Feb 11, 2024

Does it still matter?

 


A friend saw this article from the Star Tribune and sent me this picture from that short piece.The picture looks like it could have come from our old backyard. This isn't even close to the first time this issue has come up. One of the many motivations we had for selling that house was the constant abuse and disregard the city and state demonstrated for that small, historic lake; reclassified as a "watershed" to make the abuse "legal." MNDOT trashed the lake, first with total disrespect in the 1970s by "bridging the lake" with thousands of tons of dirt dumped on the frozen lake to be used for the freeway construction in the spring. That caused flooding in the lower houses on the east side of the new freeway, buried a good bit of the underground water supply for the lake, poured pollution into the lake, and quickly demonstrated the traditional European invaders' disrespect for anything held sacred by Native Americans. Just that act makes a feeble attempt to rename the lake for political correctness another addition of insult to the injury. 

While we lived on Lakeshore Drive, from 1997 to 2015, we saw countless demonstrations of how little the state of Minnesota and the city of Little Canada cared about that once-beautiful little lake. When we first moved into our home, which had been owned by a goober who used the backyard as a practice course for drunken Bobcat parties and who regularly plowed refuse from his "landscaping company" down the hill into the lake, there was still some life in the lake. My grandson and I built a small deck from our yard, out of fallen trees the previous owner had littered all over the shoreline, and we'd watch catfish, perch, and other small fish bob for pieces of bread he'd toss into the water. 

The city actually, illegally, hired a UofM prof and a pack of nitwits to poach Canadian Geese from the lake for several years before residents (loudly led by Ms. Day) embarrassed them into stopping that practice.

That first summer, the local high school maintenance department dumped a few hundred gallons of toxic chemicals into the school's drainage ditch, which made its way to the lake and killed hundreds of fish. Of course, neither the DNR, the Ramsey County Watershed District, or the state's EPA bothered to even reprimand the school's employees and no thought whatsoever was given to repairing that damage. From then until we left, the only fish we ever saw in the lake were minnows and few of them.  At least one business on the north side of our portion (west) of the lake regularly dumped manufacturing chemicals into a drain that kept that end of the lake coated with petroleum rainbows. 

In 2008, the Watershed District  engineers "designed" a new drainage system that, accidentally, lowered the lake level by at least two feet. As a demonstration of how "complicated" determining where that drain level should have been set, my 9-year-old grandson designed an experiment that we documented for his grade school using string, a level, and a tape measure.

MNDOT "designed" various freeway drainage systems that filled the lake with sand, salt, and roadway contaminates peaking (during our time there) with the 2010's expansion of the freeway and a drainage ditch from the south-going Little Canada Road freeway entrance that immediately filled the meager remains of the spring and turned the lake from a feeble remainder of a lake (that once had a "deep end" that exceeded 8') into a rapidly filling swamp with no spot on the lake that couldn't be walked across. Of course, the slackers who get paid way too much to prevent this kind of thing at the state's EPA, the DNR, and the totally worthless Watershed District bureaucrats were busy cleaning their fingernails or counting the money that appeared on their desks in unmarked brown paper bags as that all happened. (After 18 years trying to defend our backyard lake from all of those worthless deadbeats, I have no respect for any of those departments or their employees.)

 For us, the final insult-to-injury nail-in-the-coffin that convinced us to sell our beloved home was the pointless, overpriced, dysfunctional "noise wall" that served to prevent freeway traffic from seeing the eyesore our lake had become. There is no acoustical justification, even based on MNDOT's own guidelines, for a 15' wooden wall placed hundreds of feet from the nearest property it is intended to "protect." COVID did a far more effective job of lowering the health-endangering noise levels (averaging 91dBA in our backyard during the summer and fall of 2014) from I35E in our neighborhood by reducing traffic massively for 2 years. However, as the wall was being constructed MNDOT got serious about directing freeway contaminants into the lake and the south end of the west side of the lake rapidly filled in and became so overrun with sand, salt, and silt that one of our neighbor's dock was literally lifted out of the water. Waterlilies flourished as the lake level dropped.

One of the reasons we ended up staying in Minnesota for the past 28 years was my wife's dream of living on a lake came true when we found our Lakeshore Avenue home in early 1997 just before my promised transfer back to Denver was due. We kept a kayak and a canoe near our dock and used it regularly on that lake, even as it was being overwhelmed by pollution, invasive plants, and noise. We defended the migrating birds who visited our lake from neighbors and government officials. We regularly argued for the preservation of the lake and its wildlife, usually unsuccessfully. A few of our neighbors were also strong advocates, including Rocky Waite (the name change advocate in the Trib article) and a few were obviously oblivious to the lake and did not consider its existence to be of value. A name change is the least the state owes this lake and its history.

Jan 6, 2020

Still Not Renamed?

This is the 100th post for the Savage Lake blog and my last. Years before we left, in 2014, there was talk about renaming the lake. Our neighbor, Rocky Waite, was particularly inspired to change the name to something less offensive. Apparently, nothing has changed since this 2016 article, "Little Canada’s Savage Lake on its way to a new name," from LillyNews.com. No surprise there.

