For years I would camp out on conservation land near the bluff on Cape Cod and walk along the shore. One of the joys of that solstice walk was the way it always united the non-human and human wild: a mile up the beach from where I camped I could see the flames of a fire, the Day family’s annual solstice bonfire. The first year I’d done the walk on solstice, over a decade before, I’d stumbled upon their fire, a cocktail party appearing right in the middle of a nature walk. In the years after, stopping there became a tradition. I would interrupt my trek to drink the Day family beer and eat their steamers and roast their marshmallows, and to learn who had died, who had married, who had been born. Afterward I would always stumble back to my tent in the dunes, all the better for the human contact.
A few years ago I moved to the South and felt a deep pain at being separated from the place I cared most about. But the pain has lessened as I’ve sought out old rituals in my new place. Last June I spent solstice on an island called Masonboro, a half-hour paddle from my new house. It was one of the first times I felt truly at home in my new world. I sat on the beach and looked toward the west, toward sunset, toward where my wife and daughter slept. As I say, I’m no wild man but I felt pretty wild that night. And pretty joyful. I drank a beer, cold from the small cooler I packed in the hold of the kayak, and glanced at the sun going down, figuring twenty minutes left of the long day. But I didn’t care—at the moment I was more interested in the sea oats waving in front of me, still months from the husky brown of fall, looking green and fecund as an early summer wheat field. I got up and headed from the marsh side of the island to the ocean, a trip that at high tide takes all of two minutes. Now I walked along the flat hard sand near the water, still able to see the flooded marshes but kept immediate company by the ocean, walking to the rhythm of its beautiful, monotonous roar and slide.
The Atlantic may not be the most romantic of oceans, but it’s the ocean I know best and have known from the beginning. I passed the charred remains of a fire and thought that I might or might not make my own solstice fire. Whether or not I did, I knew I’d likely have a less than comfortable sleep on the sand. But sleep wasn’t the point of being here. This walk was. The fact that I was noticing the mobs of dragonflies that hovered in clouds above the elder bushes. The fact that I had seen oystercatchers and black skimmers on the paddle over and an osprey with a huge fish dangling from its talons. The fact that I would still get a swim in before I circled back to the tent to eat the turkey sandwich I’d made earlier. The fact that though I knew I would die soon enough—just like most of the men in my family (prostate cancer? Heart attack?)—and though I have been told, but don’t quite believe, that the planet will die, too, I was, for one moment at least, feeling joyful and goofy and downright happy about being out in the world. What I felt like was a lucky man, my luck coming in almost exact proportion to the days and nights I spent like this.
It’s corny, it’s romantic, it’s hokey. It’s not very meta- or modern. But it is the truth.
Earlier in the spring I had paddled out to Masonboro with a friend who is a writer, a modern self-conscious writer, a sometimes meta-writer, a depressed writer who sees the cynical in most everything. As we paddled out to a field of egrets that bloomed like long-stalked, white flowers, all the post- and all the meta- and at least some of the depression went away. Is this because he is, like the rest of us, a romantic fool whose thoughts get mushy around birds and trees? Or is it something deeper? Something encoded in human beings, something that kicked in as he stared at the egrets and said, “Sure the rest of it is bullshit, but this, this island, this place, these birds, this is not bullshit.” I don’t know for sure that it is the latter. But I’m betting on it.
I was about to say, “I’m betting on it because it is all I’ve got.” But that isn’t true. I’ve got friendship; I’ve got family; I’ve got the love of my wife and daughter. And I’ve got my daily work. But beyond things familial and professional, I think what I have is what we are calling nature. I think what I have is what I’ve had every solstice for the last couple of decades, whether I was hiking into the Colorado foothills or the dunes of Cape Cod or strolling out along a flat barrier island in North Carolina. I think I’ve got something other than me, bigger than me, better than me. I don’t think this thing I’ve got is going to make me immortal; I don’t think it’s going to get me into heaven; and I don’t think that it is going to erase my daily anxieties; I don’t think it is going to make me a “winner.” But I do think it is enough. I do think this thing—let’s call it the world for lack of a better term—has given me a great gift, and that the least I can do, once a year or so, is to celebrate it in return.
DAN’S RIVER
Finally we push off from our little island and paddle into Waltham, the site of Dan’s earliest success story. We approach Prospect Street and pass the Waltham Watch Factory, which at one time manufactured the majority of the watches in the US. Dan talks about building a walkway in front of the factory.
“It would be stunning,” he says. “Cantilevering over the river.”
Unlike the farmlands, quaint villages, and rolling suburbs we have paddled through, Waltham was, from the start, an industrial town. As well as the watch factory, this was the home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, established in 1813. It was here—not in the more famous Lowell mills—that a factory system was established and here that “Mill Girls” lived in dorms and worked eighty hours a week. This was ground zero for Massachusetts’ transformation from a farming community to an industrial one. The Charles provided both the power and the dumping grounds for this growth.
Dan points to the other bank.
“On the left here is Nova Biomedical, the first commercial property where we replanted native species. That was the biggest eyesore on the whole river. There was a parking lot right to the edge of the water. Now it’s a restored wetlands and everything’s thriving, a true habitat—from a parking lot to a complex ecosystem.
