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Ask me about the Ottawa River and I’ll tell you about a guy named Jeff Wander.

And the rocks thrown at him because he was doing his job.

Jeff is an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency employee. I met him shortly after moving to Toledo in 1993, when he was plying Ohio’s most polluted river for water samples that his bosses needed to document the obvious.

“Get your head down,” Jeff told me one day as we approached the old Jeep plant by boat.

Rocks, he explained, had been thrown at him from the Jeep parking lot in the past.

None came our way that day nor on a subsequent trip. But we got an eerie feeling from a couple of menacing stares.

“Looking for that pollution, are ya?” mocked an old guy as he gazed down at us from a bridge.

What sticks with me nearly 16 years later isn’t my fear of flying objects or the harassment of a state employee.

It’s the mind-numbing stupidity that got us into this situation. The sheer animosity some people have for fixing what’s wrong.

The Ottawa is a case study of how not to treat nature. People used it as an industrial sewer for decades.

At least 20 landfills were built along it. Legend has it that so-called “midnight haulers” dumped God-knows-what into them — or straight into the river — after dark.

Millions of dollars have been spent to curb the chemical waste coming out of the former Dura Avenue, Tyler Street, and Stickney Avenue dumps. More needs to be done.

The water quality’s slowly improving, but tumors and other signs of ill health are found in the river’s meager fish population. It will likely be years before the state health department even says it’s OK to make body contact with the water again, let alone giving the green light to fish from it.

Mayor Carty Finkbeiner last month described the Ottawa’s filth as “unfortunate remnants of our manufacturing and industrial past.”

So what’s driving the two-year, $43 million dredging project that begins this spring?

Call it a coincidence, but in June, 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began wielding its power under a federal act for natural resources to “determine whether compensation [from polluters] is due the public.”

That same summer, a $50 million dredging project east of here was completed. It was the region’s largest under the Great Lakes Legacy Act that Congress created in 2002 to remove polluted sediment.

The Ashtabula River, a Lake Erie tributary once thought to be in worse shape than the Ottawa, is the only other site in Ohio where such funds have been used.

By following the Ashtabula model, a local consortium put together a winning proposal for the Ottawa.

It got a 50/50 cost-share. In other Legacy Act projects, the U.S. EPA picked up 65 percent of the tab.

No matter. The work is finally getting done, with surprisingly little impact on the city’s budget.

Sure, councilmen nit-pick over the value of land they’re devoting from the city’s Hoffman Road landfill for burying 250,000 cubic yards of dredged sediment — roughly enough to take up one of the landfill’s 31 remaining years of capacity by itself.

They’re swapping $5.6 million of land for $4 million in cash the city doesn’t have.

So what? Teach a few more people how to recycle and call it even.

The Ottawa’s in the shape it’s in because nobody valued it decades ago.

What it means as a Lake Erie tributary. What it means to our social, economic, and even our psychological well-being.

If they had, they probably wouldn’t have used the river as an industrial sewer.

Or thrown rocks at state employees trying to find out just how sick it was.

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