In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Patrick Wensink’s blend of ecological reporting, history, and memoir make The Great Black Swamp as innovatively told as it is fascinating on many levels.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“With humor and pathos, Wensink weaves his own life into this twisty environmental history, from his farmer ancestors to the dissolution of his marriage. Funny, fascinating, and sneakily profound, this delights.”
In his own words, here is Patrick Wensink’s Book Notes music playlist for his book The Great Black Swamp:
Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and The Most Interesting Place in America Nobody’s Ever Heard Of is part real-life ecological horror story, part memoir about my attraction to all the wrong types of people, and a love-letter to my home, Northwest Ohio—the most overlooked section of an already overlooked state. It primarily tells the story of how 400,000 people in Toledo, OH nearly died in 2014 when Lake Erie turned neon green with toxic algae and their drinking water became as deadly as cyanide. It’s an important story, because this is a problem that now impacts every state and just about every country on Earth. I set out to discover how this happened and what can be done to stop it. Along the way, I discover the fascinating history of my home, which was once known as The Great Black Swamp—a deadly wetland the size of Connecticut that was settled later than some parts of the Everglades due to mud deep enough to swallow a horse, snakes, bears, wolves, and clouds of mosquitoes so thick some people mistook them for smoke. Along the way, I also discover that my marriage was ending, and that the solution to toxic algae and my own heartbreak are strikingly similar.
The book is primarily about ecology, but is chock-full of music—from the time Toledo threatened to murder affable folkie John Denver, to my ’90s adolescence as the only punk rocker in a farm town, to the seriously valuable life lessons I learned in a grunge rock biography. What follows is not a list of swamp rock tracks. There’s no Creedence Clearwater or Jerry Reed for miles. It’s not a list of great rock from Ohio (I’ve done that already. https://largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2015/10/book_notes_patr_9.html ) Rather, it’s a Great Black Swamp-adjacent list. Songs that evoke the vibe of this dangerous, deadly, forgotten wasteland, and the unbelievable story of its deforestation.
John Denver “Saturday Night in Toledo, OH”
“Somebody had better warn John Denver before he ambles into Toledo,” a local reporter warned back in 1973. “That instead of a key to the city, he might just be handed a live grenade.”
On the surface, lovable Muppet-sidekick John Denver has absolutely nothing to do with the story of my corner of Ohio. But like most things I thought I knew about my home, things are a lot more connected than I imagined. Shortly before that furious newspaper article was published, John Denver walked onto Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show stage and sang a tune he’d been opening concerts with lately. It begins with the lyric, “Saturday night in Toledo, OH/Is like being nowhere at all.” From there, he keeps dunking on the city as being pretty much the most boring place he’d ever seen, citing the only fun things to do is watching the buns rise at the bakery.
This level of shit-talking probably felt a little unwarranted. Toledo, seemingly, had done nothing to provoke the good-natured Denver. So, they fought back. That song is offensive as hell to me, and I’m sure it is to the people of this city. It’s disgraceful,” the mayor, Harry Kessler, said publicly. “Boy, am I going singe him. I’ll send that son-of-a-gun a letter he’ll never forget.” Denver quickly cancelled an upcoming concert in Toledo.
When he rescheduled several months later, a funny thing happened. The city didn’t rip up their tickets or burn all Denver’s albums. They did a very midwestern thing: They either got over it, or simply buried those feelings. They shrugged, and smiled, and got back to normal. When Denver played Toledo (on a Saturday night, no less) later in the year, he was welcomed with open arms.
Still, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with toxic algae or a swamp? To be honest, not much. And yet, Great Black Swamp’s first chapter tells a much longer version of the John Denver saga. He never polluted the lake, he never visited the swamp, and frankly he seems like a pretty okay guy from the little I know. But it’s the way Northwest Ohio reacted that is special. If you are from the Midwest, or know any Midwesterners, this reaction to things being hard or weird or shocking feels familiar. The classic shrug and smile and back to normal mentality is what makes us seem so friendly, but it’s also what led to all that toxic algae in 2014. So many things in the region got swept under the rug in order to feel happy and normal, that they eventually became impossible to ignore when the drinking water turned into a 260 trillion gallon margarita-colored lake of poison. Nowhere is this mentality clearer to me than with John Denver in 1973.
“Swampland” by Birthday Party
If you’ve never heard of the Great Black Swamp, that’s okay. I grew up there and barely heard much of a peep about it. I was under the impression that my corner of Ohio was pretty much always perfectly flat and filled with corn. But the Great Black Swamp was probably the meanest, nastiest, deadliest wetland in America during the 18th and 19th centuries. I’m sure someone from the South, with their alligators, will disagree. But we’ll let them.
This is by far the nastiest song on the list, and one that frequently popped into my head while researching and writing. Nick Cave’s post punk outfit The Birthday Party were among the darkest and most extreme bands of the early 1980s, and nowhere is this more perfectly rendered than on “Swampland.” The music is murky and scary, while Cave sounds like he has seen the ugliest sites life has to offer.
