspective, but I was five years old, my brother was three, and it seemed like we were allowed to go down to the beach on our own anytime we wanted to, but I suspect my mom was right behind us.
• [00:04:04.68] Some of those memories are the brightest I have of childhood, of that shoreline, of Sleeping Bear Dunes down one way, of Platte Bay the other. The gulls kiting overhead. I was very lucky to have parents who instilled the love of the natural world in me. They taught me what I was seeing, the birds, the plants. My father is a passionate fisherman, my mother is a passionate landsman. She gets seasick. So when we would go out fishing, she could put up with it for a little while and then we had to go to shore and when we were on shore, she would take my brother and me around to show us what was going on.
• [00:04:45.41] Her father was a member of U.S. Life Saving Service, the precursor of the Coast Guard, and was stationed on South Manatou Island. He died the year I was born, so I never knew him, but I heard the stories that he had told her of shipwrecks and of going out in the life savings boats, rowing out from short to rescue sailors in storms.
• [00:05:10.18] I started thinking about a book about the Great Lakes while I was in college, first at Marquette and at Northern Michigan University, where we lived very close to the shore of Lake Superior, and I got to watch Lake Superior every season, as I had watched Lake Michigan all my life, in all seasons. Then I went to the University of Louisville in Kentucky, in brown water country, and began to get very seriously homesick for the clear waters of home.
• [00:05:37.76] I have notebooks from those days where I wrote things like, describe the way dune grass draws a perfect circle in the sand as the wind changes through the course of the day. I knew even then I had to write a book about the Great Lakes. Years later, when I had already written eight books I think, nine books, I was talking to my editor at -- at the time I had two publishers, Harper Collins and St. Martin's press, and we did alternate books. I did science books, little more science leaning books with Harper Collins, and books of essays with St. Martin's. And I was talking to the editor at Harper Collins, Hugh Van Dusen, about book ideas. And I said, yeah I'm really ready to write a book about the Great Lakes, and about their grandeur, and about the complex story of their history, human and natural history, and the environmental story.
• [00:06:36.02] And he's he said -- now Hugh's a very sophisticated man, a very well-educated man who's traveled all over the world. But he always leaves New York and goes east when he travels. And he said, eh, the Great Lakes, not very sexy. So I said, well let me try to convince you. I said, recently I was up on Empire Bluffs, near the place where I lived as a child. And I was looking out over the Lake and a young gentleman from England came walking up beside me. I mention this in the book. And he said, can one see Wisconsin? And I said, no, one cannot. One can't even see it when you're halfway across the Lake. Most of the way across you can't see shore on either side.
• [00:07:23.07] And Hugh went, wait wait wait. You mean you can't see across the Great Lakes? It's an old story, we've all heard it. I said, no. No. And he said well, we have to do this book. Well, as it turned out, both St. Martin's and Harper Collins wanted it, so I was put into that wonderful position of sitting back while they fought over it. And St. Martin's won.
• [00:07:48.74] I signed a contract in 1997, and I agreed to do the book in one year. For everywhere I went that year I encountered that kind of gaps in knowledge that Hugh Van Dusen had had.
• [00:08:01.35] It got to where I was no longer to meet people who didn't understand the Great Lakes, who didn't know that they were freshwater not salt, or that they had an outlet to the Atlantic, or that you couldn't see across them. That just made me more determined as I went, to bring more attention to the Lakes.
• [00:08:18.40] A little bit of it was stubborness on my part. I had grown impatient with that New York attitude, I was getting it from a lot of New York magazine editors, too. One of them said, now you're from Ohio or Iowa or one of those states, right? I think he thought Iowa was a Great Lakes state, too.
• [00:08:40.78] My pride for this place was great, and it made me motivated. I wanted to push through that attitude, I wanted to brag about the Great Lakes and Michigan the way I brag about my kids. In often the same conversation. So I kept at it, I kept plugging away. I started collecting stories, some of which made it into the book.
• [00:09:05.91] Like the guy on the personal water craft off Chicago who ran out of gas, drifted off shore, spent the night, wasn't rescued until the next day and he was dangerously dehydrated. And a doctor had to put an IV into him and start pumping some water into him. And said, I have to ask you this, why are you dehydrated? Why didn't you drink from the lake? And he said, lake?
• [00:09:32.62] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:09:36.36] I have to say, that anecdote, by the way, was poached by Bill Cusumano at Nicola's Books. Is Bill here? In his wonderful essay about Michigan in the Great Lakes reader, a book I recommend, written by book sellers and librarians around the Great Lakes region, each of them telling a personal perspective and story about the Great Lakes. I saw Bill today in the book store and first thing he said, hey, man, I poached that anecdote, it was so great. He said, hey imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And I said, yeah somebody who stole something first said that, by the way.
• [00:10:15.92] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:10:18.74] His essay is terrific, I recommend it.
• [00:10:21.44] A friend of mine, not too long ago, told me the about a 30 year old woman in his office. She grew up in Escanaba, that fine, interesting little city at the top of Lake Michigan, in the UP. And he said, wow that's a great place, it must've really been something growing up there. What was it like? And she said, oh, it was wonderful. It was so cool having Lake Superior outside my front door.
• [00:10:46.01] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:10:46.26] And he said, you mean Lake Michigan? And she said, no, Lake Superior. And he said Lake Michigan. And she goes, I lived there all my life, I should know it's Lake Superior. So he had to get a map and show her.
• [00:10:59.84] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:11:05.73] And then there's the story of a Utah-based publisher of a children's magazine called Studies Weekly, some of you might be familiar with this story. They decided a few years ago that they wanted to do a story about the Great Lakes. So they put their crack research team to work on it, and ended up coming up with such a good story that they made it their cover story. And it was called, the title of it was, There She Blows On Lake Michigan. And I'll just read a paragraph from it.
• [00:11:40.22] Southern Lake Michigan is known for its wonderful sailing, and cool freshwater, but little has been known about the abundant whale and dolphin population until recently.
