Willows and flotsam on one of the Pig's Eye Islands.
A couple weeks ago my buddy Aaron and I canoed into Pig’s Eye Lake, a backwater of the Mississippi River a little south of downtown Saint Paul.
It’s name comes from the one-eyed settler who set up a still in a riverside cave and sold booze to soldiers from Fort Snelling. As many know, Saint Paul was even called Pig’s Eye for a time, and his supposed likeness still graces the cans of a cheap and nasty eponymous beer. If such had become the city’s map-wearing name, something tells me the state capital would be elsewhere.
The lake hosts the mouth of Battle Creek, whose final banks once bisected the Saint Paul Landfill—a notorious and almost mythical place of local history, where tires and household trash smoldered next to industrial waste in an apocalyptic scene of discard. Toxic waste is still leaking into the creek and river. Some years ago, the governing municipality covered the site with heavy fill to curb the seepage, and now a strange field grows.
Aaron and I paddled across the lake and up the ten-foot wide Battle Creek channel until a beaver dam that we didn’t want to portage stopped us.
We got out to examine the shore and walked onto the field. It stretched vacant and odd because so much unbuilt upon open space surrounded by cities screams disease.
We made one more stop to the outlet of the Pig’s Eye sewer treatment plant, where much of the Twin Cities’ wastewater enters the water table anew. Now, less than 100 years ago communities dumped straight into the river, and when the river was low and the outflow high (I suppose during intermission of a great radio show) the waste to sewage ratio was six to one, so when newspaper articles say the water is better than it was they aren’t joking.
The outflow channel is not a seeper, as I’d expected, it’s the size of a midrange river, and flows for several hundred yards. Its clear outflow is a startling contrast to the chocolate milk Miss. Image from the fantastic Google Maps.
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