Gary Kuzminski was out hunting in the woods near Lansing for morel mushrooms last week when he came across an unexpected find along the banks of a shallow creek.
“I was walking along the bank and saw some cracked shells,” he said. “I was like, ‘you idiots, why are you throwing your seafood bags out of your cars into the river!’
“Then I walked another 10 feet and there’s another shell, and another shell, and another shell.”
A bit further downstream, he saw animal tracks leading from a shell to the water.
“Raccoons were pulling these things out of the water,” Kuzminski said. “I was like, my god, there are clams in here! It was the first time I’d ever seen that.”
He posted about his find on social media, causing a bit of a stir.
The reason he and most others haven’t run into native clams around the Chicago area is freshwater mussels “may be the most endangered group of animals in North America,” according to the Illinois Natural History Survey. Over the last 100 years, the state agency said, many species once common in Illinois have been drastically reduced or are gone from the state altogether. Some are globally extinct.
“I didn’t realize the significance, and I didn’t know anyone would be interested in a clam, let alone the shell of a clam,” he said.
Kuzminski shot some photos that have been sent to experts for analysis, and tried to identify them himself using field guides. He thinks one of the species he stumbled upon might be a state endangered variety.
That kind of discovery is just one of the benefits of getting out into the nature, he said, and exploring the environment, no matter what that environment entails.
A Dolton native, Kuzminski grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s playing near the Little Calumet River and adjoining industrial properties, “swimming in the creek and coming out with orange underwear,” he said.
“We’d play in the abandoned factories and silos that nature was taking over, like “Planet of the Apes” style,” he said. That was our playground. My folks never knew it or they would have had a heart attack.”
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After outgrowing his childhood love of exploration, he moved to the city, “trying to escape the shadow of growing up in the Calumet region and becoming a Chicago boy.” He helped start Reactor magazine, chronicling the early rave music scene in the city, and worked in concert promotion and poster design. He started a website devoted to independent music and “poking the bear” of big record companies, and taught at Columbia College before becoming marketing director of the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival.
“I had some pretty amazing experiences and the privilege of putting on things I could only dream of,” he said. “Now I’m back, an artist guy walking the woods, popping on some skis and trying to enjoy a full moon next to some tributary of some vestige of the Calumet River.”
He moved back to his family’s home, now in South Holland, to help with care taking, which, in turn, led him back to the woods, where he takes long sojourns every time he feels the need to escape.
One of his favorite spots isn’t far from his home, in Cook County Forest Preserve woods north of Wampum Lake between Lansing and Thornton. Known as the old Hoxie property after a rancher who owned the land in the late 1800s, it’s bounded by the Tri-State Tollway and some railroad tracks and includes an old graveyard that contains the remains of victims of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, he said. It’s also in the vicinity of the Hoxie Site archaeological dig that investigated a Native American village from a thousand years ago.
“That area has a lot of soul,” he said, “and you can feel it. It’s really thick. It’s cut off. There’s no real access road to it, and you have to know how to get in there. It’s my own private Idaho.”
He goes there several times a week, to see how the landscape gradually changes with the seasons, or sometimes just to check in on the May apple plants that line the forest floor.
“It’s a way to decompress, especially now, this past year,” Kuzminski said. “And it helps put me into a proper place in the greater timeline of things. You’re sitting here in a colony of May apples that could be older than the founding of the country itself. … It’s pretty humbling. If you go there with your troubles, it puts things into perspective.
“This is a place where in the worst of times I could come to recenter.”
Long a backwoods camper, Kuzminski usually reserved his adventures to more notable places, such as an extended stay in the Florida Everglades or exploration of the area around VaIl, Colorado, while there on film festival business.
After getting back from his Everglades trip, he decided to take a kayak out onto the Little Calumet River.
“All of a sudden, I’m seeing herons and hawks and eagles and all these things like I did in the Everglades, and I said ‘Wait, what is this?’ Why didn’t anyone tell me this is here right in my own backyard?”
But what makes the Calumet region unique, he said, is the juxtaposition of nature and Rust Belt remnants of 20th century industry.
“I wanted to get involved to learn more about the state of where we are living, the shadow of this postindustrial, apocalyptic, weird patchwork of toxic waste dumps next to prairie and wetlands.”
One of the signature Calumet places he’s found is Fay’s Point in Blue Island, where he often puts in for kayaking, at the confluence of the Little Calumet, Calumet River and Cal Sag Channel.
“What’s neat is you can decide what adventure you want to have,” he said. “If you want to look at the deer and raccoon and wildlife, you can do the idyllic paddle and go toward Kickapoo (Meadows Forest Preserve down the Little Calumet). Or you can decide to go into the postindustrial apocalypse and do the Calumet River. Or you can do the Cal Sag.”
It’s an interesting place to explore, he said, and he’s trying to get the word out. On cross-country skiing forums, he discusses his local adventures amid similar discussions of forays into the Swiss Alps or volcanoes of Iceland.
“I’m sharing my tales of skiing US Steel South Works, and they were all intrigued by what I ‘m doing,” Kuzminski said. “I’m not putting up decay porn, I’m giving them the whole back story.
“I would love to see people embrace urban exploration a little more than just documenting decay porn — getting out there and learning the story of that land and the history, because there’s a lot there. There’s a lot of soul on that land. The roots run deep.”
Be it in his kayak or on skis or just hiking a trail adjacent to Thorn Creek, the southeast suburban waterways seem to be at the center of most of Kuzminski’s adventures.
Not only are they a link to nature, they’re a link to the world, and all of time itself.
“There was a time I was on Thorn Creek between South Holland and Harvey, and some young kid looks over the bridge as I’m going under, and said ‘How far does this thing go?’ It depends. Do you want to go to New Orleans or do you want to go to Europe?
“I said it flippantly, but it dawned on me you can navigate anywhere. This can go through to the St. Lawrence Seaway, or to the Gulf of Mexico. While it’s local, it opens up the world, which is how we used it to begin with, whether by us or by clams spawning their larvae for fish to carry downstream. It’s pretty cool.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].