• [00:11:49.38] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:11:49.79] As winter turns to spring, and the cool waters of the Lake are warmed by the sun, the fresh water sperm whales and dolphins begin their annual 1300 mile journey from Hudson Bay.
• [00:12:09.20] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:12:11.52] So it goes on in that vein for a long ways. It was a an elementary school teacher in Muskeegan who was reading this story to her class, and she probably got about that far and she said, wait a minute. So she called Weekly Studies Incorporated in Utah and said, you've made a terrible mistake, there are no whales in the Great Lakes. And they argued with her.
• [00:12:36.28] They said, no, our researchers found the information. Well, they found it on a bogus website, that was a prank. So they had to, of course, retract the story.
• [00:12:51.31] Well the year went up, it was 1998, and I had read every book I could find about the Great Lakes. And I collected stacks of research papers, and government reports that soon threaten to bury me in a Collyer Brother's death pile. I wasn't any closer to being finished than I was when I started. My saintly editor Pete Overton granted an extension on my deadline. I had already driven around the Lakes, but I drove around them again.
• [00:13:15.85] I stayed in motels and campgrounds and slept in my car a few times. My wife and sons join me on some of those trips and we explored, we canoed, we hiked beaches, we hiked Shoreline Forest, fished. I interviewed scientists, policymakers, and other experts, struck up conversations with people I met along the way in restaurants and walking along the shore and sitting beside propped fishing rods on piers.
• [00:13:43.55] Then it was 1999 and I was no closer than I'd been in 1997 to knowing how to write a book about the Great Lakes. I was up against that familiar problem of knowing just enough to know how little I knew. Pete gave me another extension. I still didn't know how I was going to write the book, but I was collecting some stories.
• [00:14:03.50] In Georgian Bay, with Gail, Nick and Aaron, we met a woman who was a sea kayaker, and she told powerful stories about kayaking the shores of Georgian Bay. I met Dave Stone, an 80 year old man on Long Point in Lake Eerie on the Ontario shore, who looked like Fred Astaire. And I could hardly keep up with, he walked on the beach. He was going so fast and talking a mile a minute about his adventures as probably the first scuba diver in the Great Lakes. He brought the technology back to Ontario from his stint in the Royal Navy during the war. And began diving in the waters around Long Point, which he's convinced, was convinced, he recently died, he was convinced was the largest concentration of ship wrecks in the Great Lakes. He called it the Lake Erie triangle. Of many, many hundreds of ships, and many that he was the first to discover.
• [00:14:58.99] An editor asked me to contribute an essay about the effects of weather on human life, for an anthology he was putting together. And the story, the memory of the 1967 storm on Platte Bay during the Coho Run, came back to me with force and I think I wrote that entire essay in one sitting, in one night. The first draft at least.
• [00:15:22.75] I met Joanie McGuff and her husband Gary, a talented author and photographer team, who live on Batchawana Bay, on Lake Superior, in Ontario, and who had recently circumnavigated the entire Lake Superior in their sea kayaks, and had put together a wonderful book called Superior: Journeys on an Inlad Sea, a book of photos and essays that I admired a great deal. Sat down with them, and heard their stories, and was directed to some people who would end up being instrumental in the book.
• [00:15:55.63] I spent a day with a retired biologist named Carl Baker on Lake Erie. We went out on the lake fishing. Actually, I think I spent two days with him. And he talked about his career, when he got out of college on the east coast, he was a marine biologist and had never seen the Great Lakes. His first job was with the Ohio DNR in 1960. He arrived on the shore of the lake for the first time after accepting the job, long distance, looked out onto a lake that was so covered with algae, that he said it looked like an ice cream factory had exploded. Multi-colored swirling mats of algae, all the way to the horizon.
• [00:16:36.06] He went in a research boat out to the Charity Islands, and in the end of the day they came back, the path they had cut through the algae in the morning was still there, they just followed the same path. The mat was so thick. And he thought, there's no way this Lake can be saved, no way at all. But he stuck with it, and many years later he was the man credited with the return of at least the Ohio portion of the Walleye Fishery.
• [00:17:07.02] I was picking up stories and I was learning plenty. I learned that a meteorologist had studied temperature differentials between the water of the Great Lakes and the air above it and calculated that the day of the year most likely to blow up a dangerous storm was November 10th, any year. That rang a bell. I checked my notes. The great storm of 1913, called The Big Blow, which created waves 30 feet high and sank 12 ships, drowning between 250 and 300 people, November 7th through the 11th.
• [00:17:37.92] The Armistice Day storm of 1940, which drown more than a hundred, November 11th. The 1958 storm on Lake Michigan that broke the Carl D. Bradley in half and killed all but two crew members, November 18th. And the most infamous storm of all, the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, November 10th.
• [00:17:57.46] And then serendipity kicked in. This happens with frequency, every writer I know has stories like that. The deeper you get involved in a subject, the more wonderful things happen. The more luck comes your way. It's 90% perspiration, of course, and 10% inspiration, but there's also a percent of luck involved, and it seems to be related more to the perspiration than the inspiration.
• [00:18:24.62] But this one I can't take any credit for. Early in the morning of November 10th, 1998, I woke up knowing that something was unusual. I was home in our house in [? Old Mich, ?] a two story farmhouse, and the house was rocking. The wind sounded like trains going through the yard. I went to the bathroom and the water in the toilet bowl was sloshing, the house was swaying so much.
• [00:18:48.08] Then I remembered what day it was. It was the anniversary, it was November 10th, the anniversary of the day in 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. So I threw a sleeping bag and a camera into my truck, kissed my wife and kids goodbye and headed for the UP. I find out on the way, listening to radio, that the winds are 80 miles an hour in the Straits of Mackinac. They were 60 miles an hour on Old Mission Peninsula when I left the house.
• [00:19:16.01] I got to the bridge just in time to be allowed to be among the first convoy of cars allowed to pass, the wind had dropped back down a little bit, enough that we were able to go in convoy behind a an escort, very slowly, at five miles an hour across the bridge. I was driving a truck and the wind was so strong out of the east, which is unusual, that I had to crank the wheel over. And I'm like this going down, luckily at only five miles an hour I can do it.