“There was this one guy, Fred Spaziani, who worked at Nova, and when everyone else at Nova was against it, Fred really believed in it and fought hard for it. Fred died of cancer, but his leadership was really invigorating and helped get this through. The result was that we reclaimed this, the longest half-mile where there was no public ownership. We got a gift from Nova and then we bought the next section off the MBTA.”
As we pull over to portage through downtown Waltham, Dan warns me that we will not be able to leave our bags and equipment and make two trips.
“We’re in the city now,” Dan says.
As if on cue, two young Hispanic men come strolling up the bike path, just the sort the casual profiler might fear. But I, perhaps buoyed by the beer and cigar, decide to treat their arrival as an opportunity.
“Can you guys give us a hand?” I ask as they walk up, and, before they can think to say no, they find themselves helping us portage our hundred pound boat for the next five hundred yards through the streets of downtown Waltham. We talk as we carry the boat together. Wilson and Juan are both unemployed, or at least they thought they were until this minute, and as they walk they tell us that their parents moved here from Guatemala, and that they were born in the building next to Dan’s restored wetlands. In my bad Spanish I start to try to explain that my pillow is also named Wilson, but give up fairly quickly. We wait for the light at a crosswalk and cut down the opposite bank behind the historic Moody Street Mill, kicking a shopping cart out of the way before carrying the boat down a steep dirt path to the water. Before we climb back in the boat, Dan hands Wilson a twenty for the work.
Below the dam we come into the thick of it. Many of the places upstream bear Dan’s mark, or at least are sites for future plans, but it is here, on this once-grim eight mile stretch of water running through the grit of Waltham, Newton, and Watertown, that Dan’s dreams of giving people contact with the river have come to fruition. He points out spots on the bank as if they were events in his life—which of course they were.
T
his stretch was where he first came with survey crews and old maps and learned almost immediately that the land that would be his green path had been claimed by encroachment. He had to knock on doors and make phone calls and try to convince homeowners that property that they thought was theirs was in fact not.
“Were they pissed off?” I ask.
“Life-threatening,” he says. “The local godfather said, ‘Don’t mess with my people.’ ”
He points at another building that we glimpse through the trees.
“These guys had a hundred-car parking lot—an illegal encroachment. They fought me tooth and nail at first but now they love it. They have a full maintenance agreement—they offer to take care of their part of the river for us. They have their meetings out here. Encroachers have now become stewards. They just couldn’t see it before. All they could see was a wasteland. They said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I had to sell them on the vision.”
A little farther along he points again.
“With these corporate landowners, Stop & Shop in particular, there was really good internal support for our project. Stop & Shop gifted us two and a half acres of critical land. This next one we had to buy—this piece of land here—but the next two were also gifted. I had a number of successful negotiations with these corporations. We of course were coming in and cleaning up pretty neglected land. And they had conservation easements so they still owned the beach. So I think it was put together in a way that was pretty positive for them.
“Note the houses to the right. We had to switch sides because of this private property. We would have had to do a land taking. This used to all be parkland but it was given away when it shouldn’t have been. And it would have been hard to do a residential land-taking. So that’s when I decided to create the bridge and cross over the river.”
We cross under a delicate suspension footbridge. The 140-foot bridge was one of Dan’s crowning achievements, connecting the paths of Newton to Watertown/Waltham. Dan knew right away what he would call it. The usual protocol would be to name it after some dead politician. But Dan called it the Blue Heron Bridge.
One of the first times I met Dan, at least in a non-Frisbee setting, was during the early days of the construction of the Blue Heron Bridge. The supports were in but the span was not, and underpinnings of the bridge had just begun to jut out over the river. I remember that day because the rains had been heavy and the river looked truly wild. We walked west of the bridge behind the Super Stop & Shop on land that had until just a year before been a landfill. But that day you could have easily imagined yourself next to a river in the mountains during snowmelt. Eddies over-spilled the banks into a forested flood plain of newly planted silver maples, and the water swallowed parts of the path where we stood. The river was loud enough to make conversing hard.
The Charles had come alive and so had Dan. It was the first time he spoke to me about his fight to save the river banks. We circled back to the bridge and he told me that it—the bridge itself—had proved a puzzle piece that had solved a seemingly intractable puzzle.
“Homeowners on the Newton side didn’t want the path to go behind their backyards,” he said. “They stopped my path dead in its tracks and I was almost to the point of giving up.”
Dan had been stymied for a while before he hit upon the solution. A bridge! Why not cross over into Watertown and Waltham? Of course it wasn’t that easy. First he would have to talk the corporate folks at Stop & Shop, on the Watertown side of the river, into gifting two and half acres of critical land. But once they agreed he was back in business. His path could now run down one side of the river, cross the Blue Heron Bridge, and then continue wending eastward.
“Right there you’re in Newton—half way across the bridge you’re in Watertown—and then another hundred and fifty yards to the west and you’re in Waltham. So the Blue Heron Bridge is definitely bridging communities. And the Newton residents, many of whom opposed it, now celebrate it and walk across the bridge to shop at Russo’s supermarket and Stop & Shop. Bringing their Newton money into Waltham and Watertown, which I love.”
