“If the demand is there, you can’t end the supply,” he argued. “You have to think of it in original ways.”
Dan’s proposal didn’t carry the day.
Another hour of hard paddling follows.
My back hurts and I long for the fancy, comfortable kayak of day one. When I eventually long out loud, Dan tosses me a pillow from his pack, which I place over my hard seat. A little while later, when I start waxing poetic about the pillow, he dubs it “Wilson,” after Tom Hanks’ famous cinematic volleyball.15 We don’t talk much but focus on our twin goals of making it down the river and exorcising our hangovers. No one has yet mentioned that it is our country’s birthday.
As we paddle, I search the sky for birds. Last night, when we were crossing Cow Island Pond on our way to the Alehouse I was treated to the site of an osprey hovering above. It was hard to see at first, but its crooked wings gave it away. Dan said it was the first one he’d seen on the river. I resisted any talk about “totem animals” and was happy when he did, too.
While I have more and more respect for Dan as an environmentalist, when it comes to the English language, he isn’t exactly Thoreau or Carson.
“Fuck yeah!” was his response to seeing the osprey.
Which was better than what it might have been. I’ll take “fuck” over mystical oneness any day of the week. And yet, while Dan is all grit and common sense talking policy, he has a pretty romantic way of describing his inspiration.
“Nature tricks you,” he said to me as we paddled. “You fall in love with it and you love it so much that you end up fighting for it.”
It almost sounded chivalrous, as if nature was a maiden and Dan one of her knights. But if that example treads close to the mawkish, I don’t object to his frequent use of the word “vision.” Slap a “quest” at the end of the word and before you know it you’re talking about drumming and fire-walking, and it does tread dangerously close to Robert Bly territory. But in Dan’s case, the word choice seems appropriate. That was what he did after all. He saw what the Charles could return to before other people did, presented others with the picture in his mind, and then, despite all the political fights and setbacks and compromises, he went ahead and made something close to what he had seen manifest itself in the world.
Certainly, that is something important in these compromised, apathetic times. It is, at the very least, a better way of spending one’s time on earth than trading stocks or piling up money. It is—and I hope I can say this in the least Disney-like fashion—a hopeful and inspiring way to be.
We paddle hard through the morning until Donna picks us up at the Silk Mill Dam and whisks us ahead, like a lucky roll of the dice in Chutes and Ladders, skipping the upcoming dam-riddled section of the river. She has brought tubs of coffee, bless her, and I am thinking now that she is not such a bad Sherpa after all.
We climb back into the leaky boat near the Duck Feeding launch, about thirteen miles from downtown, at the beginning of the so-called Lake District. Before long, after two quiet days, we are part of a small American flagwaving armada. We pass a family in a canoe, all four of them wearing Red Sox hats, and Dan calls over to see who won last night. As it turns out, all is right in the world and the Sox have beaten Tampa Bay four to one. Obviously, our wild journey is taking a decidedly social turn. Dan describes what the place was like seventy years ago.
“There was an amusement park, a zoo, and a floating drive-in theater that didn’t make it because everyone was getting nauseated. There were dozens of canoe liveries along the river. And they even had a jail cell where they locked people up for necking.”
He points out that some of that tradition continues as we pass the Charles River Kayak and Canoe Center, which “get hundreds of kids out on river.” While other parts of the Charles sneak through peoples’ backyards, the Lake District is as obvious, open, and friendly as a yellow lab. It continues to get the most passive, non-motorized boating of the whole river.
“One of my driving ideas is to give the locals access,” Dan says as we paddle past Mount Feake Cemetery. “For instance, the Lake district has a long history of ice fishing. A guy pulled out a forty-eight inch, thirty-seven pound northern pike right here in Waltham. But the rules said they couldn’t fish and people got kicked off. I fought to get them permits.”
“Every chance, you need to let people get on the river. Eliminate the rules and regulations. Let people interact. Don’t fence things off.”
There is one thing he doesn’t want to allow on the river, however. As we paddle into the Lake District, Dan points down at one of his time-sworn enemies.
“Water chestnut,” he says. “This shit sucks. One of the most aggressive invasives. It’s an escaped aquarium plant. People think nothing of dumping their fish tanks in the river. It gets spread by the propellers of boats and in birds’ plumage.
“The best thing about native plants is that they bring back native species. I’ve tried to plant native plants, but I really don’t mind invasives as long as they are blending with other plants. Water chestnut is different. It actually threatens the aquatic ecosystem because of the amount of dissolved oxygen it takes in. It decomposes and can threaten fish life and it’s always dangerous if you get caught up in it in a boat. We’ve spent about 650,000 dollars battling it over the last seven or eight years. It’s been a major harvesting program. Luckily, it responds well to mechanical harvesting so you don’t have to use chemicals.”