• [00:19:49.07] I look over toward Boblo Island and there's three ore carriers anchored in line, in the lee of the island, waiting the storm out, trying to get out of the wind. Got into the UP, power was out across the whole UP, no lights anywhere. No cars on the road, really. Once I got on, is it 119 that goes to Trout Lake? Got off the main highway, anyway, off 75, I had the road to myself. There were trees down.
• [00:20:19.03] I had to twice go into the ditch to go around fallen trees. Go through little towns, there's no lights anywhere. I was encouraged to notice that in the bars you could see a candle on the bar, so there was some activity, there was some life.
• [00:20:35.42] I head up to Whitefish Point, I wanted to see Lake Superior at the point closest to where the Fitzgerald went down. I wanted to see what the Lake looked like in a major, major storm of this magnitude. I got up there, and it was beyond description. The Lake was just in a churning chaos. There's a little fishing marina down on the east side of the point, on Whitefish Bay. I drove down there to see what was going on there, because the wind was from the east, so the full brunt of it was coming across Whitefish Bay, unlike during the storm of the Fitzgerald, when the wind was from the northwest.
• [00:21:16.12] I got down there and there's a breakwall that protects the harbor. And the waves are hitting that breakwall and shooting as high as this ceiling, easy, probably higher. It looked to be as high as a three story building, so high that I was hundreds of yards away from that breakwall, and the spray was hitting me in surges. And then I noticed a figure out on the breakwall, a human I guessed, in black, but it was hard to tell.
• [00:21:44.29] He was carrying some kind of apparatus, and every time the wave would spray he would turn his back, huddle down, turn his back to it and the spray would go right over him. You know, it's a terribly dangerous thing to be doing. And I waited until he came off, he started walking back to shore, then I jumped out of the car.
• [00:22:02.34] I'd been trying to take photographs, it was impossible. I couldn't even, besides the spray in the air, I couldn't hold the tripod down the wind was so strong. So I just ran across, I intercepted his route as he got to his vehicle and the apparatus he was carrying was a camera, on a tripod. A motion picture camera.
• [00:22:19.61] And I said, are you OK? And what are you doing? And he said, that's wild out there. Well it turns out he was shooting footage for a documentary about storms on Lake Superior, he worked at the Whitefish Point Shipwreck Museum. I introduced myself, told him a little about the book I was working on. He said, are you here for the reunion? I didn't what he was talking about, but every year the families of the men who died, the 29 men who died in the Fitzgerald, gather at Whitefish Point, as they do at the sailor's memorial in Detroit.
• [00:22:55.25] And have a quiet memorial that is not open to the public, and they invited me to join them and to just sit back quietly in the back of the room. The lights are still out, and the Shipwreck Museum, for those of you who have not been there, is a beautiful building with a large open space at the center, completely surrounded by artifacts from vessels. Many of them are glass and brass. Well, about 200 candles and bowls had been set around the room, so they were all glittering off the brass and the glass.
• [00:23:26.76] About 30 chairs were set up in the middle, and sitting in the chairs where the children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews of the men who died on Fitzgerald. They announced that they had a special guest that year who was going to speak to them. It was a man named John Lufkins, who was 55 years old, he was a Tribal Chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Tribe. He stood up in front of everyone, distinguished looking man in a blue blazer and a very sad expression on his face. And he said I have a story to tell and I haven't told very many people this.
• [00:24:02.12] And then he began to tell us about the day of the Fitzgerald sinking, the day before the sinking. The Fitzgerald went down in the night. That day he went out fishing on Whitefish Bay, he was a commercial fisherman. And he was 32 years old at the time, he was with his 18 year old brother-in-law. They went out in a 16 foot boat as they did most days, on a typical November day. It was cold, but not brutal. It was a little choppy, foot and a half waves. Nothing they hadn't seen hundreds of times.
• [00:24:35.16] They had to go out and check gillnets that were set way off shore, out by tiny little Tahquamenon Island. And they were out there, and it took them most of the day to get in place, get ready and start hauling nets. At one point they were hauling a set, and he became aware of motion, movement, behind him to the west. And he looled toward the mouth of Whitefish Bay, which was in the distance, and he could see a line of white across the whole bay. Something he'd never seen before.
• [00:25:04.48] It was so peculiar that he stopped hauling the net and just stared at it for awhile. And suddenly it occurred to him that he was seeing this front of a storm wall coming across the Lake and tearing the top of the Lake off. And as he watched, he could see how fast it was coming. So he said to his brother-in-law, cut the lines. Cut the lines. Thousands of dollars gone, the cut the lines and they headed for shore.
• [00:25:30.07] They hadn't gone far at all. And, by the way, it was getting late in the day, it was late afternoon. They hadn't gone far at all when it caught up to them. He said the waves went from a foot and a half to five feet in seconds. And they were blinded, it was just white spray everywhere. And it was from behind. So those of you that are boaters know what a difficult situation that is, a power boat can't take much water from the stern.
• [00:25:55.87] So they had no choice but to turn and face into this wind, and at that point he knew their only chance was to get to Tahquamenon Island. So he started heading for it. Waves started growing, within a few minutes they went from five feet to eight feet, and the visibility was practically zero. There was also snow squalls that came with this wind, and the temperature dropped from maybe high 30s to the 20s, and it was just impossible to see.
• [00:26:27.33] The waves were rollers, not ocean rollers, not consistent ocean rollers, but huge, heavy-bodied waves. And within a very short time he realized that he was losing all his navigation. He couldn't tell where they were, he couldn't control the boat, and so his best bet, he figured, was to get into the troughs of the waves as much as he could, run those troughs, and try to zigzag.
• [00:26:52.91] He didn't have a compass. There's no sun to guide by, all he could go by was instinct, trying to see the direction that that island was in. And he was really scared, he thought, boy this is a really dicey situation. In all his years of fishing on Lake Superior in a small boat, 16 foot outboard, open boat, he'd never been in a situation so dangerous. Suddenly, right in front of him, is the island. And he said, he just -- thank heaven, this is amazing. Our luck is holding, we're going to make it through this, maybe, if we don't die of exposure.
