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Although it also could have been 1952, and this could be National Geographic. The repeated fires on the Cuyahoga River represents a quintessential origin story in my field of environmental health–a flash point for action that ultimately helped pave the way for regulations to limit pollution of the waters of this country.

Please find my poem Cuyahoga here, available now on Tributaries from Fourth River.

T.S. Eliot wrote “What we call the beginning is often the end”–words to remember as the firewalls of regulations fail under the current administration. The rivers may burn again.

You can read more about the history here and find the attribution for the featured image and its accompanying text. I thank the photographer who snapped a pic of the pic in the archive to deposit into the public domain.