The Hanover Park Water Reclamation Plant

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I come across a fair number of things in my work, or even just gadding around the Internet, and not long ago I found out that last week was Infrastructure Week

“Infrastructure Week is a 501c4 non-profit working to educate America’s public about the importance of infrastructure to the nation’s economy, workers, and communities. Since 2013, Infrastructure Week has been led by its Steering Committee – a bipartisan coalition that includes leading business groups, labor unions, and think tanks working to improve America’s infrastructure,” says the organization’s web site.

I sense lobbyists in the background of that statement, the sort who lobby for more spending on infrastructure. There are worse things to lobby for.

The site also told me that there are events associated with Infrastructure Week. Many of them are panel discussions and the like, with little interest except to industry professionals and maybe infrastructure nerds (there have to be some). Then I saw that the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which has seven water reclamation facilities — treating about 450 billion gallons of wastewater each year — was having an open house. Just show up on Saturday morning at one of the facilities and you can look around.

The closest to where we live is the Hanover Park Water Reclamation Plant. The plant is on a large piece of land, 289 acres, and has 12 buildings, plus wells and large storm retention reservoirs, yet is remarkably inconspicuous even in the thick of the northwestern suburbs, set back from major roads and completely enclosed by tall fencing.

Yuriko and I went at 10 on Saturday; our daughters were still asleep, and didn’t want to be wakened for mere infrastructure. The facility’s usual closed gates were open when we got there. The main building looks exactly like what it is, part of an industrial complex developed in the early 1960s, just when the suburbs were coming out this way.
At some point, I suspect, “Sewage Treatment Works” was deemed unseemly, so it became a Water Reclamation Plant, but the old name remained carved over the door.

First we watched a short video about the plant and its various operations, including efforts in sustainability, and then one of the staff showed us around. There were eight visitors all together when we were there, including us, so overcrowding wasn’t an issue. Infrastructure doesn’t pack ’em in.

The sewage is pumped from the sewer up to a series of treatment pools that cascade downward, letting gravity take the water through the successive steps. Large objects and then smaller particles are removed in various ways, and microorganisms that eat the waste are introduced.

In this way, the plant treats an average of 12 million gallons a day, with a maximum capacity of 22 million gallons. During periods of heavy rain, it comes close to that, and occasionally the facility can’t keep up. The guide said that during the heavy rains of September 2008, sand bags had to be used to protect the plant buildings from flooding.

The water reclamation district says: “Water entering Hanover Park WRP passes through coarse screens to filter out large debris, followed by pumping and primary settling, which includes further screening, grit removal and separation of solids from the water in which aerated grit tanks and settling tanks remove fats and oils.”

The primary settling tanks were the only ones that smelled bad. A slight whiff of human fecal odor hung in the air, just enough to notice. Elsewhere, there was little smell, except chlorine near where that is introduced to the water (before the water is released, the chlorine is neutralized).

“In secondary treatment, microorganisms remove organic material from the water as oxygen is pumped into aeration tanks,” the district continues: “Solids then settle at the bottom and clean water flows out the top of additional settling tanks.

“After passing through primary and secondary treatment, the treated water at Hanover Park passes through sand filters and is then disinfected using chlorination and de-chlorination. Clean water that has passed through the Hanover Park WRP treatment processes is released from the Hanover Park WRP into the DuPage River. It only takes 12 hours for wastewater to be converted from raw sewage to clean water.”

The sand filters are in a large, long shed of a building. According to the guide, the filters were the first of their kind to go into service, ca. 1971, and it was considered so important that President Nixon came to the dedication. Might have been during the run up to the passage of the Clean Water Act.

As far as I could tell from the description, a sand filter is exactly what it sounds like. Water leeching through sand to remove even more particles. It might have been state-of-art 45 years ago, but the sand filters are going to be phased out soon for newer tech, the name of which I forget.

At the end of the visit, we picked up some water reclamation souvenirs that the district was giving away. Including postcards!

Also, 40-lb. bags of compost that the plant makes. Remarkably, most of the plant’s solid wastes (sludge) eventually goes to fertilize a farm — which is on site.

“In 1969, the MWRD purchased the Fischer farm (200 acres adjacent to the Hanover Park WRP) and built the Upper DuPage reservoir, which holds about 75 million gallons of stormwater overflow. The farmland also includes 100 acres for growing corn and soybeans… The harvested corn and soybeans are used for feedstock, ethanol and biodiesel.”

Glad to see this bit of infrastructure. I’m all for visiting more conventional sites, which should be obvious. Infrastructure’s worth seeing, too, if only to remind me occasionally of the massive machines and systems in motion out there, all essential to our health and comfort but unnoticed unless something goes badly wrong, and all put together by us clever apes.

