The Fox

Seven years ago yesterday, I was sitting in the back office of Chicagoland Canoe Base, at 4019 North Narragansett in Chicago, meeting with the venerable Ralph Frese, longtime owner and respected environmentalist and historian.  I had scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the nearby Dunning-Read Conservation Area, a natural area at which I was working in order to complete my internship.  Our meeting was supposed to last an hour or less, but we went off on tangents and ended up talking for nearly four hours.  At one point, Ralph began talking about a project he was involved in during the early 70s, one that has become legendary in the field of local canoeing.  He asked if I was familiar with the re-enactment of the Jolliet-Marquette voyage that was carried out on the tricentennial year of 1973.  I said no, which led to him rolling his eyes slightly.  He huffed, got up, walked to a disorganized bookshelf, and pulled out a box containing a book about the re-enactment.  It was photo-heavy, full of grainy 70s photos of men wearing period clothing, riding and portaging primitive-looking canoes.  As it turns out, it was a pretty big deal at the time.  Ralph had been commissioned to build and supply canoes for the voyage, and it became clear that while talking with him (mostly listening to him), that this was a highlight of Ralph's illustrious career.  Decades later, he was careful not to bend or fold the pages of the book.  And when we had paged through the entire thing, Ralph carefully placed the book back into its commemorative box, and back onto the shelf it went.

Ralph was aware of my internship project and major.  He had pointed out that one of the participants of this reenactment was an old friend of his named Jim Phillips, and asked me if I had ever heard of "The Fox".   I sort of sat with a blank look on my face because I had no clue what he was talking about.  Again slightly miffed, he proceeded to tell me about this Fox.  The Fox was a mysterious character, who, during the late 60s through the early 80s, became an environmental activist after witnessing illegal pollution go unenforced by relatively uninterested rural law enforcement agencies.  He secretly committed acts of nonviolent protest against polluting industries and used the media coverage as fuel to tighten laws governing waste disposal.  Over the course of many years, he was responsible for countless acts of what some consider environmental terrorism - plugging up factory sewage outfalls resulting in backups and damage to equipment, placing caps on smoke stacks, and dumping buckets of ripe road-killed skunks and toxic waste into lobbies of companies he knew were violating pollution standards.  All the while, nobody except for his closest confidants knew the true identity of the Fox.  His calling card was usually a note, signed "Fox", the "O" being a customized logo of a fox head.

When I heard all of this, I knew right away this was someone I wanted to learn more about.  It was my lucky day, since Ralph had copies of The Fox's book, "Raising Kane" for sale in the store.  I bought a copy, and it remains one of the more inspiring books I have.  Had I known that this would be the last time I'd see Ralph, I would have thanked him graciously for his time.  Ralph was a sweet man, but hard-nosed, and I was always trying to play it cool with him.  He was secretly battling cancer, and passed away less than seven months later, on December 10, 2012, at the age of 86.

In early April of this year, the company I work for relocated me to a location in Montgomery, not far from the Fox River.  It occurred to me that I was now working very close to the site of perhaps the Fox's most infamous exploit - the old Dial soap factory on Aucutt Road.  This was the Fox's first foray into direct action activities.  After learning that the toxic soap scum he saw in a nearby creek came from the soap factory, and finding dead animals in and around the creek, he plugged up the sewage outfall several times under the cover of nightfall, causing major backups which eventually caught the attention of authorities.  Today, the factory sits mostly silent, as production was halted last year due to lackluster sales of bar soap.  The surrounding landscape has changed drastically since 1969 - the year the Fox first hit the factory.  In his book, he describes the surrounding area as prairie and woods, but today those areas have mostly been filled in with more industry.  The creek, though, appears to be reasonably clean - at least, there doesn't appear to be "dirty grey soap curds, rancid fats, septic water, and a variety of scented esters", as the Fox had described.  This is due largely to the actions of the Fox.

I've attempted to locate the exact location of the outfall, as well as other spots described in Raising Kane, but haven't been able to.  Of course, these events occurred fifty years ago, and much has changed, so the outfall may not even exist now.  But a lunch break trip to the Little White School Museum in Oswego tipped me off to the existence of a memorial to Jim Phillips and the selfless work he put in to bring awareness to pollution of the Fox River.  This memorial is located at Violet Patch Park, a short stretch of riverside designed for passive recreation.  I decided to head that way to see the memorial on Wednesday, June 26th.

Today, the Fox River, as seen here from a bridge at Violet Patch Park, is much cleaner than it was fifty years ago.

As a testament to the cleanliness of the river, here is a recently deceased example of spike mussel (Elliptio dilatata), an Illinois species of special concern, found at the park.  The presence of this species here is an indicator of the good quality of water it lives in.  Also seen were examples of elktoe  (Alasmidonta marginata) and round pigtoe (Pleurobema coccineum).