This stretch of river was deeply influenced by the vision of someone other than Dan. An area of impounded water created in part by the Moody Dam downstream, this water was a celebrated part of Boston life during the early twentieth century, home to Big Band dance halls and thousands of regular canoeists, a great river community center—just the kind of spirit Dan is trying to restore. In fact much of the land that Dan has reclaimed along the Charles was originally purchased for the state in the late nineteenth century by the visionary landscape architect Charles Eliot. Eliot saw the banks of the river as a place for solace from the ever-growing city, and without that original purchase there would have been no hope for the present vision.
In the Lake District, Dan’s is as much a revision as it is a vision. Much of the land that would become his nature corridors and bike paths, and the banks where he would plant his native plants, was already owned by the state, thanks to the efforts of a previous generation of environmental dreamers, including Eliot, over a hundred years before. In 1893, Boston became the first city in the United States to create a metropolitan park system, and part of the early push of the founders of that park system was to purchase, and claim by eminent domain, the green ribbon along the banks of the Charles. Over the years, however, the state ignored its land, and the homeowners and business owners who lived by the river naturally encroached on public land. It would become Dan’s job to pry that land away from them. And of course to convince them that this was a good idea.
As Dan points out, human notions about the river have always had a direct effect on its health. Before Eliot got to work, the Charles was seen as many rivers were at the time: a kind of all-natural sewer system that swept your shit away. In fact, it was an interesting confluence of the most base, practical need—getting rid of one’s crap—and the most high-minded—the evolving ideas of nature as a kind of “cathedral”—that came together in late nineteenth century Boston to form America’s first metropolitan park system and the first public works commissions for sewage and water. Both were founded here within six years of each other, between 1889 and 1893. Born from the practical consideration of getting water to drink and getting rid of waste was the possibility of a more romantic ideal: giving the people in the newly crowded city a place to get away from it all. Eliot led the charge of a group of Brahmin reformers in this first greening of Boston. As Boston historian James C. O’Connell puts it: “This effort was the urban counterpart to the Progressive campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and others to preserve natural wonders and rationally man
age natural resources by creating national parks and national forests.”16
But the river became more than a place to get away; it was a huge social center. On any given day there were three thousand canoes for rent, and the river, formerly a place to dump sewage became a place to congregate, picnic, swim.
Given what we are seeing on July Fourth—dozens of people out on the river in canoes, kayaks, and powerboats—you could be forgiven for thinking that this social tradition has continued unabated from the early twentieth century. But, as O’Connell writes, “When World War II broke out, Boston’s metropolitan parks were at a height of popularity they would never see again.” After the war the rise of the suburbs, and the car, led to a decline in parks, and funding that had once gone toward green space went toward bombs instead.
The result of those decades that followed was that Bostonians lost their rightful access to the river. Businesses put up chain-link fences and built parking lots to the edge of the water. Imagine if you were living in Waltham forty years ago or so and wanted to get a peek at the water. You might have snuck around a fence and slid down a weedy bank, and all the while you’d be feeling that you were doing something not just dangerous but wrong. Guilt would no doubt accompany your desire to see the city’s wet pulse. It would never occur to you that you actually had the legal right to sit there and watch the water.
“Basically, Boston turned its back on the river. Buildings were built as if the river wasn’t there and people started dumping again. The human perception of the river changes with time. Each era has its own river. But the fifties through the seventies was the worst period. Part of the demise of the parks was caused by the rise of the suburbs. The dream of having your own piece of nature with a grill and a car you could wax while you grilled. And that altered the public consciousness toward the public open spaces. So we had a collective force going against the river as open space. Everything contributed. It was a time of industrial pollutants and a time that lacked the concern for coming together that was there in the 1920s and 1930s. Fortunately that need has prevailed and it’s back again. And now on July Fourth, we’re about to paddle into the Mecca of that experience where people are coming together collectively for a huge event. Unfortunately this is a heinous celebration of our war-like ways, but we’ll enjoy it.”
It wasn’t until the late sixties that people, and city planners, kind of started to dimly remember the hidden, watery thing behind their backs. By then the original Metropolitan Park Commission had long since become the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) and, like its name, had taken on a more practical, and less poetic, bent.17 For the next couple of decades the organization that was born of Eliot’s romantic ideas of “nature as cathedral” transformed into a babysitter for softball fields and ice rinks. But with the environmental awakening of the sixties, and the river’s health aided by the Clean Water Act, plans emerged for a return to, and possibly even an expansion of, Eliot’s original vision.
“I came along at the right time,” Dan admits. “The state economy would go in the shitter again soon. But for a minute there, there was some money. And excitement.”
The section that Dan first set out to reclaim is the section that we will be paddling through this afternoon. There the chain-link fences were up, the banks reduced to scrub, the river an afterthought. It was, hands down, the ugliest stretch on the river.