• [00:27:29.46] So they got on shore, haul the boat and they find an old shack. Maybe a duck hunter shack, or a fisherman shack. Tar paper, kind of half tattered. And inside is an oil burning furnace with about two inches of oil in the reservoir. And they got it lit. It hadn't been lit, it was rusty, it hadn't been lit in years. But the shack was weather proof enough that they had shelter, they had warmth, they were going to be OK. They even had sleeping bags, he had sleeping bags in garbage bags for emergencies. So they were going to be OK.
• [00:28:00.04] They were just getting dried off, and suddenly the door flies open and here's a man they knew, another fisherman, soaking wet and screaming in the wind to be heard. You gotta help me, you gotta help me, my buddy is still in the water. So they ran down to the shore and got there just as his buddy is climbing out of the waves, is crawling up on shore. He had been clinging to a gasoline can, and had made it to shore.
• [00:28:25.46] So they got these two guys up in the cabin, stripped them, got them in the sleeping bags and it looked like they're going to be OK. Well John, it's almost dark by now, and John figures he's going to go down and check on the boat and make one quick circle of the Island and look to make sure there's nobody else in trouble. Didn't see anything, gets back up to the shack, goes to shut the door behind him for the night and the wind caught it and blew it open, and when he reached for it, out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of orange out on the water.
• [00:28:54.99] And looked again, there it was again, it was a life jacket and he realized somebody was in the water, somebody else was out there. So he yelled at the other few that he was going out after them. His 18 year old brother-in-law wanted to go with him, he wouldn't let him. Said, no, this is too dangerous, you stay here. I'll take care of this.
• [00:29:10.99] So he gets out there, by now the waves are 10 feet high. And the tops are just shear white caps. Sleet, snow, and it's almost dark. So he gets out, away from the protection of the island, and he discovers to his dismay that when he would get to the top of a wave, the boat, because there's no weight in the bow now that his brother-in-law's not there, the wind would turn it like a wind vane, spin him around, send him right back down the wave.
• [00:29:38.70] So he had no control, he didn't know where he was going, and within minutes he lost sight of the island. So now he's the thinking not so much about saving some stranger's life, he's thinking about his own and doesn't know what to do. So he starts trying best he can to circle. Thinking he'll eventually bump into either the island or this person he saw. He comes around a trough, he's trying to stay in the troughs as much as he can, he comes around a wave in the trough, and there, right in front of him, is a capsized boat with two man in orange life jackets, clinging to the top of the hull.
• [00:30:12.90] And he quickly realizes the only hope he has of reaching them is to run his boat up right on the middle, between the two men, on the hull of the up-turned boat. Which he does. He runs to the bow, reaches down, grabs the closest man by the collar and hauls him into his boat. And at about that time, the boats separate and he loses control. And within seconds he loses sight of the boat with this other man.
• [00:30:34.82] And at that same moment, he realizes that it's his uncle and his cousin. So he starts circling again, trying his best. And again, no control. It's getting darker and darker, he can't see through the snow and the sleet. And again, pure luck, unbelievable luck, he used the word miracle, bam, there's the boat again. He did the same thing, ran up on it, ran to the bottom, grabbed his uncle, he'd grabed his nephew the first time, grabbed his uncle, hauled him in. And they were in the boat.
• [00:31:06.98] OK. Now what do they do? How do they get back to the island? About that time his nephew had recovered enough strength, because they were dangerously hypothermic, they'd been in the water for a long time. The nephews said, are we going to live? And John said, oh yeah yeah yeah. But he was thinking in his heart, no. There's no way, we're all going to die out here.
• [00:31:26.36] So began just running the waves. Just trying to find open paths as much as possible, he could probably get up on waves a little more now with those two men in there, but still couldn't see and then suddenly, unbelievably, the island right there. And his brother-in-law on the shore waving, and they run up and they pull the boat up and they got these guys in and they all were going to make it.
• [00:31:50.25] In the morning -- they had a transistor radio that they hadn't been wanting to use because the battery was almost dead -- but in the morning, they finally turned it on to see, and the very first thing they heard was that Fitzgerald was reported missing, had last been seen near the entrance to Whitefish Bay. Which was maybe 15 miles from where these guys were.
• [00:32:10.72] You could have heard a pin drop in that room. It was an amazing, an amazing experience.
• [00:32:19.24] By now, it's 2000 and I still didn't have a book. Pete sighed and granted another extension. It might have gone on like that forever, if not for another moment of serendipity. And that was the Malabar. Malabar was a two masted schooner that was Traverse City's pride and joy. She was used for evening cruises, I've met many people who were married on her. She was used as an education ship. I've met many people who had their first experience with water ecology on the Malabar in Grand Traverse Bay.
• [00:32:58.02] One young women I met at University of Wisconsin, was a graduate student studying freshwater biology, and she said her whole life course was determined by the Malabar. Everybody in town just felt a bond to her. But that winter, we had noticed her listing at anchor. She's was covered -- plastic covered the deck, but apparently had leaked, and water had gotten into her, and she was starting to sink. There was some real serious problems with her hull.
• [00:33:30.24] It's a ferro cement boat, which I know nothing about. But ferro cement is a pretty widely used material, but what happens, if water gets down into the reinforcing steel frame, it begins to corrode and then the concrete begins to crumble. That's what was happening.
• [00:33:50.65] The newspaper reported that a man in Maine had bought her, and had sent a crew to sail her to the east coast. And a lightbulb went off, and I thought, wait a minute, this might be just what my book needs. This vehicle for telling stories.
• [00:34:07.12] So that's what happened. I got on the boat and I discovered this way to tell the story of the Great Lakes, this complex -- baroque story, as my friend Tony Infante calls it. A wonderfully rich, enticing story that can't just be told as a list of facts, it has to be told in a journey. And that was the solution that I ran across.
• [00:34:34.60] I'm often asked what I think is the biggest problem facing the Great Lakes. Is it climate change? Is it invasive species? Phosphorus loading from agricultural run off and municipal waste? Petroleum and chemical spills? Contaminated sediments? Airborne deposition of heavy metals? The threat of diversion, sale or theft of the water itself?