Wat Phra Kaew

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Today I looked up the etymology of wat, the sort of Buddhist temple you find in Thailand. Here’s the brief word origin offered by Merriam-Webster online: Siamese, from Sanskrit vāṭa, enclosed ground.

Makes sense. We visited a number of wats in Thailand, especially in Bangkok, where large ones are thick on the ground. Wat Phra Kaew, home of the Emerald Buddha, holds the prime place of honor among the Thais. We visited the complex, which is part of the larger Grand Palace, on May 26, 1994.

Some features stood out right away. This is the Phra Si Ratana Chedi at the wat.

Bangkokforvistors says: “The chedi essentially balances the structures on the upper terrace, but it also recalls the monumental pagodas of the old capital in Ayutthaya… The chedi houses a piece of the Buddha’s breastbone.”

The Chapel of the Emerald Buddha is in the background here.
I made no image of the Emerald Buddha, since I believe that wasn’t permitted. Tourists were allowed in to see the statue, which isn’t sizable, but is definitely elegant, and with an aura of history about it.

The Phra Mondop, or the library, which is not open to casual visitors.

The Wiharn Yod, a prayer hall.

“The wiharn is unique in its Greek cross plan and its Chinese porcelain decoration,” Bangkokforvistors says.

The following are other images I can’t quite pinpoint, but which were in the enclosed ground of Wat Phra Kaew.

Thinking back on it, I have an overall impression of heat and gilding and mirror tiles and heat and intricate but unfamiliar iconography and heat. The time to have gone might have been when the wat opened first thing in the morning, but we weren’t always as energetic as necessary for early-morning tourism in the tropics. Yet sometimes we were.

Curious about more recent tourist experiences at Wat Phra Kaew, I took a look at Trip Advisor. Most visitors rate it highly, which is fitting. But the low-raters point to changes since we were there.

For one thing, it’s now 500 baht to get in. About $15.50 these days. I’m certain we didn’t pay anything close to that much, making it an example of gouging tourists at supposed must-see places.

Also, tourism within Asia has changed somewhat since the 1990s, if Guimo68 from Miami is to be believed. That is, the Chinese are showing up in force (all sic): “Filled with chinese tourists trying to cut in front of you. I had fun trying to cut in front of them, so 2 stars… The whole experience is like trying to see the mona lisa. Too many rude and loud Chinese.”

Then again, there’s no pleasing some people, such as SophieLoveOz of Ellenborough, Australia (all sic): “I was so excited about the Emerald Buddha but was really disappointed as it is teeny tiny and way up high on a high stupa so can’t see it. It is Jade not Emerald, according to our guide. So many beautiful Golden Buddhas elsewhere.”

The Swamp

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The following is the kind of color I want from history books, not the kind of experience I want for myself:

April 12: Did nothing but send off express to Fort Deynaud at 4 a.m. and mourn my existence the rest of the day. Mosquitoes perfectly awful.
April 13: No peace from mosquitoes… Stayed up all night… Mosquitoes awful. 1,000,000,000 of them.
April 18: Mosquitoes worse than ever. They make life a burden.
April 19: I am perfectly exhausted by the heat and eaten up by the mosquitoes… They are perfectly intolerable.

The time: 1856. The place: Florida, during the Third Seminole War. Pre-DEET Florida. The writer: Alexander Webb, with the U.S. Army at the time. He survived the mosquitoes (not everyone did), was later a hero at Gettysburg and died in 1911.

The diary extract is quoted in The Swamp by Michael Grunwald (2006). Subtitled “The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise,” it’s a history of human interaction with the Everglades, and an interesting book with a large cast: Calusa Indians, Ponce de Leon, Andrew Jackson, the Seminoles, James Gadsden, Osceola, competing Florida Reconstruction governors Gleason and Reed, land speculator Hamilton Disston, John James Audubon, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and Henry Flagler. That’s just up to the 20th century, when the only organization up to the task of draining much of the Everglades came to the fore: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Of course, draining or otherwise modifying the Everglades is now universally regarded as a mistake, and a remediation as slow as the Everglades is under way.

Early on, Grunwald pointed out that large parts of the ecosystem are actually marshes, with only some counting as swamp, but never mind. The Swamp it is.

Then it occurred to me that “drain the swamp” is an ossified metaphor. No one in the developed world advocates draining real swamps any more. We want more wetlands. As usual, language is a laggard. But that’s not always a bad thing.

New Library in the Neighborhood

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A Little Free Library has appeared on my block. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there a few days ago, the last time I walked by. Dog walking usually takes me by that front yard.

