Lake Winnipeg
I
Crossing to Elk Island Provincial Park when the water is shallow.
The dogs are running ahead, chasing seagulls. This spit of white sand extends almost a kilometer into the lake towards Elk Island. Soon we’ll don lifejackets and swim across to the far sandbar, balancing our picnic and towels overhead. On the island we’ll find willow roots exposed by rolling waves, flat white stones for skipping, and driftwood stumps. The island is large enough to be forested with spruce and poplar. There will be black flies, and tracks of bear or wolves along the beach, and blueberries further in.
It’s a calm day. We couldn’t cross in a wind. Lake Winnipeg is the tenth largest fresh water lake on the planet, and it’s shallow, wave tossed, tempermental. Waves can come up suddenly, driving a wind tide and a current through the narrows. Depending on the wind, the beach can grow or shrink by 10 meters in half a day. We strap lifejackets on the dogs, and tethers. Border collies are strong swimmers, but it’s a long distance and there are no boats in sight that could help with a rescue. The leashes will also keep them from veering off after floating pelicans or kildeer nesting on the shore. Their enthusiasm for swimming might exceed their stamina.
Crossing to Elk Island Provincial Park when the water is shallow. We wander the shoreline, nap, and throw sticks for the dogs. We’ve enjoyed these summer days on Lake Winnipeg almost every year as the kids have grown up, renting a cottage, and bringing friends and family. We bike though Victoria Beach to the bakery, jump off the big pier, climb the sand cliffs, and walk for miles along the shore looking for beach glass, admiring stones with hollow centres or pink and black stripes. We make a ritual of taking our coffee down to the beach and watching the sun set over the lake every evening.
II
Noni on a snowmobile near Matheson Island.
April has been a warm month. It’s dark when we get to the edge of the ice road, and all I can see in the headlights is water. As Shirley aims the car down the ramp, I undo my seatbelt and roll down the window. Shirley is a school consultant, supervising teachers all over northern Manitoba, and she’s had to drive or fly into dozens of remote communities. She’s survived this long, I tell myself, so we’ll probably survive this too, although the trip so far has not inspired confidence. The highway was icy, but it’s not in Shirley’s character to slow down. She keeps up a steady conversation about her work while passing semi trucks that have skidded into the ditch. We’re heading to Matheson Island, a small village with a commercial fishing cooperative and a one room school. The car plows through the water, across the Lake Winnipeg ice, following a winding line of small poles that mark the way.
Doreen and Harold are our hosts. They have spare rooms to let for Hydro workers or pilots. Their house is on the only street, a tidy gravel road along the lakeshore. They each have a fishing boat, and in the winter fishing season they work nets under the ice. Harold is going for surgery on his hand, says Doreen, the years of cold water and heavy pulling have tightened his swollen fingers into painful knots. It’s a good life though, she says, we’ve raised our kids here. You’ll meet our grandson tomorrow at the school, he’s quite an artist. I show them a watercolour sketch I’ve done while we’ve been talking. Oh, that’s Wally’s shed, says Harold. He’s thinking, why would anyone paint a picture of a shack? He’s much happier with the drawings of their grandkids that I do for them the next day, in exchange for an excellent pickerel dinner.
Matheson Island is an Icelandic and Metis community, with some family connections to the Bloodvein Reservation across the strait. The school is small and well kept, with a dedicated teacher and smart, curious students. We have a good week, drawing portraits, building puppets, and illustrating stories they’ve written about faraway places they’ve seen on TV.
We leave carefully, as the ice is rotting. It’s not covered with water anymore, and although it’s a metre thick, you can poke a stick through it. There are a few men standing around a truck that’s stuck in the ice up to it’s axles. They’ve rigged a tripod out of logs and are using a winch to get the wheels free. This is the signal for everyone to drive their vehicles across to the mainland. They’ll have to use sleds for a few weeks, or stay home, until the ferry can start up for the summer.
The following year, I bring my daughter, and the kids take her out on her first snow mobile ride. She understands that it might seem odd to these kids that she rides a bus to school, instead of a covered sled that a volunteer pulls behind a snow machine every morning.
III
Lake Winnipeg is getting murky. It’s hot today, but we can’t swim because of the bluegreen algae. There are signs posted, Water Advisory, a warning not to wade or swim, and citing the risk of nausea, vomitting, diarrhea, skin infection, and breathing difficulties.
We are marooned on the beach, looking at the vivid peacock-coloured paste that coats the sand and rocks and extends kilometres offshore. It’s a toxic soup of bacteria that can kill pets and wildlife that drink it. The toxins can be airborne, too, so it’s not even safe to be here, really, although there are sunbathers in skimpy swimsuits, and families with toddlers, all looking wistfully at the water.
IV
On the shore of the Salton Sea, Imperial Valley, California.
I visit the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California. The Salton Sea is the result of overflows from the Colorado River, and from canals built in 1905. In its heyday, there were hotels, amusement parks, residences, and a military base. The lake has been drying up ever since, as the demand for water for nearby communities and for irrigation has lowered the water in the river. The water is saline and eutrophic, full of nutrients from farm run-off, and algae blooms.