• [00:34:57.45] I never know quite how to answer that. They're all serious problems. What I believe though, is that the biggest threat to the Great Lakes, the biggest threat to the entire world, is anything that causes people to turn their backs, lose hope, become cynical. It's anything that makes them think it's too late to make a difference. Anything that makes them prefer to stay home in their houses. Anything that makes them believe that battles are lost already.
• [00:35:24.88] I've seen the evidence of that. I spent a couple weeks on Maumee Bay, two summers ago, I think. Two springs ago, and spent a lot of time with a woman named Sandy [? Boone ?], who's the western Lake Erie lake keeper. She lives right on the shore of Maumee Bay. Maumee Bay is brown, its shores are clogged with rotting algae, some of it the dangerous, potentially deadly, blue green algae. Dead fish, lots and lots of zebra and coaga mussel shells piled up, sometimes after a storm, knee to thigh deep.
• [00:36:05.77] And Sandy's fighting a very lonely battle down there to get people to care about Maumee Bay and western Lake Erie. And she told me that she's done, over the years, hundreds of public presentations. At the end of them she always asks the audience to raise their hand if they've ever walked the beach, or fished or swum or recreationally boated on Maumee Bay. And she said the results are consistent everywhere she goes. No matter what the audience, about 5% raise their hands.
• [00:36:39.33] That's the fear that I have, and that's what worries me, to see what's happening with the algae infestations all over the Great Lakes, for instance. The fear of the asian carp, and other invasives. My greatest hope for this book was that it would stimulate discussion of these things, and maybe get some people to start thinking more about it, and maybe even start acting on it. It took, the book took another leg of its journey two years ago when I was approached for about the sixth time by a documentary film maker. I had talked to, I had been called by filmmakers in Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto, who had a vision of making a documentary based on the book.
• [00:37:22.89] But it was always a one hour show. It was always a limited view of this story, and they wanted to simplify the story. They wanted to make a black and white presentation of the environmental story, a good guys against the bad guys. Whereas many of us know, it's very hard to determine who the bad guys are now. It's not as easy as it used to be. It's not as easy as the days when chemical companies were simply dumping their waste in the water.
• [00:37:52.61] It's become a lot more complex story. And I would try to explain that to these people, and I'd say -- because they didn't live here, they didn't know. The ones in Toronto were great, but the ones in Los Angeles and New York didn't quite understand it. They said, well, you know these lakes are in danger of dying, don't you think we could help saving them. And I said, well what do you base that statement on? They said, well that river that caught fire. And I would explain that was 1967, and that that river is now the centerpiece of Cleveland's downtown restoration project, and that there are places in the Great Lakes that are as beautiful as any place on the east or west coast, as remote, as wild, as close to wilderness as you can find in this part of the world. They didn't get that, so I declined their offers.
• [00:38:42.37] And then I was approached by a gentleman from the Ann Arbor area name Tony Infante. And Tony's vision was completely different. He was passionate, he was informed, he had read everything I'd read plus a lot more because he has a stomach for policy writing and I don't. And he said, the first thing he said was, this has to be a multi-part series on television, and it has to follow the theme of the book. It has to follow that same story arc, which is a great television term, this journey through the Lakes is the way to tell the story.
• [00:39:18.82] So for the last year, I guess, I've been working very closely with Tony and we've made great progress. It's still in development but we have a partnership with WTTW in Chicago, they're our presenting partner, producing partner. We've entered a partnership with the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, and a partnership with the University of Michigan. And we're making huge strides.
• [00:39:43.26] We've assembled a great team of very talented filmmakers, with many Emmys and an Academy Award under their belts. And we want to make a film, a series, for PBS that is as compelling as the best journalism and has the production values of Planet Earth. So that's the goal.
• [00:40:11.01] So that's all of my prepared remarks, but I would love to answer any questions and I think I see the microphones there and there if anyone has anything more, any questions or any comments. Anything that they'd like to address.
• [00:40:34.02] SPEAKER: I had the pleasure of sailing on the Malabar once or twice, and its successor, the West Wind, I think the name was. What is the situation on that boat, is it still sailing on the east coast now?
• [00:40:51.87] JERRY DENNIS: No, it's in Florida, the Florida Keys, the last I heard. I get updates from Hajo Knuttel, the captain that became the heart of that journey. He was the man that made that journey come alive. And he was hired to sail the Malabar from Bar Harbor, Maine, where we sailed it to. He was hired to sail it across the Gulf of Maine to Green Port, Long Island, where it was used for evening cruises.
• [00:41:24.78] And then it was sold again, to the Florida Keys and the last I heard it was at Marathon Key and it was in trouble again. It was decaying again so Hajo was hired again to go and repair a big chunk of the concrete hull. And he was trying to raise the money to buy her, and his ambition was to bring her back to the Great Lakes and sail through Lake Superior, because all these years later, every time I talk to him, he still complains that we weren't allowed to go into Lake Superior on the Malabar. So that's his dream but, I don't know if it will ever come to pass.
• [00:42:01.66] I guess it is still being used for the same purpose, for evening and education.
• [00:42:06.18] SPEAKER: Is it still named Malabar, or have they changed it?
• [00:42:07.79] JERRY DENNIS: No they've renamed her, her original name, fortunately, the Rachel Ebenezer. The Malabar was not a real popular name among sailors, because there was a whole group of famous Malabars, and the Rachel Ebenezer is poetry.
• [00:42:21.86] SPEAKER: Well, I'll have to check my photos, I was in Key West just over a year ago, there was a couple of schooner there. I took a picture of one at sunset, with the sun right behind it. May have been it then.
• [00:42:34.81] JERRY DENNIS: May be, keep in mind, that she's been repainted ugly industrial yellow on the decks.
• [00:42:44.71] SPEAKER: Hello. My name is Deborah, and I'm a kayaker. I became aware of you when I bought your book, Canoeing Michigan River. I loved it. But as much as I love canoeing, kayaking, rivers, I really love the Lakes. So my question has to do with Lake Superior.