Downgrading "Lake"

Here's what Ramsey County has to say about Savage Lake, "Because it is divided by the highway, the eastern and western basins of the lake are connected by a pipe that flows from the west basin into the southwest corner of the eastern basin. Although called a lake, Savage Lake is actually a 27-acre wetland. West Savage Lake is 17.4 acres with a maximum depth of 5.9 feet; East Savage Lake is 9.6 acres with a maximum depth of 5.7 feet." At least they have a nice picture of the lake from a view that no longer exists thanks to their "noise wall." 

It was, of course, a lake before MNDOT decided to dump a 1/2 mile dirt "bridge" into the lake, flooding the east side neighborhood when the ice melted and swamped yards and homes that were near the waterline. This was one of Minnesota's many savage attempts to bury native American history under "progress." Bridging the lake wasn't good enough for the state's lake wreckers. In 2011, MNDOT began the freeway construction that would finish off Savage Lake and, ironically, jam up MNDOT's freeway entrance drainage at the same time. Once the lake's spring source was plugged and the freeways were draining into the lake from both ends, on the west side of the lake, the "lake" status was history. Between MNDOT's abuse and the DNR's lethargy, Savage Lake was doomed by a corrupt, lazy, and incompetent pair of bureaucracies and a county and city government that was too busy packing its pockets with development money to bother with protecting the city's natural resources.

Apr 15, 2019

Is This Irony?

The Ramsey-Washington Watershed District has an entry about the botched-up drain they installed in 2003 and modified several times before getting it as close to right as they ever do anything: Savage Lake Outlet Improvement.They sarcastically claim, "Prior to the project, the outlet from Savage Lake was highly susceptible to plugging, which caused extended elevated water levels in the lake. City maintenance crews frequently removed sticks and other debris from the outlet.

"During the winter of 2003-04, we installed a new outlet structure that would operate at full system capacity even if 80 percent plugged. The outlet stabilizes normal water levels in the lake and allows flood levels to subside much sooner than before."

One of the advantages of getting to review your own work is that you don't have to even pay lip-service to facts or reality.

Apr 26, 2018

Postscript: 2018

We haven't been back to Little Canada, to our old neighborhood since we moved in 2015. Last Monday, after spending a day with friends and family, we decided to take a "tour" of the place we lived for 18 years; the longest period of calling a place home in our lives. A lot had changed, a lot stayed the same, and some of it was unrecognizable. Passing by our lake, via 35E at rush hour was startling. Traffic is almost exponentially greater, noisier, and dirtier. Clearly, either the increased lane-count has attracted commuters who once took a different route or development north of St. Paul is really ramping up. I have no idea when Google took the photo [below], but I can guarantee it was not on a Monday at 3PM.

The biggest reason we bought our home on Lake Shore Avenue was the lake; Savage Lake. We liked the yard and the privacy. I loved the giant garage. Elvy loved the weird layout of the house and the potential of the basement for workspace for her art. We both loved the idea of having a home with a lake in the backyard. I realize that Minnesotans discount bodies of water like Savage Lake as if they are just holes in which to dump sewage, but the rest of the country (especially west) has a different perspective on precious water resources. Not different enough to stop pissing, shitting, and wasting their water, but at least slightly more cognizant than Minnesota where we have so much water we delude ourselves into thinking it is endless. If you look at the past entries in this blog, you'll see that we spent almost as much time in our backyard enjoying our "lake" as we did inside hiding from winter. Before we moved to Little Canada, I had never thrown a party in my life. Because of Savage Lake, we had a wedding reception, annual Little Canada Days fireworks parties, sledding parties, a college graduation bash, and dozens of get-togethers in our backyard that always included some aspect of being on the lake in boats, skis, snowshoes, sleds, or just sandals or winter boots. We hiked the lake in the winter, boated it in the summer, and enjoyed it every day we lived in Little Canada. In the end, it was the thing we both knew we would miss the most about our old home. It still is.

When we lived in the Cities, we regularly compared our industrial noise neighborhood to friends' homes and our daughter's home in Dinkytown. Other essays in this blog talk about the unhealthy expansion of noise in our old backyard and I won't beat that horse more more in this essay, but if you are fooling yourself into believing that you can live with 85dBA-and-above-noise on a constant basis you already need medical assistance.  Today, there are four lanes (two in each direction) on 35E that didn't exist when we left the Cities. If traffic expands to fill the available space, as it usually does, that probably means the noise level in my old backyard has risen by 3-8dBASPL.