Today I took a moment to look into the new Little Free Library. Looks like the family that put it up stocked it, for now, with children’s books that their daughters no longer want. I know them slightly: husband, wife, two daughters younger than mine, but not little kids any more. And a dog smaller than mine. Sometimes they sniff each other through the back yard fence.

I’ll have to contribute a volume or two, to be neighborly. Right now, though, I’m looking for my copy of The Right Stuff. Wonderful book. I read it again last year, after first reading it ca. 1991. Now I want to re-read a favorite part, about the trials of Enos the space chimp.

Recent Sounds

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I take my digital audio recorder some places that I go — I’m resisting the temptation to call it a “tape recorder” — and sometimes to step outside the door and record the ambient sounds.

Such as outside my mother’s house in San Antonio last month. The birds were a lot livelier than in the cold Illinois I’d left, and the selection of birdsong somewhat different, though I can’t pinpoint the exact differences.

In Marathon, Texas, late last month the wind blew much of the night and into the morning one day. I captured 20 seconds of it, but it went on without much pause for hours.

The spring rainstorms in northern Illinois have been numerous and loud recently. This is what I heard from my front porch about 24 hours ago.

The rain had stopped by the morning and the sun dried up a lot of the puddles today. But not everywhere. The back yard is still marshy.

Sure Signs of Spring

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Not long ago, a colorful lawn care truck showed up on my street.

The driver had work to do that didn’t involve my lawn, which in this image is my own modest field of cloth of gold. Imagine if no one poisoned their dandelions: the suburban lawns would burst out glorious gold and then white for a couple of weeks in the spring.

Also in our front yard, perched atop a nest built on one of our exterior lights: a robin.
These cool days lately she’s been sitting on her eggs constantly. I assume there are eggs there. I won’t disturb the nest to find out.

The duck that nested two years ago in the back yard never has returned. The robin nesting on the basketball hoop that year might be the same one in a new location, though who’s to know? I’m glad to see the robin this year anyway.

Sightseeing at the Jetties Cafe 60-Odd Years Ago

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Here’s a postcard I acquired at a Missouri antique mall not long ago. To judge by the automobiles in the image, early to mid-1950s.

The image doesn’t seem odd, not at first, but the caption on the other side tells a different story:

“Aliens who have entered the United States illegally are being returned to Mexico on this ship passing the Jetties Cafe on Padre Island, Port Isabel, Tex. Usually a smaller boat follows the ship to pick up aliens who prefer to ‘jump ship’ before it clears the channel.”

As postcard subjects go, that’s one of the odder ones I’ve seen. A casual scene of mass deportation. Maybe it was a strange card even 60+ years ago. Or maybe it counted as topical, referring to a not-well-remembered action by the Eisenhower administration.

The publisher was Frank Whaley Post Cards of McAllen, Texas, and this card is numbered FW-457. A casual look reveals that he seemed to specialize in South Texas. Apparently he was successful enough to own a couple of postcard vans.

Trans-Pecos & Llano Estacado 3,600+ Mile Drive Tidbits

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Along U.S. 90, not far west of the town of Comstock, Texas, the road crosses the Pecos River. The east end of the bridge has a place to stop and take in the view. This is looking upriver.

Downriver, toward the Pecos’ meeting with the Rio Grande.

Hard to believe there’s that much water in West Texas. Anyway, the river (of course) marks the beginning of the Trans-Pecos.

One of the grand hospitality properties of the Trans-Pecos is the Gage Hotel in Marathon, originally developed in 1927 by West Texas cattle baron Alfred Gage (born in Vermont), and designed by El Paso architect Henry Trost. Fifty years later, Houston businessman J.P. Bryan bought the rundown property and made it into a modern boutique hotel.

I didn’t stay at the Gage, though I had a good meal there and used its wifi. Instead, I stayed at the Marathon Motel & RV Park down the road. It has all the charms of a tourist court — separate cabin-like buildings of two or four units, even a bottle opener fixed to the wall — at a more modest price than the Gage.

There is an astronomy enthusiast at the Marathon Motel in the evenings, Bob, who sets up a couple of sophisticated telescopes a short walk outside the property and shows guests the night sky, which is pretty dark out in Marathon. I spent about an hour talking with Bob and looking his scopes the first night I was there.

Trouble was, the Moon was waxing gibbous, which made the sky a lot less dark. But we looked at some easy-to-find brighter objects, such as Jupiter and some of the Galilean moons, as well as Mizar and Alcor, and tried to spot the Orion Nebula. Orion was trending toward the horizon, about to bid adieu for the warm months.