Today the bridge is in full use: people chatting and kids with balloons and bike riders zipping across between Newton and Watertown. On the same bridge Dan once came upon a woman spreading her father’s ashes. She told him that her father had lived his whole life in Watertown and that this had become his favorite spot on the river.
Perhaps the hardest sell of all were the riverside observation decks that now jut out over the river. Even Dan’s architect opposed him on that one.
“I wanted to have these decks where people could sit and watch the river,” he says. “They all thought it would just be a place for people to drink and smoke pot.”
“I can only hope that a little of that is going on,” he adds with a smile.
In fact the occupants of the first two decks we pass are single women, one reading and the other doing yoga, and the one we pass now holds teenagers who, in the midst of their make-out session, are oblivious to our canoe floating below. It’s true that in one of the scenic clearings—socalled “interpretive sites” that Dan designed himself—two grizzled-looking men are passing a paper bag, but so far there have been exactly zero incidents of the crime that the residents feared.
At another unoccupied access point, Dan decides he needs to get out to do a little work. “Life is maintenance,” my father told me not long before he died. It was not the sort of thing my romantic young self wanted to hear, but it is something I now at least half-acknowledge as true. Certainly it’s something Dan has come to believe in his work along the river. The big vision and big victories are nice but then comes the day-to-day work of maintaining those gains, making sure the river doesn’t sink back into another of its dark forgotten periods. Dan demonstrates this for me in the flesh as we land near a small path down to the water that is overgrown with weeds. At first he just wants to show me the landing but then he doesn’t like the way the weeds have encroached on the path and the way someone has left a soda can under the brush and, before he knows it, it has turned into a project. Dan bursts into a flurry of activity, again employing his paddle as machete, and tearing back vines with his hands. He smashes down knotweed with his paddle while avoiding the blue flag iris.
“You just saw how I’ve been maintaining this same little area for five years. It takes basically about three or four minutes of crushing some knotweed and a little edgework on the boulders and you’re done. The maintenance guys do a good job. But they have a hard time doing anything other than cutting grass. That’s what they like to do. Cut grass.”
We paddle past the Bleachery Dye Works where, less than a hundred years ago, the river’s color changed almost daily with the factory’s discharge: purple, red, brown, like a twisted Willy Wonka nightmare. Today, branches span over the mostly naturally colored river. An Eastern kingbird peers down from one branch. Then a floating can of Bud Light bobs by, followed, a few seconds later, by a female Baltimore oriole flying past.
“The thing is that for all the work and fighting you don’t really have to do that much to heal a place,” Dan says with a laugh. “You just get it started and nature does the rest.”
Proof is the floodplain through which we float: a classic silver maple forest with roots that crawl over the bank like snakes. Painted turtles rest on snags and black crowned night herons roost in the trees and kingfishers shoot out over the river. It’s true we have to occasionally avoid half-submerged cinderblocks and shopping carts, but if this is a limited and battered wilderness, it is also a resilient and recovering one.
As we paddle toward the city, I think back on how it all started for Dan. Somebody at work told him to go look at old maps of the river, giving the new kid something to do. Dan did look at those maps. And then, over the next seventeen years or so, he threw himself into reclaiming the junkyards and car parks and industrial wastelands that had sprung up along the Charles, shepherding in a green resurgence on the riverbanks by taking back land that
had once belonged to the state but that had gradually been illegally encroached upon by businesses and neighbors. He literally changed the maps. His quixotic goal was to sell the idea of the Charles—a river made famous in song for just how dirty it was—as a nature preserve while wrangling, talking, and legislating land away from encroaching factory owners, homeowners, and even that local Mafioso in his attempt to restore native plants and trees to create a green corridor through the heart of Boston.
Dan’s was an odd quest, no doubt about it, but in this age of environmental losses and hand-wringing, perhaps the oddest thing about it was this:
It was successful.
FLIGHT
Waltham is the first community after eighty-one miles of Charles where the river no longer serves as a continuous border. It is a substantially poorer town, and a tougher town, than those where the Charles begins. But it is here, deep in the city, that you get a real feel for the remnant wildness of the tamed river. Even though you’ve got supermarkets and warehouses lurking behind, when you are actually on the river there’s still a true, riparian, wild feel. There is a practical reason for this: not too many people want to portage through the center of Waltham as we did with the help of Juan and Wilson, which means we get the water to ourselves.
“This is near the confluence of Beaver Brook and the Charles. Beaver Brook leads up to Beaver Brook Reservation—the first public reservation as part of a metropolitan system in the US. It’s fascinating terrain.”
To think of the city as terrain! Territory to fight over and claim for the tribe.
Open mussel shells litter the river floor along with the occasional piece of trash. The trees aid the wildness, blocking out the city. Great silver maples span the river, their leaves a light chalky green, some of the largest trees left within the commuter circle of Route 128, preserved at first by neglect and now by law.
My Green Manifesto Page 13