• [00:43:06.41] Last summer, I went up to Grand Marais for the 25th anniversary of the Great Lakes sea kayaking symposium. It's in the beautiful, sheltered, but sadly deteriorating harbor of that little Upper Peninsula town, and I met Jack Hubbard, who's the township supervisor. This is leading up to my question, believe me.
• [00:43:35.36] Jack is waging, with the citizens of this 6,000 or so populated town of Grand Marais, is waging a lonely and desperate battle to get this harbor of safe refuge, which is a technical naval term, I think you would know, Jerry, to restore it. Because the wave action, over decades, has filled in the harbor to the point that, almost two years ago, six ordinary citizens, I'm sorry, four ordinary citizens, lost their lives in November in a sudden squall because the other vessels that would have come to their rescue, were mired in the sand, they were beached, because of the wave action. These people died within a few hundreds of yards of shore.
• [00:44:39.25] They were friends of Jack Hubbard's. And to hear him tell the story is very moving. And the little town has done fundraisers, they've produced a CD. And just to go into the township hall, and see everything they're doing to try to raise awareness. This is the only safe harbor on the south shore of Lake Superior and I wanted to ask you, as you're doing the multi-part series about the Great Lakes and their impact on human lives, would you consider, or do you know of, the story of the safe harbors on Lake Superior and the impact it has on both commercial and recreational boating?
• [00:45:26.31] I'm sorry it took a long time to ask the question, but it's something that I'm trying to research to help Jack Hubbard to get some funding to restore the harbor. There's been a marine study done, there's been naval architects consulted, and there's been some grant money awarded. It's a powerful story, it's a very human story, and I think with your knowledge of the Great Lakes, and your appreciation for Lake Superior, would you consider any aspect of that in your production?
• [00:46:00.05] Have you come across discussion of safe harbors in the Great Lakes as a whole?
• [00:46:07.96] JERRY DENNIS: Yes, thank you. I will consider it and I have been very interested in that story. It is unfortunately also an example of a poorly designed structure. On a shoreline that is so uniform that the long shore currents are so consistent and powerful, that any time you put an artificial structure in a current like that, there are consequences. And in Grand Marais' case, the consequence is really unfortunate, the harbor fills with sand.
• [00:46:42.41] And the sand is also pulled away from shoreline areas, causing houses to collapse into the Lake. So it's kind of a mess. And I have considered that for the documentary because it's an interesting problem. I hadn't really thought about the history of safe harbors or --
• [00:47:02.70] SPEAKER: Yeah, it's a naval term. It was developed by what was the precursor to, I don't know, Homeland Security? All along the Great Lakes there should be harbors of refuge, that's also a term used, if that rings a bell.
• [00:47:18.74] JERRY DENNIS: I think we should research that and put that in it, because it is a big part of the story of shipping on the Great Lakes. Thank you.
• [00:47:26.44] SPEAKER: If you don't mind, during your break or after the presentation, I'd like to give you some contact information.
• [00:47:34.23] JERRY DENNIS: I'd welcome it.
• [00:47:35.06] SPEAKER: I think some people could give you some usefull information and I think you could help them also.
• [00:47:42.73] JERRY DENNIS: Yes. Thank you. Yes, sir?
• [00:47:50.34] SPEAKER: Good evening. It appears as if we've survived water being drained of to other parts of the country from the Great Lakes. But in recent days we've heard that the Supreme Court has not allowed us to protect Lake Michigan from the asian carp coming in. And that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has gotten approval for their permit for miniing in the UP. In one case, it would affect our fishing industry. And in the other case, it affects the quality of water in the area, the mining. And would ruin fishing, as was reported in the Sault Ste. Marie paper about a week ago. It made a story, front page headlines. I was wondering what your experience has been with those two issues.
• [00:48:48.57] JERRY DENNIS: No direct experience, except that I've follow them in the media and have talked to people who are pretty passionate about both subjects. We're still making bad decisions. And the Kennecott mine situation should never have gotten even close to being passed, and I was up there, in the area I have a friend who owns property, that will have an access road cut right through the middle of his dream property.
• [00:49:21.87] It's a stand of pines and hemlocks that's gorgeous. He built a cabin there. Planned on retiring there. And he had to allow access, through the middle of his property, to the mining company. And he's heartbroken, and he's probably going to sell the property. But I asked him, have you been able to rally your neighbors? The other people who own property in that area. And he said he tried, and overwhelmingly they support the mine. it's the old jobs issue.
• [00:49:58.13] And they've been romanced, they've been seduced into believing that they're going to profit even in incidental ways, like having an access road, and being paid a fee that probably won't amount to much. But I don't think the mining company has to tell them how much, so they suggested it'll be a lot. And, of course, many of those people live on very little, so a little might help them a lot.
• [00:50:25.74] it's the same kind of thinking that allowed the Chicago river to be reversed in the first place, in 1900 or so. Short term thinking. The profit of a few. And ram rodding the projects through, and it's very discouraging. Very discouraging.
• [00:50:46.66] SPEAKER: In last newsletter of the Great Lakes Alliance they had a picture of a conservation person in a water boat going down the Chicago River, and behind him the asian carp were literally leaping. Not only are they large, but they're vivious. They have an insatiable appetite, and the concern is, of course, the effect that it would have on the Great Lakes. Michigan industry, particularly, starting with Lake Michigan.
• [00:51:20.01] It's a difficult issue, and as they pointed out, to close the chanel in Chicago would cause flooding, so from the human standpoint, there's that problem. On the other hand, there are ways in which between conservation efforts, and electrical netting that they can keep the carp out of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Alliance report was sobering but hopeful. Thank you.
• [00:51:51.63] JERRY DENNIS: Thank you.
• [00:52:01.27] SPEAKER: It's been almost 10 years since you took this trip and seven years since you published your book, could you tell us a story or some type of an update, that if you were writing that book today, or a new addition of that book, that you would include.
