Wick Allison's worthy acolyte, Tim Rogers, slapped me silly and cleared up a lot of confusion about the manmade lake planned for downtown with his post this morning on the D magazine blog, FrontBurner.
Rogers explained, and I do quote: "The bigger of the two lakes will be something like 800 feet wide. They'll be fed with 50 million gallons of water per day, pumped from the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant (don't worry; it's cleaner than river water). To get floodwaters to the river from downtown, we'll need to bury pipes under the lakes. And, by the way, the lakes will create a reverse flow to the river, such that you'll be able to canoe in a continuous loop, without having to get out and portage."
By the way, that's pronounced por-TAHGE.
O.K., I personally am not up for the part of the continuous canoe loop where you go under the lake in the pipes with the doo-doo water. Thanks all the same, but I'd rather portage.
Or is it that we make a continuous loop by canoodling downstream in the river? Ummm, not this Boy Scout. Mr. Rogers asserts that the doo-doo water from the sewage treatment plant is cleaner than the water in the river. And...yeah! Because the Corps of Engineers has already said the doo-doo water in the river itself most of the year is not safe for human contact. We're talking relative degrees of doo-doo-osity here, which is not my idea of a picnic.
Call me a baby, I don't care, but even with a clothespin on my nose, even in a Hazmat suit, I'm just not doin' it. This whole thing with the underground pipes and the recirculating submarines is starting to remind me too much of the spook house at the State Fair.
But I doo want to thank Mr. Rogers for making me ever so much more optimistic about our wonderful civic adventure. And explaining it so succinctly! Maybe they should change it to DOO magazine. --Jim Schutze
