This is just one post in the Weird & Wacky Water News Category

The Delta’s strangest yard sale

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 30, 2008 at 6:37 am

From Stockton’s Record:

Herman Miller, the storied old man who lived on his floating laboratory, teaching bacteria to eat toxic sludge until famously evicted by the feds, called Friday. Though this paper gives Miller an ink truck of coverage, we’d never met. Nevertheless, the peppery old river rat asked me to publicize his yard sale.

“You can’t believe it,” Miller said of his items. “Everything I’ve collected over 40 years. Very large boat hardware. Stuff nobody wants but me.”

Miller directed me to the site of an old creosote plant on the south bank of the Deep Water Channel, a place of Dickensian industrial grit. Near that spot a year ago, Miller tied up his barge, the Merit, grew anaerobic bacteria in vacuum tanks and encouraged the little beasties to eat pollution, his scheme to get rich.

I found him in a weedy waterfront field. He is 83, spry, diminutive, white-bearded. He was also begrimed after hauling all his stuff out of storage and arraying it in the field. “I was just counting anchors,” Miller greeted me. “I think I have six anchors. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Also lots of laboratory equipment. “Everybody thinks I’m an old bastard who lives on the river,” Miller said. “I’m a UOP graduate, an engineer and a scientist.”

It was a lousy day, hot, muggy, the air filled with infernal smoke from distant fires. A perfect day to visit a Superfund site. That’s what the feds declared the creosote-soaked property; why they evicted Miller, after a long-drawn-out battle; why he’s selling off his cumulus.

“They told me, well, move your stuff,” Miller recounted, leading me around. “So I’m trying to sell anything for anything I can get for it.”

Of Miller’s belongings, half have an Ace Hardware usefulness, and half are too obscure to fly off the shelves - unless there’s a mad scientist convention in town.