There’s a strong, unpleasant odor in the air. I can hear the sand crunching underfoot when I walk, except when I looked closely I see I’m walking on fish bones, only fish bones, maybe 2 feet deep, as far as I can see. There are jawbones, a few scales, a whole dried up tilapia to prove it. The beams and concrete pads behind me were once a beach resort. There are a few shattered trailers, and a few that are still occupied, with beat up looking cars behind scraps of corrugated metal fencing.
And a bar oddly wallpapered with dollar bills signed by patrons. We chat with the proprietor, who shows us a binder of newspaper clippings documenting the demise of the lake. I look across the empty room and through the window to the darkening sky and the twisted piles of an old pier. It would make a convincing post-apocalyptic film set.
I feel a deep sense of dread. Is this Lake Winnipeg’s future?
Readying the nets on the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium boat, the Namao.
V
We’ve boarded the research boat, the Namao, for a short tour of the lake’s south basin. Karen Scott, a scientist and spokesperson for the Lake Winnipeg Reseach Consortium, has invited our artists’ group on board to see the work that’s being done to save the lake. She’s softspoken, a good listener, and able to help us begin to understand the complexity of the problem. We watch as science students sit around a tank on the deck, counting and identifying fish species, dredging up mud from the lake bottom to measure micro-organisms, and scooping test water at specific depths and coordinates.
In 1997, neighbours, high school and university students, and army troops got together to fill sandbags and heave them onto dikes, fighting the Flood of the Century in Manitoba.
The nutrients that feed algae flow into Lake Winnipeg from a watershed that extends west into Alberta, and south into North Dakota and Minnesota, Karen explains, although 60% of the pollution comes from the Red River. Nutrients is a polite word for phosphates and nitrogen in sewage effluent, fertilizer and manure. There are communities along the river with more or less effective sewage treatment facilities. Winnipeg’s storm sewers overflow in heavy rains, sending the city’s effluent pouring straight into the river several times per year. Large scale hog farms contribute to the problem, as a quantity of the manure is spread on fields as fertilizer. Fertilizer is good if it’s drilled deep into the soil, if heavy rain doesn’t wash the nutrients into the ditches and waterways, and if the rivers don’t flood. The Red and Assiniboine Rivers are part of a lowland flood basin, flooding often enough that Winnipeg built an enormous ditch, a floodway, around the entire city after a big flood inundated the city in 1950.
Hydro dams also play a role, limiting the flushing of the lake at the northern outlet, with the resulting high water levels drowning the marsh at the south end. Marshes filter out Bob Haverluck and I spent a day on the Namao as part of a River on the Run art collective project. 1 In 1997, neighbours, high school and university students, and army troops got together to fill sandbags and heave them onto dikes, fighting the Flood of the Century in Manitoba. nutrients from water, turning phosphates and nitrogen into plants and habitat for ducks and minnows. The loss of the marsh has added to the murkiness of the water.
The Namao, docked for the evening.
The fisheries have had booming catches, as the nutrients provide ample food for the fish. So far, the wave action has provided enough oxygen that the fish have survived the algae blooms. Scientists aren’t sure what the long term effects of pollution will be, but typically fish stocks will crash after large algae blooms die and rot, sucking oxygen out of the water.
We are jotting notes, taking photographs, and sketching, talking to whoever has time for us. We end up in the galley, eating the excellent chocolate chip cookies just baked by the ship’s cook. The information is hard to digest, but the cookies are going down well.
Back on shore, we meet to paint, sing, write, and perform what we’ve learned, in the hopes of raising awareness of the complex issues, as well as much needed funding for research.
VI
I’m standing in the lake, up to my knees in water, and I can see my toes. I haven’t been able to do that since I was a kid. It’s because of a small invasive species called zebra mussels. They have have hitched a ride into the lake on pleasure boats, and are now multiplying in the lake. Zebra mussels are filtering nutrients out of the water, reducing algae blooms and increasing water clarity. They’re cleaning the water. They’re also clogging fishing nets and water pipes, reducing fish stocks by competing for food, changing the habitat of aquatic plants, and creating a sharp layer of broken shells on the beach.
Scientists will have to start from scratch, rethinking their models to incorporate the impact of these little molluscs. The future of Lake Winnipeg, the fisheries that sustain northern communities, and the water quality of the beaches, are now unknown.
We’ve been so careless with our waterways. So oblivious to the environmental outcomes of development. I think we need some of that sandbagging spirit; pulling together to defend our water from pollution, the same way we defended our homes from the flood. I wade and watch the sun set, and wonder. The light reflected on Lake Winnipeg looks the same as it always has, and yet, in my lifetime, there has been so much change beneath the surface. And more to come.
Lake Winnipeg at sunset.
*Photo credits: Rhian Brynjolson and Dale Klassen