• [00:52:23.00] JERRY DENNIS: On the hard cover addition, on the inside flap, I would make sure it said there are eight states bordering the Great Lakes, not seven. I didn't even notice that til about a month ago. And I have to accept responsibility because publisher always gives you the chance to review it, but I must have been very tired, I missed that.
• [00:52:51.84] That's an interesting question, I haven't been asked that. I always have this fantasy of updating and re writing and polishing up all my books years later. Sometimes I'll go back and I actually do it. There's sections of this book that I read now and then in public, and it's scribbled all over, I've revised it as I've gone. But I can't say that there's a whole lot I would do differently.
• [00:53:20.83] Except, maybe, I might blaze a little more wildly with my six shooter, because I was trying not to take too strong -- I was trying not to take such a strong stand of my own, that I would make people think that they were having something shoved down their throat. I wanted the reader to make up their own mind. But I think there's a time and a place for a little bit of outrage. And I've I probably would let fly a little bit more now.
• [00:53:59.28] I have just finished a new book and I let fly pretty freely on that one, but it's a slightly different format as well, and it makes it a little more allowable I think. But other than that, I don't think I'd changed much. Maybe put a few more Ohio stories.
• [00:54:20.94] A critic who -- I'm a rhino-skinned veteran writer, I don't pay very much attention to the critics. One that made me laugh in the Globe and Mail in Toronto, September 11, 2003, three page 44, said, this author sailed beyond his subject. He took offense to the fact that this journey left the Great Lakes, and went to the Erie Canal and the Hudson River and the Atlantic. I guess I could have anticipated a little bit, that criticism. In fact, I think I even had a discussion about it with my editor while I was working on it. He said, well, you know, that's not the Great Lakes.
• [00:55:13.23] I was aware of that.
• [00:55:15.14] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:55:16.64] But, first of all, it's my book. And secondly, it's interesting. I wanted to, once I was on that journey, once I got the tang of salt in my nose, I said what a great opportunity to show how these waters are all connected. One big cycle, right? And it's perfect. So write the book you want to write, the way you want to write it and to hell with the critics.
• [00:55:51.91] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:55:52.17]
• [00:55:56.11] SPEAKER: We just finished the four DVD series of Chicago and we're working on an eight DVD series of New York right now. During my college years, we lived in Chicago and we were familiar with the river reversal, and I kind of naively thought, that sounds like a good idea to me. Whether clever or -- but you've made a comment against -- apparently you feel that was a bad idea and I'd sure like to hear why.
• [00:56:26.58] JERRY DENNIS: I wasn't sure I heard the first part. The reversal of the Chicago River?
• [00:56:30.77] SPEAKER: Yes, the reversal of the Chicago River. Yes.
• [00:56:32.73] JERRY DENNIS: Well, it was a good idea at the time for Chicago, of course, because Chicago was dumping virtually untreated sewage into the Chicago River which was flowing into Lake Michigan and coming back into Chicago through their water intake crib, and was sickening the population. So they wanted to reverse the river, which was not one of the greatest engineering marvels, but it was quite a job.
• [00:57:10.13] It required a system of canals and locks. But the Great Lakes watershed, any map of the Great Lakes watershed, shows how narrow that strip is by Chicago. The head waters of the Chicago River were a marsh that Native Americans would haul their canoes through to the head waters of the Illinois River and down to the Mississippi system.
• [00:57:38.94] You can see why engineers got excited about it, because it could be done a minimum, you know, I mean it was a big job, but not like the Welland Canal. It was doable. Well the communities downstream, the communities on the Illinois River said, well, wait a minute. You're going to send your polluted water down the river where we get our livelihood? Many of those towns were mussel drudging communities, they drudged the mussels out of the rivers to make buttons, and other things. But the button industries were really big in those areas. And those mussels could not survive in poluted water, and, in fact, within a few years of the reversal of the Chicago River many of them were wiped out. And many species, I don't know how many, some species were made extinct.
• [00:58:29.90] So it was a good idea for Chicago then, but a bad idea for the communities downstream. Now what's happened is, this is a conduit. If you've ever seen it, it's a water highway. It's crowded with barge traffic, and they're hauling all this stuff that can only be hauled in large quantities and is too expensive to haul on railroad cars, for instance, like coal and slag and coke and all these large volume products used in manufacturing and in industry. And it's a profitable business, and it keeps people occupied, keeps some jobs.
• [00:59:12.80] They're haulling it up and down, but it's created this conduit that's allowing this invasive species that was accidentally, probably or possibly in some cases, intentionally introduced into ponds and rivers in the South, they've gradually made their way up the Mississippi. And now they're making their way up the Chicago River and Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Well, that's one reason that it's a bad idea.
• [00:59:38.06] The other reason is that it set a precedent that Great Lakes policymakers have been fighting ever since it was open. And that is that it's a diversion from the Great Lakes. That creates that whole big problem of who owns this water? Who has the right to take it? And I've forgotten the number now, but it's hundreds of millions of gallons a day of Lake Michigan are draining out the Chicago River. So much that to keep a balance in the Lakes, it made it possible to reverse, it made it possible for hydropower companies in Ontario to reverse a river system at the headquarters of the Nipigon River and divert approximately an equal amount of water from James Bay that would have been eventually in James Bay, down to Lake Superior.
• [01:00:31.47] So you've got these two big projects that sort of balance each other out, but the dangerous thing is the precedent. And that's what the people who are worried about the Great Lakes Compact are having to deal with, is that precedent opened up the doors to a lot of things, but possible schemes to pipe it to the southwest. Or to pipe it to montana for coal slurry. And they're fighting it all the time.
• [01:00:55.66] I don't think if the Chicago River hadn't been reversed, that problem would not be as large.
• [01:01:05.24] SPEAKER: I just have a question about the crew members, I think it was Matt and Tim, who didn't get along? You were pretty verbal about it in your book. Did you have to get permission? How did they react to that?