BIRD MEN
We pull over on a small wooded island next to Quinobequin Cove and sit in the shade below a red maple. Sipping on a Long Trail IPA, I reach into my dry pack and pull out a cigar—a Macanudo—while staring out at the water. We feel better, and not just due to the hair of the dog. The sun slices down through the trees and morning’s exertion has lifted the mood. I place Wilson on the roots of the maple and pat him gently before sitting on him while stretching my feet down into the water. Volunteer aspens sway behind us.
For Dan this area is steeped in personal history. Less than a mile, straight across the water, is the house where he lived during the early days of his fight to resuscitate the river.
“That’s where I was when I first fought for the reservation,” he says, pointing his beer bottle toward Ware’s cove. “I moved in there just prior to being assigned this part of the Charles. And that’s really the spot where I had my own rediscovery of the river. That’s when I bought this canoe.”
He looks gratefully at the canoe, perhaps thinking back to its first trips, while realizing this might be its last.
“At first, in those days, I just ran on raw enthusiasm. I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to try and do extraordinary things. I’m glad I was naïve, or I wouldn’t have started in the first place. I had no idea what kind of fight I was in for.”
I ask what it really felt like—during the early years of fighting. I don’t get the feel-good answer I expect.
“It sucked,” he says, shaking his head. “We had written up a master plan for what we called the Middle Charles River Reservation, but almost everyone was against it. The only people who really supported us were Bob Zimmerman and the Charles River Watershed Association. I went to a meeting in Newton, and 130 residents showed up—all angry and all against the plan. Everywhere people were saying that my paths were going to bring crackheads into their neighborhoods. They said if I built paths by the river they would erect an eight-foot chain-link fence. Then a congressman’s office called and tried to stop us. Local officials had told him I was building a motorcycle course on the river, and I had to prove it wasn’t true.
“On top of that I was battling my own people within the state bureaucracy. Early on someone wrote a positive article about me in the newspaper. A co-worker came up to me later and said: ‘That article really hurt you.’ I guess when you work for the state you’re not supposed to stand out. I started to mutter to myself, ‘Someone get me out of this project.’
“Government’s strange. They don’t want you to do extraordinary work. They pull you down if you do extraordinary work. You don’t get credit, and you’re not supposed to get credit. So I don’t ever even try to get credit anymore. And still I get flak for getting too much attention, for standing out. I tell them, ‘You can go to the press events and get all the credit. If you fund it, I will do it and not take any credit. But if you don’t fund me, I’ll keep scrambling and keep doing it the way I’ve been doing it.”
He stares off downstream. It occurs to me that it is the first crack in his optimism I’ve seen in two days. He is quiet for minute before continuing.
“During those times I’d go down to the river a lot. Sometimes in those days I’d smoke a little hit of pot and let the river bring some magic to me, to rejuvenate me and get me re-motivated to go back into that maze of human obstacles to make it happen. After the depressing meeting in Newton I walked out on a bluff above the river. I was angry, sick of it all. Then, while I was staring out, a black-crowned night heron landed on a branch near me. Then another and another until there were twelve or thirteen of them. That rejuvenated and remotivated me to go back into that maze of human obstacles to make it happen. Screw humans, I thought. I’ll do it for the animals.”
He takes a long pull on his beer.
“That lifted me. To tell you the truth the animals were my key to support at the beginning. When I wasn’t getting a lot of human support.”
Corny? God yes. But what does that matter in the face of results? Of course, I love the fact that birds were at the bottom of things. It makes me want to run and find Shellenberger and Nordhaus, wherever they’re hiding, and tell them that this is the way things really work.
Whatever the motivation, Dan kept his birds and mysticism to himself and set about trying to convert both his neighbors and his neighborhood. The mob he’d faced was ugly, but he found that his neighbors, as individuals, were less so. By all accounts it was his affable straightforwardness, as well as his stubborn streak, that allowed him to win over angry residents, like those 130 Newtonians. Often he would seek out the residents by knock
ing on their doors and showing them his plans, inviting them down to the river so he could give them a tour and describe his vision. He did this for three years. And despite the characteristic litigiousness of the American people, the Boston Globe would write: “What is remarkable is not that the MDC finally retook its own land, but that it has resolved the vast majority of the encroachments without a single lawsuit.”18
This was miraculous. People agreeing to give up something they believed was theirs for the common good.
“We kept pushing the idea that the river belonged to the people,” Dan says. “That the people could be its stewards.”
As it turns out, many of those who opposed the idea are now its greatest backers. So far the paths haven’t brought crackheads to Newton. Instead the banks flower with viburnum, berrying shrubs, native blueberries, and white pines, while supporting an ecosystem of increasingly varied animal life: roosting herons, fox, muskrats, white-tailed deer.
I am trying to be hard-headed and practical in the sort of environmentalism I’m putting forth here, but birds keep getting in the way. I like the fact that Dan’s fight was intertwined with birds and in this he doesn’t seem too different than many who fight for the wild.
My Green Manifesto Page 10
