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by Justin Glanville 

For more information about upcoming trips and to learn how to support the Crooked River Commute, please contact David Jurca atdjurca@kent.edu or (216) 357-3438. My kayak’s bow splashes quietly through the river, my knuckles skimming the surface with each paddle. The water feels warmer than I expected, almost welcoming. It doesn’t smell bad, either — just a mild mix of mud and ripe, midsummer leaves. This is a surprise in the infamous Cuyahoga River, once so polluted it caught fire repeatedly. Its last blaze, in 1969, got so much attention it inspired the federal Clean Water Act.

A few yards ahead, a great blue heron launches itself into flight. Its long legs and wings look lazy and graceful at once. “You think that’s the same one we’re seeing over and over?” I ask. David Jurca, Associate Director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) and organizer of the trip, nods. “It’s probably mad we keep scaring it off.” We keep paddling. Conversation has been coming and going like this since we put in near downtown Kent early that morning. It starts and stops like the heron, the silences as comfortable as the talk. It’s sometime in the afternoon now, to judge from the force of the sun. I adjust the brim of my baseball cap to block the strongest rays from the side of my face. 

There are seven of us on the Cuyahoga on a Friday in July. It’s the first day of the first-everCrooked River Commute, a two-day voyage from Kent to downtown Cleveland sponsored by the CUDC, a satellite urban design center of �Ը������� University. The trip is intended to bring attention to the Cuyahoga as the ecological heart of Northeast Ohio — and, despite its history, a viable and safe place to have a little outdoor fun. 

It turns out you can be on this water and survive. Not only that, you can immerse yourself in an alternate and somehow deeper reality, one that removes you from the usual culturally-imposed signifiers of time and place while connecting you to another set of natural ones. So that when you step out of the river 50 miles later, at the southern shore of Lake Erie with Cleveland’s skyscrapers in the background, you feel changed in ways you can’t describe without sounding a little dumb. “I feel like an alien,” I say. “Like, from a spaceship.” Everyone grins, seeming to know exactly what I mean. 

On a map, the Cuyahoga doesn’t make much sense. It runs for 85 miles but drains into Lake Erie only 15 miles further north of its headwaters in Geauga County. This inefficiency is why the Native Americans called the river Cuyahoga — thought to mean “crooked.” It’s also the reason they could use the river to reach both Lake Erie and the Ohio River — via a portage over to the Little Cuyahoga and then the Tuscarawas. To understand how the river ended up looking like this, you have to go back about 20,000 years, to the time of the glaciers. The Cuyahoga got its crazy U-shape from a glacial meltwater combining with more ancient river valleys. Even now, a lot of drama accompanies the two rammed-together sections. At Cuyahoga Falls, the river becomes histrionic, with a waterfall and Class IV (expert-level) rapids dropping some 280 feet. 

The river’s turn also marks a big shift in water quality. Before reaching the metro Akron area, the Cuyahoga is fairly pristine, teeming with fish and smelling of fresh green things. After Akron, things get murkier. Yes, “murky” is a euphemism. Akron still releases about 2 billion gallons of combined untreated sewage and stormwater into the river each year. This mostly occurs during big storm events when the region’s stormwater and wastewater lines mix. (Cleveland is grappling with the same overflow issues, but focusing more on Lake Erie, the eventual destination of its sewage.) 

But it would be oversimplifying to say the Cuyahoga is two rivers. It’s an infinite number, its course and characteristics differing from section to section and day to day. First, there are the widely varying use patterns along the river. The upper Cuyahoga flows through mostly rural Geauga County. Once the river hits Kent, though, industrialization and urbanization intensify in an almost unbroken crescendo. By the time the river outflows into Lake Erie, some 55 miles later, it looks not so much like a natural watercourse as a cog in an awe-inspiring industrial machine. (More on that below.) At all points, you can read what’s happening on the banks above even when you can’t see anything but trees. As we approached Akron, for example, we saw a looming square shape in the water ahead — not a rock, as I’d first assumed, but a mud-caked shopping cart. And yes, we definitely smelled the Akron treatment plant. Perhaps even more disturbing than the smell of the sewage itself was the treated water as it re-entered the river: A hint of laundry detergent on the air, soap-like white bubbles floating on the water’s surface. It begged the question: What exactly do we consider “clean” water? (Learn more about the water reclamation process here.) 

Then there are the whims of weather and nature. For we Crooked River Commuters, the water was particularly low — flowing at about 280 cubic feet per second (cfs) at our put-in point in downtown Kent. By comparison, the river can run close to 1,000 cfs or higher during wet periods. On the positive side, this meant water quality was likely better than normal, as storms lead to sewer overflows. But it also meant our kayak bottoms skimmed the riverbed a lot, slowing our progress. In other places, ordinarily gentle bends in the river moved faster, more unpredictably, more dangerously.