We crossed a river. “That was the well-known Cuyahoga,” she said. “If you swim in it, you dissolve.” The Cuyahoga was flowing south. It rises in northeasternmost Ohio, runs south into Akron, then reverses its direction, swinging north through Cleveland and into Lake Erie. Morewarningsignsflashedby. “STAY AWAKE! STAY ALIVE!” Anita said, ‘Tm trying. I’m trying.” Now spanning the road was an Italianate steel-arch bridge, standing on Berea sandstone, a fragment of the Berea Delta, of early Mississippian age, which had extended its bird-foot shape far into Ohio Bay. We stopped, and picked quartz pebbles the size of golf balls out of a conglomerate there. “These would have been just offshore,” she said. “You can take the pebbles out of the rock with your hands because it was never hated up like the conglomerate at the Delaware Water Gap. This was never buried much. It is not well lithified. It hasn’t experienced enough heat to get tough.” A few miles west, we crossed the Cuyahoga River again, and looked down some distance from the interstate bridge into the Cuyahoga’s extensively reamed-out valley, with its modest, meandering stream. “It’s an underfit stream,” said Anita. “A little half-ass stream in a valley made wide by glacier ice. The co-working space amsterdam Cuyahoga’s valley was steepened and entrenched, like Yosemite.” “You are comparing the Cuyahoga Valley with Yosemite?” “Technically.” We left the interstate and followed the valley into Cleveland.
The Cuyahoga River had suffered a bad press. When it caught fire some years before, it attracted national attention. Its percentage of water had become low relative to its content of hydrogen in various combinations with carbon. The river burned so fiercely that two railroad bridges were nearly destroyed. There was no mention in the papers of the good things the river had done. It had made parks. It had been there before the glacier ice and had cut down five hundred feet through Mississippian formations into Senecan and Chautauquan time-stages of the late Devonian. It cut deep ravines, which the ice later broadened into canyons. The ice augered through the V-shaped valley and turned it co-working space eindhoven into a U. Which is what ice did at Yosemite-with the difference that the walls of Yosemite are speckled white granite, while the canyon walls of Cleveland are flaky black gasiferous anoxic shale. As mud, the shale was deposited in quiet water in a late Devonian sea.