bad neighbors?

Part One 

                                     Friends or Neighbors ?                                           

Entrance to City of Canton owned farm land. 

      I forget who actually quoted or in this case doctored the quote to fit their need. But this does sound appropriate as it is derived from another quote as it says; ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. The derived quote goes something like: ‘Forget your enemies it’s your neighbors you have to worry about’. At times this isn’t always true and for most people your neighbor would be part of an extended family.

    In the old days of farming, we depended on our neighbors as collectively they would gather and help bring in the crops. Come take care of an aged person when the family traveled. A variety of tasks could easily be exchanged between you and your neighbor while heading down life’s way. This wasn’t for cash but for a mutual unspoken trade of labor and this extended to watching the neighbor’s kids and advising the parents when someone was acting up. This stopped a lot of trouble as kids had nowhere to go that they were not singled out for their actions unlike today where at times we don’t even know who are neighbors are or how long they had those poor girls locked in the basement in chains as in the Castro case in Cleveland.

     More to home , I am speaking in terms of one of my neighbors and the environmental tragedy that unfolded over there across the fence in a time when we had no EPA( Environmental Protection Agency) and we left things up to the powers that be assuming they had all the answers of what was right and what was wrong.

    The authorities I am speaking of are the representatives of the city of Canton (Canton, Ohio) . Home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and at times the murder capital of the world, albeit that second claim to fame is only evidenced and surpassed at times by their insensitivity to anyone downstream from them, they at time s were less than responsible in accepting what should have been the norm at least and opting in favor of profit of individuals to achieve a moderate growth of unregulated population. These representatives were from another time and consisted of the mayor and city director , planners and whoever else was responsible for the unregulated housing and the inability of the city to maintain a healthy sewage system instead decided to allow for unregulated growth and an overflowing sewage system , that not only permitted unregulated releases of raw sewage into our public water system, namely Nimisilla creek but also advocated and encouraged unregulated waste disposal through raw sewage releases onto property they owned in Pike township on the farm next to us. This also became a dumping ground for the screens they used to filter the sewage that was processed by their inadequate and overflowing plant . this cake material consisted of spent condoms and seeds and whatever else would pass through a humans body that would become trapped in the screens and eventually would end up on the farm beside us only to be eventually be buried but not until it had laid there a considerable amount of time collecting flies and wild animals that would eat the crap vegetables and whatever that would sprout from the rich organic waste.

     I imagine somewhere in someone’s mind this may have started out as a good idea to finally utilize some of the waste streams that a young city the size of Canton Ohio , would create. Considerable effort and expense was used to utilize these resources as a new sewage plant was built on the side of the Nimisilla Creek convenient to both the creek and the farm , which required construction of a sewage pipeline I imagine that still exists today in some form and may still actually be used which scares me from a environmental view as it was antiquated in my youth. This new sewage plant built back in the 1940’s I assume or even earlier was located on the now City farm as it is called by locals. It was a collection of farms that the City of Canton purchased when they built the plant that was supposed to pre-treat the sludge as they called it and then distribute this sludge on to nearby farms and fields they acquired through a series of ditches and pipes, maintained by city workers who would flood certain portions of fields and allow a controlled runoff of waste to accumulate before moving to the next area. Efforts were made to farm and utilize this waste stream as humans eat quite well. Even the poorest of us and still have a high nitrogen content of our feces that encourages plant growth. But along with this is a thing called pathogens or harmful bacteria that arises as a result of mismanaged and unprocessed sewage,

     Thousand’s of workers came flocking to the city of canton during world war two  and places like Hercules and Timken were hiring in mass and a housing boom was created . overflowing the capacities of the existing sewage system   and at the same time allowing for unregulated dumping of waste products into our sewage system from industrial sources that utilized heavy metals such as zinc and lead which cannot be filtered out of the sewage and was eventually either spread on their farm or dumped into the Nimisilla Creek turning all fish belly side up in protest.

     Chippy Brothers, a well-respected principal I had at East Sparta Elementary once remarked to me in his old age ,  that when in his youth the Nimisilla was once one of the most prized trout fishing streams in the state of Ohio . Most of my youth I saw it as a lifeless stretch of stench punctuated by trash overflows and varied from brown to black depending on how much sewage was released. ( to be cont.)