NOTE: You may not be familiar with the usual verbiage used in discussing noise levels. "dBASPL" means deci (1/10) Bells (a measure of acoustic loudness) A (A-weighted to approximate the sensitivity of human hearing to sound at various loudness levels) and SPL (sound pressure level, a necessary addition because decibels are used for a variety of energy measurements from electrical to light to touch and so on). Forgetting the weighting aspect for a moment, the threshold of human hearing is 0dBSPL and the generally accepted threshold of pain is around 120dBSPL. The aspect of this specification I want to point out here is the A-weighting. Our hearing mechanism is fairly insensitive to low and high frequency sounds at low volume. A-weighting is intended to compensate for human hearing nonlinearity for sounds below 55dB (unweighted). So, anytime you see a specification like "90dBA" you should understand the "A" is being abused for some reason. The reason, in the case of sound barriers, is that low frequencies pass through most of the barriers constructed today as if that barrier is insignificant. So, using A-weighting allows the person doing the testing to discount the irritation factor of loud low frequency sounds artificially. Also, most of the loudest vehicle noises are low frequency sounds. The appropriate weighting system to use at the noise levels presented in the Savage Lake neighborhood would be C-weighting, but that would expose the ineffectiveness of the noise barrier and the health hazard residents are exposed to. 

There are lots of technical articles written about noise barriers, but "Building the Wall" probably does as good a job as any at explaining how poorly those structures work for the majority of the neighborhoods they are supposed to help. This classic and simplified description of where that 3dB of noise reduction comes from should be startlingly and discouragingly illustrative of how useless those expensive walls are at any practical distance. Flexible barriers do absorb a little noise energy, but not enough to produce much noise reduction in practical terms. The 6dB justification MNDOT and lobbyists use to justify these installations is purely political and economic. The real argument is "would you rather look at traffic or a wall?" It's not my backyard now, so I can't answer that question. I do know that at least one of our neighbors moved away a year after we left, partially because the noise became intolerable for them.

When we lived in the Cities, we would often visit friends homes or our daughter's home in Minneapolis and enjoy the relative quiet of other parts of the urban environment. Today, even the quietest of those places seems almost intolerably noise to us and, I imagine, our old backyard would be deafening; and I'm not exaggerating. Exposure to noise levels of 85dBSPL and above is a known health hazard. So, while we miss the lake we loved and the neighborhood that was our home, losing almost 30dBCSPL of noise from our backyard was a necessary sacrifice. The reason I decided to add this comment to the long-neglected and nearly-abandoned Savage Lake Blog is that the only reason this human abuse happens is that people believe there is nothing they can do about it. That is not true, but humans/citizens will have to become involved in their local, state, and federal government to fix it. Trump and the Trumpanzees imagine they can turn back the clock to the 1950's and everything will revert to the "good old days." Good luck with that, dummies. Change and the future will happen, regardless of how often Fox News tells you it won't. The country can change for the better or worse, but it will never go back to what we imagined it was 60 years ago.

Oct 24, 2016

Two Years Gone

It's hard to believe that it has been two years since we moved into our Red Wing home. I don't think a day goes by when Elvy and I don't have some kind of conversation about our old home. We were there for 18 years, twice as long as either of us lived in any other place. We loved that home and, especially, we loved Savage Lake. Still do, even though we haven't seen the lake in 2 years we still think about it often. Our grandson grew up in that backyard and canoeing on that lake. It will always be a part of us.
 
I ended up writing about that today because my Window's screen saver glitched and started cycling through my "yard" folder from the want ads I'd created for selling our home in 2014. You wouldn't believe all of the memories that flooded into my consciousness!
 
I wish someone in the neighborhood would take over this blog because I'd like to keep up on the status of Savage Lake. I know Minnesotans think our little lake "isn't a real lake," but I wish I could prove that you are wrong. That lake has been there longer than Europeans have been on this continent and it is a treasure, no matter how miserably the City of Little Canada, MNDOT, the Watershed District, and the DNR treat it. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Savage Lake is restored to its past beauty long after humans have vanished from the planet.

Dec 4, 2015

Heiruspecs: On the Ground Official Video

More of a place marker than anything, but part of this Heiruspecs' music video was recorded in our Little Canada house. If you were ever in our old (1885 foundation) home, you might recognize Elvy's basement studio, the basement family room, our living room, and the kitchen.

The family room, where the drums were filmed for this video, was also a drum booth when I recorded a couple of bands in the house about ten years ago. There was, at one time, a 12-in, 3-out tieline run from the attic studio to the basement for that purpose. I also had an 8-in, 3-out tieline into the living room (where some of the vocals and the bass was filmed). Two separate several-day long recording sessions (one for Jack Smith and the Persuaders' CD and one for "The Las Vegas Wedding Blues" soundtrack --a never completed film score for a movie that died stillborn) were all it took to convince me I'm too old and cranky to put up with musicians in my home. I pulled the tie lines and restricted the rest of my recording activity in the house to solo instruments and voice-over work (all of the MMSC motorcycle safety PSAs from 2002 until 2012, for example) in the attic isolation booth. The "studio" area in the attic contained my control area and CDs for the Roseville String Ensemble, CDs and audio-for-video for dozens of live Bethel College orchestra performances, the A-V production of Motorcycling Minnesota television programs, and a collection of live pop band recording mixes came out of that attic studio.
As part of my marketing for the house, I compiled a collection of pictures taken over the past decade and posted it on YouTube (see below). The soundtrack, by David Santistevan, was mixed and mastered in my studio. If you are patient, you can see some half-decent pictures of the studio being built and how it was used. There is at least one really great professional shot of the studio area after it had been emptied out, when the place was up for sale, and after we were moved out.