an 1862 flood, canal overseer Russel Lord, “in effect, attempted to pump dry the Lackawaxen.”23
Along the canal’s feeder streams, water-intensive tanneries sprang up, each feeding not only on water but also on the area’s hemlock, whose bark produced tannic acid, a necessary component in tanning hides. The tannery that stood between Pleasant Mount and Belmont, along the West Branch of the Lackawaxen, was part of an international business that by 1860 accounted for two-thirds of the value of Wayne County manufacturing, a stat in large part attributable to the canal offering access to New York’s port. Supplying tanneries with hides from as far away as South America, in 1872 the canal floated 1,690 tons of leather and hides and 729 tons of tanners’ bark.24 It’s a good bet that tanners simply dumped used vats of tannic acid into streams like the Johnson; a mix of acids, blood, and offal cannot be good for water quality.25 By the mid-1880s, however, the industry, making mainly shoe leather, collapsed across the county after it exhausted the supply of hemlock.26
With railroads delivering coal at an ever-faster clip, the canal lost ground. In 1880, D & H president Thomas Dickson approached the company board of directors with three reasons to shut it down: (1) it’s “expensive to maintain... liable to damage, and can be used a portion of the year only”; (2) the “question of a water supply is becoming more serious every year”; and (3) “traffic cannot be moved upon [it] as cheaply as by rail.”27 At the end of 1898, the D & H finally closed the canal, and the Lackawaxen, Delaware, and Hudson rivers reclaimed their waters.
As the weather warmed in 1899, the canal became a “stinking, unhealthy ditch.” One seventeen-mile section sold to the Erie Railroad “bought the Erie considerable abuse over sanitary problems” because people feared malaria outbreaks. When operations ended, life along the canal banks changed almost instantly; mules disappeared into D & H mines, workers left for jobs elsewhere, and many of the busy towns that had sprung up along the towpath withered and died.28
Our house sits on a lake we’ve never seen. As large as a Finger Lake and about one hundred feet beneath us, neither ice nor rain created it. An orphan of anthracite mining and a brainchild of the state Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, the Acid Mine Lake names a basin beneath a basin, a watershed of pollution cupping the watershed I glimpse from my front door. Not good.
To mine coal below the water table, companies continually pumped water from their mines, even when mines were idle due to labor strikes, accidents, or money troubles. Owners, strikers, non-miners: everyone respected the pumps because they knew that if the pumps stopped mining would end, forever. In 1960 the pumps stopped.29
In January 1959, Knox Coal Company miners chipped away at a coal seam near Pittston to within six feet of a buried valley under the Susquehanna River. Left by the Wisconsin ice sheet, “water-bearing, quicksand-like sediments” broke into the mine, pulling the river with it, sweeping away twelve men, and sending seventy more scrambling for the surface. The resulting whirlpool, 120–50 feet wide, defied for days all attempts to plug it, including running into the abyss thirty or more railroad cars loaded with coal. By the time the river surface smoothed, ten billion gallons of water had been sucked into Wyoming Valley mines.30
A massive pumping and propping operation cleared the mines, but by then the three major coal companies had discovered that deep mining here was no longer profitable. Deciding to pull out, Glen Alden, Moffat, and Hudson agreed among themselves that the last outfit left would shut down the pumps. After the last switch flipped to off on 1 November 1960, water gradually collected in mine gangways and rooms, crosscuts and hoisting sheds, its level rising by January 1962 to 609 feet above sea level. Mine water soon gushed “from numerous bore holes and seeps along the Lackawanna Valley,” coursing down hillsides and collecting in basements.31
Called in to solve the flooding problem, the state decided that siphoning off the water would relieve the underground pressure. Near Old Forge, where the river spills over the Moosic Saddle anticline, workers drilled down four hundred feet, creating a hole that “drains all of the flooded mine tunnels from Olyphant through Scranton and Taylor.”32 The resulting gush daily spews into the river one hundred million gallons of water laced with a ton and a half of iron oxide (i.e., rust), along with “iron, aluminum, manganese and sulfur.” If you wanted to stab a river in the heart, this would be one way to do it; from Old Forge to the Lackawanna’s confluence with the Susquehanna, no “fishery or any significant aquatic community” survives.33 The river rusts, lifeless, in its last three miles, its water and rocks a surreal, bright orange. The price for my dry basement is a long stretch of dead river.
Scranton and its river have always had an uneasy relationship. In the early 1850s, the river may have, just may have, “flowed deep and strong, with an abundance of water, that came sparkling pure from the thick forests and wooded hills of the upper valley,” but this, the Scranton family knew, would not last. In 1854, the Scrantons, scrambling to supply their growing village with water, organized the Scranton Gas and Water Company, which began four years later to pump water from the Lackawanna River, near today’s Scranton High School, uphill to a reservoir at Madison Avenue and Olive Street.34 By 1866, the year of the city’s founding, the river was officially “declared unfit for public water supply.” With river water undrinkable, in 1867 the company dammed Roaring Brook, a Lackawanna tributary, but in 1870 these waters so corroded flues at the Lackawanna Iron and Coal furnaces that an explosion killed eleven workers.35 The water company quickly retreated farther up the mountain, making reservoirs as it went. Meanwhile, garbage, industrial waste, mine runoff, and sewage smothered the river, so much so that by the 1920s much of the Lackawanna was dead, and, aided by state and local government, remained so for years. A 1937 Pennsylvania clean streams law “exempted coal companies,” and as late as the 1960s local officials resisted state and citizen efforts to clean up the river, arguing that “pollution from the mines neutralized the health threats from the sewage.” For too long, the city knew only a wasted waterway.36
Despite its troubles, the Lackawanna is beautiful. Sixty-two miles long, it drains 350 square miles, flows through twenty-three municipalities, and passes through an area populated by nearly 250,000 people. From sources atop the Moosic Mountains, the river drops “an average of 39 feet per mile” on its trip to the Susquehanna, cutting rock that was once the “ocean floor in the Devonian period, the great swamps of the Carboniferous period, [and] the folded and uplifted sedimentary rocks of the Permian age.” The river rises from glacial ponds in Wayne and Susquehanna counties: Lake Lorain, Bone Pond, Independent Lake, and Dunns Pond feed the east branch; the west branch carries water from Fiddle Lake, Lake Lowe, and Lewis Lake. Through parts of Scranton, just north of the Old Forge borehole, the river has recovered enough in the last thirty years to offer excellent trout fishing; north of the city, a section between Jessup and Jermyn—and many people refuse to believe it—the Pennsylvania Fish Commission classifies as Class A Trophy Trout waters. Despite this resurrection, more than a dozen major outfalls still empty mine acid into the watershed.37
As I worked on this chapter, I followed the “cleanup” of the largest oil spill in U.S. history. When the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on 20 April 2010, killing eleven workers and gushing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, I couldn’t help but see it as a larger version of the Old Forge borehole. Every day, long into July, oil washed ashore along the coast, crippling the Gulf economy, all for a few barrels more. Guardian writer Naomi Klein put it exactly right when she noted that the spill was less an industrial accident than a “violent wound in a living organism.”38 The Earth bleeds, we watch, and little changes but the scale of disaster.
Every other day, usually, I run up Richmont Street, sprint across North Washington Avenue, jog up Electric Street, swing around the Oral School, and pass through the gates of Forest Hill Cemetery, where I wind my way among the dead. With the original cobblestone roads paved, thankfully, running in the cemetery is less dangerous than it might otherwise be. The six mausoleums look like cottages, with maples shading their front doors; two of them, Barnes and Lucas, back into a hillside. Along my route,