Bob said the sky would be dark again a few hours before dawn, but I didn’t get up at that time until the last morning I was at the motel. At about 5 that morning, I woke (for the usual reason), but also got dressed and wandered outside for a few minutes. Bob was right. The Moon was gone, and there was what I wanted to see, no telescope necessary — the wispy, luminous edge of the Milky Way, billions and billions of stars at a glance. It was like seeing an old friend.

Speaking of nighttime spectres, not long after I left Marfa, I stopped along U.S. 67/90 at the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center, which is essentially a rest stop with extra windows in the wall.

I wasn’t about to come that way at night and wait around for a glimpse of a desert will-o’-the-wisp, so I had to be satisfied with a daytime view of the direction of the Marfa lights. Eh.

While driving along I-20 in metro Midland-Odessa, I saw an official highway sign for the Midland International Air & Space Port. What? Space port? Seems a little optimistic on the part of the local airport authority.

Indeed, in 2014 the FAA approved the airport’s application to become first primary commercial service airport to be certified as a spaceport. XCOR Aerospace was due to start flying its Lynx spaceplane from Midland, but the company went bankrupt in 2017 before that ever happened. Oops. Maybe Fireball XL5 will start using Midland International soon. (That theme song has more traction than I realized. Even Neil Gaiman did a cover; once, anyway.)

In Amarillo, I saw another kind of sign. Fake street signs. I was driving along I forget which street, and saw a diamond-shaped sign, off to the side of the road but actually on private property, that said WE CALLED HIM COUNT DRACULA. It was a non-standard color, too: black with red letters.

Huh? But I had driving to do, and other cars not to hit, so the thought passed. Sometime later, I saw another sign — different color, similarly located — that said MINE BY RIGHT OF CONQUEST.

This got me to wondering, and I actually remembered to look into these odd signs. Doesn’t take long to find image collections of the signs, which are all over Amarillo, apparently.

According to Roadtrippers Chronicles — “The Raddest Stories From The Road” — “the strange signs are part of an art installation called The Dynamite Museum. Partially funded by oil heir and patron of offbeat art Stanley Marsh 3 (most famous for his work with Ant Farm on Cadillac Ranch), there are even a few in the nearby town of Adrian (it’s said that Marsh liked the idea of putting the signs in towns that started with the letter A).

“There was no rhyme or reason to the messages on the signs; the people behind the project would come up with ideas, or vote on suggestions sent in, and then install their favorites all over town.”

If I’d known that before I went to Amarillo, I would have looked for more.

The morning I left Amarillo, I had the radio to keep me company on the open road to Oklahoma City (I-40 in our time), and for a while I got a strong signal from Turkey, Texas, to the south. That day was Bob Wills Day in Turkey, and it sounded like a big to-do. The biggest shindig of the year for the town, probably. After all, Bob Wills is still the king.

I didn’t know until I looked it up that the King of Western Swing spent some of his youth on a farm near Turkey. The town of Turkey clearly remembers him. Sounded like fun, but it was too far out of the way. Just another thing missed because of scheduling.

Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

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When leaving Illinois via I-55 in mid-April, I considered stopping for a look at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which is still in Illinois, but within sight of St. Louis. We stopped there in 2000, I think, when we spent time in St. Louis and Hannibal, Mo.

But we didn’t get far into the place that time — barely beyond the visitors center and museum. Mostly Cahokia is an outdoor attraction. Back in 2000, it was November, and the weather was crummy. We also had a three-year-old in tow.

So I’ve been meaning to stop again for a while. But in mid-April this year, the weather was as crummy as any November day, so I drove on. I figured I might catch it on the return about two weeks later, when the weather might be better.

So it was. On April 29 I stopped at Cahokia to wander around the grounds and try to imagine the long-gone inhabitants of a city so prominent in pre-Columbian North America that it’s now a World Heritage Site.

There isn’t much visible to go on. Fields, trees and non-natural mounds. Most of the importance of the site is invisible.

UNESCO says that Cahokia “was occupied primarily during the Mississippian period (800–1400), when it covered nearly 1,600 ha and included some 120 mounds. It is a striking example of a complex chiefdom society, with many satellite mound centres and numerous outlying hamlets and villages. This agricultural society may have had a population of 10–20,000 at its peak between 1050 and 1150.”

A road cuts through the site, and on the other side of the road from many of the mounds and the visitors center is the centerpiece of Cahokia: Monks Mound.
At this distance, it’s hard to tell, but those are stairs with people climbing them. Monks Mound, at about 100 feet high, and 955 feet by 755 feet at the base, is the largest Pre-Columbian earthwork in the Americas, and the largest pyramid north of Mexico. Clearly the Mississippian-culture Indians were determined to build the thing, since they’re presumed to have built it over some centuries using baskets to move soil and clay.