He sounds, essentially, like one of the explorers who ventured through The Great Black Swamp. Early explorers vanished frequently. It was said that the tree cover was so dense you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face during the day. One man said he barely knew whether he was in a cave or not, the place was so dark. If you could make your way through, you were wading up to your horse’s saddlebags in mud, watching out for wolves and copperhead snakes and black bears. One early pioneer left a nearby fort and was gone for three days until he accidentally walked into the fort’s walls, at which point he did not recognize his wife or children or even know his name. Future president and Ohio native William Henry Harrison said a couple of trips across the Black Swamp could kill a brigade of packhorses.
This place may have stayed dark and wild if not for New York and Chicago. If you look at a map, those two cities are nearly directly across from one another, except for Northwest Ohio blocking their path. Going through the swamp meant likely death, and going around added over a week to your trip.
The logical thing to do was, of course, build a road. The Great Black Swamp had other ideas.
“Highway to Hell” by AC/DC
For most of the 1800s, the brightest minds in engineering tried to solve the problem of The Great Black Swamp. Once, there was a steam-punk looking train that sawed down trees using steam power, fed the logs into a travelling sawmill behind it, and workers used those to construct trestles and rail ties in order to go over the swamp. This train line sunk into the muck in relatively short time. Next, they tried building a raised boardwalk through the swamp, which failed for much the same reason. Finally, a 31-mile ribbon was of land was cleared through the Great Black Swamp, it was drained as best they could, and The Maumee and Western Reserve Road was born. It was meant to be an American Autobahn that would connect Chicago and New York, and bring civilization to this corner of Ohio.
Instead, it was quite literally a highway to hell. By now, you can guess that the wolves and bears weren’t thrilled by these travelers, and there are several horrific stories of people being chased and attacked by wolves during this time. However, it was the road itself that gave people the hardest time. The road was so muddy that 31 taverns were built along the route, about one per mile because that was about as far as any horse or wagon could travel in a single day. The mud was so thick folktales of both horses and humans were said to have sunk without a trace. One man claimed to have spent his entire life savings repeatedly hiring people to help pull his stuck wagon from the Maumee and Western’s mud.
“Bugs” Bobbie Gentry
Around the end of the 1800s, the Great Black Swamp was drained thanks to an inventor who, according to his autobiography, took advice from imaginary friends sitting on his shoulders. Soon, the process of deforesting a million acres of trees and turning it into productive farm land began. But not before things got ugly again. Early settlers claimed to have to fight off wolves at their cabin doors, even sometimes sticking their snouts through holes in the floor. But the most deadly thing in the Great Black Swamp was one of the smallest things there: mosquitoes. These bugs were seen in massive clouds. Even in the summer, farmers and horses were covered in thick burlap to protect themselves. Around the house, families burned “smudge pots” 24 hours a day. This was a small contraption that looked kind of like a metal watering can, except it was filled with damp coal and would create a cloud of smoke which repelled mosquitoes. The catch was that you had to work in smoke outside and even eat and sleep in the haze while indoors.
Still, malaria rates skyrocketed. This part of the world turned into one of the deadliest places in America. It was so grim here that macabre poems were written about Northwest Ohio and published in newspapers.
While Bobbie Gentry’s classic ode to annoying summer critters is a lot more good natured than what was happening around the Great Black Swamp, its pace and instruments feel claustrophobic to me, almost like we’re trapped in swarm of mosquitoes ourselves.
“The Blob” by the Five Blobs
Fast forward over 100 years. The Great Black Swamp was destroyed and Northwest Ohio dug into the land, becoming an agricultural powerhouse. Maybe because it was so young, or maybe because of its nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, but this part of the state is by far the least known in a place already famous for being a flyover state. It might have gone on that way if not for the 2014 toxic algae event. For three days in August, Lake Erie looked like a Mountain Dew-colored sheet of marble. Elegant green tendrils of the stuff stretched a dozen miles out to sea, about where the town’s drinking water intakes were housed. Reporters stood on the shore highlighting closeup shots of dead fish, and holding up glasses of the stuff, comparing it to kale shakes, pea soup, and even the Wicked Witch of the West’s complexion.
My part of the world was suddenly in the spotlight, but for all the wrong reasons. It was sort of like a joke song. It shouldn’t be something taken seriously, but it is. “The Blob” for example, is not just a song about a menacing green blob threatening all humanity, it’s also a tune penned by one of the most artistic, well-respected, and beloved songwriting teams of the 20th century: Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Famous for writing tunes like “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” to powerhouses like Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer”.
Serious and absurd. Not unlike what was happening to my home. Especially once people realized that all that deforestation of the Great Black Swamp was actually to blame for this toxic mess, and, oddly, the key to potentially fixing it. But that’s another story.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Patrick Wensink’s playlist for his novel Fake Fruit Factory
Patrick Wensink is the author of five books, including the bestseller Broken Piano for President. His journalism appears in the New York Times, Esquire, Salon, Men’s Health, Oxford American and others. He is a professor of Creative Writing and directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University. He was born and raised in Deshler, Ohio.