First off, I’d like to express my condolences to relatives and friends of Nevaeh Buchanan.  While the community and wider media express sadness in relation to this tragedy, the grief felt by those who knew her must be unbearable.

And while the investigation moves onward, I keep being drawn back to the role that place has in this story.  Monroe is a tight-knit community and we have seen many area residents close ranks in an attempt to help a little girl.  Those in the great Monroe diaspora have been drawn homeward through internet forums, Facebook groups and other media.  And the curious watched as familiar locations ended up on the evening news.

As the search for Nevaeh progressed, I had the growing dread that one of my favorite Monroe natural areas would be marked forever as the child’s resting place.  I even had some concern that I might encounter something unexpected during one of my woodland walks.  This is not a completely unreal possibility.  The Stephen Grant murder case in Detroit involved a local metropark and bodies occasionally wash ashore along Lake Erie.

And it turns out that my fears were not unfounded.  Two fishermen found the body at a popular de facto fishing spot along the River Raisin and Dixon Road.  I first learned of the spot from WXYZ TV in Detroit.  They had a news helicopter above the scene.  I immediately reviewed the video clips and Google Earth to find the spot.

For me, the location is ironic.  I had just completed a story about this very area for the latest edition of Monroe Magazine.  My focus was on good biking routes in Monroe County and I traced a route from the Village of Dundee, along Plank Road, across the Ida-Maybee Road bridge, west along Dixon and then back to Dundee. 

That, of course, is the area in which the body of Nevaeh Buchanan was found.  While researching my story, I even stopped at the fishing spot in question and snapped some photos of the nearby railroad bridge.  It chills me to think that just a few weeks after the photos were taken that someone visited the same location with sinister motivations.

I have some sadness that this spot is now also marked by the tragedy.  It is a beautiful location.  The railroad trestle is historic and majestic.  The River Raisin makes a beautiful turn around the bend just downstream.  Local kayakers launch from the Ida-Maybee bridge for trips to Ellis Library.  Fishermen scout fishing holes along roadways and bridges all along the area.  And Michigan’s first public school – the Bridge School – is located right at the intersection of Ida-Maybee and Dixon.

It is a beautiful place.

But it is also a place of great sadness.  Just a few miles upstream, a marker notes a Potowatomi burial ground.  The intersections of the Saline and Raisin Rivers and Macon Creek marked the location of one of the final Native American settlements in the county.  One can only imagine the sadness of these people as they ultimately left their ancestral homelands for an unknown future elsewhere.

And this is the area of the Comair crash that killed dozens of airline passengers on an icy night more than a decade ago.

And now we have Nevaeh.

It often happens that places of great tragedy become forbidden wastelands.  A home along US-127 just south of Jackson comes immediately to mind.  Two of my former students were killed in front of the house by a drunk driver almost a decade ago.  To honor their memory, large crosses and testimonials were erected.  And while this has helped to continue the memory of two great young men, the home behind the memorials now sits in decay.  It is a chilling and unfortunate sight.

This section of the river will always carry the memory of Nevaeh Buchanan.  Schoolchildren for generations will speak in hushed tones about this bend in the Raisin.  But it is my hope that a day will come in which the majesty of the rail trestle, the beauty of the river’s current and the natural embrace of the river’s bluffs will once again bring peace to visitors rather than grief.

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