The least I could do was climb to the top. The view’s a good one. Note St. Louis off in the distance, including just-visible the Gateway Arch (which is more clearly visible with your eyes).

The opposite direction, into the flatness of Illinois.

The top of the mound itself is fairly flat, though I understand the archaeologists have discovered a number of subtle gradations up there, and found evidence of a large building toward the back of the mound. That’s assumed to be a chiefly or priestly residence, which would be consistent with most human behavior in most places, but the Cahokians aren’t around to tell us.

Another mystery: why did they leave? Cahokia was abandoned long before Europeans came this way, or even European diseases, so it wasn’t that. Climate change? Their own plague? Other Native Americans driving them away? I believe archaeologists’ answers to the question boil down to, Dunno. Go figure.

Three West Texas Cemeteries

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Heading out from San Antonio on U.S. 90, I considered a stop in Uvalde, Texas, to see the Briscoe-Garner Museum. Briscoe, as in Dolph Briscoe, 41st governor of Texas (in the 1970s, so I remember him), whose family owned 560,000 acres of Texas land not long after his death in 2010. That’s about 875 square miles, or about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, and not a lot smaller than the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Garner, as in Cactus Jack Garner, 39th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and 32nd Vice President of the United States, who famously said the vice presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss.” Especially when you end up at odds with your president. So far he’s the longest-lived vice president or president in United States history, and, as some anonymous writer at Wiki points out, had the distinction of living during the presidencies of both Johnsons: Andrew and Lyndon.

Enough there for a pretty good museum, I’d say. But as I stopped at a rest area along U.S. 90, I did a little more checking and found that the museum is closed on Mondays.

So I decided to drop by Uvalde Cemetery and find Garner’s grave. It’s a large burial ground, marked by some trees and greenery, but not overly garden-like.

Still, I figured I could find Garner. There would probably be flag poles near him. So there were.

Here’s the grave of John Nance Garner and his wife Marietta Rheiner Garner. Imagine that, he was a fully grown man at the turn of the 20th century, and yet lived to see men travel into space.

How many vice presidential graves have I seen? That is, the resting places of men who were never also president? Only one other that I can think of. I got a look from some distance at the stone of John C. Calhoun in Charleston. I need to seek more of them out.

In Fort Davis, Texas, after visiting the National Historic Site of that name, I dropped by the Jeff Davis County Library to check my email, and found it to be a fine adaptive reuse of a late 19th-, early 20-century building complex that had once been a general store, post office, an early telephone exchange and other things.

Just off Texas 118 in Fort Davis is a sign that says Pioneer Cemetery. I had to take a look at that. A narrow path, completely surrounded by the kind of diamond wire-mesh fence that you might see in any suburb, led to the cemetery gate. That was the only entrance that I saw, and otherwise the cemetery grounds were surrounded by fenced-off private houses. That felt a little odd at first, but soon I got used to it.

Like the region, the cemetery is sparsely settled.

But there are a few headstones and fenced-off plots.
One old soldier that I could see, Joseph Granger, CSA.

According to the plaque at the entrance, the cemetery was active from the 1870s to 1914, which also says that immigrants named Dutchover are buried here, along with a madwoman and a couple of horse thieves. Sounds like a motley mix of pioneers, all right. Here are some Dutchovers.

Marfa, Texas, famed among the glitterati these days, still looks a lot like a small West Texas town, though with galleries, tony hotels and Manhattan-priced shops thrown in the mix. Unfortunately, after visiting the McDonald Observatory and Fort Davis, I didn’t have the time or energy to visit the sizable Chinati Foundation in Marfa, which I’m sure is a worthwhile destination.

I did look around at some other spots. The Presidio County Courthouse is handsome, for one thing.

The Hotel Paisano is decidedly handsome, too.
Before I left Marfa, I stopped at Cementerio de la Merced, a desert cemetery with a mix of wooden markers and more formal stones. Bet not many of the glitterati pause there to pay their respects.

The names on the graves are largely, but not completely, Hispanic in origin. Not far away, but separated by a fence, was a graveyard mostly of formal stones, and Anglo names.

Marfa Public Radio had this to say: “One cemetery is known as the Anglo cemetery. The other two — Cementerio de la Merced and the Marfa Catholic cemetery — are Hispanic…

” ‘Well, it was not legally segregated, but it was segregated by custom,’ says historian Lonn Taylor, a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC…

“In this part of Texas, Hispanics hold many key political offices. Yet a visible reminder of historic inequality are the cemeteries, where in death, people remain divided.”