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September/October 2003 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Lake Erie In-depth: Lake Erie The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

But there is no evidence here on the shore that the dead zone even exists. Well, not usually. In 1999, an enormous kill of birds and fish washed up on the beaches in windrows. Loons, laced with toxins, lost the ability to hold up their heads, drowned by the hundreds and floated ashore to mix with a noisome mélange of rotting fish and slimy greenery. The same phenomenon now recurs every year, and participants in a workshop on Lake Erie were told in Buffalo this April that botulism has so far "claimed 50,000 birds and an undetermined number of aquatic species.… But researchers remain uncertain about the outbreak’s causes and why the outbreak has lasted so long."

Never mind. The sun is shining, the water is clear, and, I am assured by three truculent fishermen holding up a wall outside a bar on the harbour front, "There’s not a damn thing wrong with the lake. It’s just the yapping of a bunch of academics who have nothing better to do."

Nostalgia and curiosity have spurred me to this place. On the nostalgia front, this is where I came, back when the Earth’s crust was still cooling, to stay at my grandfather Walt’s hotel: the Dominion House, W. S. McCall, Proprietor. It was a two-storey wooden structure with — and this is the part I hold dear — outdoor biffies on both levels. On the second floor, where we stayed, a door at the end of a narrow corridor led out to a wooden walkway with side rails, which took you to the place of repose beneath the stars.

When I told the young lady in charge of the Board of Trade downtown (who tried, in vain, to find any trace of the hotel in the town records), she wondered whether the biffies were, you know, stacked one over the other. Well, no. Anyway, the Dominion House is gone, leaving not a wrack behind, and the shoreline where memory places it for me bears little resemblance to the quiet backwater I once knew. Port Dover today is a bustling tourist-cum-fishing-centre, with several motels and more B&Bs, all with indoor plumbing.

But — and this brings me to my second spur — for how long? Are the concerns about the state of the lake alarmist or pertinent? And if Lake Erie is under threat, what does that portend for the rest of the Great Lakes?

Time to meet professor emeritus Henry Regier of the University of Toronto, a man who has spent most of his life teaching and studying ecology and has become one of the internationally recognized experts on Lake Erie, about which he has written innumerable scientific papers. He looks just the way a professor should look, except for his air of outrage, which he carries like a proud banner. He is grey-haired, grey-bearded, sharp-eyed, articulate and glowing with energy. And much of his energy these days is directed in a diatribe against the destruction of Lake Erie.

In his living room at Elmira, Ont., a few days before coming down to Port Dover, I asked the professor whether, as I had been told, Lake Erie was dead.

"No," Regier replied. He thought about it, waved his hands a couple of times and went on. "When you die," he said, "you will be replaced by billions and billions of living microbes. You will be reorganized in a different form. That is what is happening to Lake Erie.… There is a dead zone occupying perhaps one-quarter of the central basin of the lake. This area is not really dead. We just use the term because the things there are not the things we want there: bacteria and decomposing organisms."

In early summer, the top 15 metres of Lake Erie’s water heats up — it can reach 26°C — while the bottom stays at about 6° to 8°C. The result is that the lake becomes stratified, with the lower layer blocked from the atmosphere and thus cut off from oxygen. Erie’s western basin is too shallow for this stratification, and the eastern basin is deep enough that it does not present so much of a problem. In the central basin, however, plankton dies, sinks and, in rotting, uses up what little oxygen is left. A vast area of the lake bottom — some years as much as half — becomes "anoxic" with less than 0.5 milligrams of oxygen per litre. Most life cannot survive in these conditions, but zebra and quagga mussels can — at least for 24 to 48 hours. Their mucus and feces add to the mess, and the end result is the production of deadly gases in which toxic organisms such as botulinum, a spore-forming bacterium that causes botulism, can thrive.

The dead zone begins to clear in late September after the water at the bottom of the lake warms up and the strati-fication disappears. Such zones will form in any lake under the right conditions, but in Lake Erie, the zone reaches alarming proportions and, it is argued, threatens the ecosystem of the entire lake. To comprehend fully this cheerless news, we need some background.

Writer Walter Stewart lives in Fenelon Falls, Ont. Photographer Wolf Kutnahorsky is based in Toronto.

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