• [01:01:19.95] JERRY DENNIS: Well, they both -- I don't know how to Matt reacted, because I lost track of him. I tried to send him a book and he had moved and I don't know where he is. Tim thought that it was honest and fair. I wish that I -- that's one thing I would have done more, I would have let them fight it out. Because they were at each other. There were two times, probably three, when we had to separate them. They were at each other's throats. It was just a case of bad chemistry. But it was kind of fun.
• [01:01:53.17] [LAUGHTER]
• [01:01:56.40] I did get a kick out of it because I was a mediating presence. And Matt would come up to me when I'm on deck and go, that Tim, he's such a jerk -- it kind of reminded me of high school -- he such a jerk, how can you stand him? And about an hour later, Time would be up and he'd say the same thing about Matt. And, oh man. So it was kind of funny. They were like two alpha dogs, you get them in a room and the hair bristled and they start circling each other and pretty soon there snarling and going at each other, but they're great guys. Get them apart and they're great.
• [01:02:36.98] SPEAKER: Got a question regarding -- do you have any idea what the financial side of operating the Malabar was up north or on the east coast? I was sailing one day on Traverse Bay and it was getting late in the afternoon and I decided to turn around and go home and all of a sudden the Malabar comes in. Oh, wow, this is neat, this is cool. I sailed all around the ship as it was coming in, it was really inspiring and I thought, that would be such a neat, awesome way to make a living. Is there any money in it?
• [01:03:14.38] JERRY DENNIS: I don't know, I not the right person to ask, but I did notice that the guy that bought the Malabar had it taken to Maine, was really tight with the money. I don't think he was planning on a big profit margin. I mean, he was so tight with the money that it squeaked.
• [01:03:32.73] His employees were very disgruntled, they weren't making much money. They were all college students and they were trapped there. I don't know. It's a good question. I would imagine it's one of those fields that you get into for love, not money.
• [01:03:52.13] SPEAKER: I was just wondering, I kind of just want to say this out loud because there are a lot of people here, I feel like I'm the only that has heard about it, if you've heard anything about the state of Louisiana trying to remarket the asian carp as a silver fin, and making it a delicacy in the restaurants. The chef that I heard interviewed about it said that the meat of the asian carp is comparable to a scallop or a crab, it doesn't really need much preparation. The bigger it gets the meat maintains it's delicacy, whereas other fish if the get too big, they're not very good. I was just wondering if you heard anything about that?
• [01:04:31.76] JERRY DENNIS: I have not.
• [01:04:32.77] SPEAKER: At least everyone else has heard that I heard about it. JERRY DENNIS: I applaud the industry of trying to salvage some good out of it. The problem I can see, right away, is that probably the containment levels are going to be unacceptable because they're algae feeders, which means that they're picking up big amounts of contaminants. Eventually I think that they'll be bound not to be very desirable, but it's possible.
• [01:05:04.50] SPEAKER: Your story about the fishing disaster at the mouth of the Platte reminded me of a newspaper writer, I think he was either writing for the News or the Free Press. He was there at the beginning of the commercial development of the mouth of the Platte, and he wrote about it. And felt that, 20 years later he went back and saw how the township has redeveloped that point, by the mouth of the Platte as part of the park. He said it was totally ruined and he wished he had never written about it. Are there some stories that you wish you had never told?
• [01:05:42.15] JERRY DENNIS: Yeah. I wrote a story for the New York Times once about a secret spot some friends had shown me in the UP. It was maybe my second or third story for The times and the editors said, you know, we need a destination here. And I said, I can't tell you that. And there's a silence on the phone, she goes, well, I'm afraid we're going to have to kill the stories then. I said, Ewing, I told them immediately where it was.
• [01:06:14.43] That was 25 years ago and, to this day, I get beat up about it. My friends have not forgiven me, they make sure I never forget it. It's a problem. I know the writer, I know the writer you're talking about very well. And he's a veteran, and he knows the consequences of that so, any of us have been the road are very aware of that. Certain places you keep to yourself. You disguise them.
• [01:06:46.89] Others, use your judgment. You want people to know about a place that's in trouble. You want them to know how beautiful it is if it's threatened. Michipicoten Bay on the north shore of Lake Superior, I want everybody to know what a special place that is. Near the town of Wawa. Beautiful, pillowy rock formations around the bay. But there's a trap quarry proposed for it to go in and level those rocks to the water's edge, crush them into road gravel. And the community is divided, terribly divided about it, with again the issue of jobs against the natural beauty of the place.
• [01:07:26.21] I'd like everybody to go up there and see what's there, and then get a little outraged. Yes?
• [01:07:32.11] SPEAKER: In the summer of 1968 we camped on the north shore of Boblo Island. Nothing there. And the people said, just wade out in the water and dip a bucket in and then drink the water, right out of this straits, with the oar boats going by and everything. On your really voyage, do you take all your water with you or is there a point anywhere in the Great Lakes that you velt you could drink the water?
• [01:08:00.04] I drank from the water in Stillwood from the Pukaskwa Peninsula part of northern Lake Superior. I wouldn't hesitate. We were canoeing and we would just dip our dippers in, like people have been doing for thousands of years. And drink right from the lake without hesitation.
• [01:08:20.78] I was tempted a few other places. There are some beautiful, beautiful places that you just can't imagine the water isn't safe, but reason warns you. I watched sailors going through the Straits of Mackinac, who, during the Chicago to Mackinac race, who are so concerned about keeping the weight down in their boat, that they would not carry chemical toilets along, which are required as part of the race. They would get around the regulation either by sneaking it off the boat after the inspection, or just convincing the inspector that you didn't have to go below and check.
• [01:08:56.55] And they would go to the bathroom in their five gallon buckets, and they called bucket and chuck it, out the side of the boat, into Lake Michigan and the Straits. I said, geez, that water -- you know, the thinking was, it's a drop in the bucket, it's not going to create any harm, right? And they accused me of being a liberal tree hugger. I said, yeah. They said, we like you anyway.
• [01:09:26.62] The attitude is scary, and it is a problem. And I'm afraid I wouldn't drink out of the Straits or around Bablo.
• [01:09:35.98] SPEAKER: Thanks.
• [01:09:40.13] JERRY DENNIS: Well thank you. Thank you very much.