My Green Manifesto (20 page)

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.

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.

And of course, another thing that helps are the birds. Jays, mallards, chipping sparrows, Eastern kingbirds, and a
kingfisher too. In my dry bag I have a list of the birds I've seen over the last three days and it contains more than thirty species.

“The strange thing,” Dan says. “Is that you likely see more birds here, close to the city.”

I ask why.

“Well, we're closing in on the harbor so you get seabirds too. And this stretch is smack dab in the middle of the North American flyway. And because of the dams no one really paddles here. Which means it's a kind of small wildlife refuge.”

I remember the jungled stretch of water we paddled yesterday and the sharp-shinned hawk we saw weaving its way through the branches. I can't help but think aloud how amazing it is for an animal to have evolved to maneuver in tight between trees and branches.

Then, thinking about Dan's story about the black crowned night herons, I remember that during the year my daughter was born, when we lived in Cambridge, I regularly got out to the river to watch herons too. His story of being renewed by the birds may sound hokey to some, but it rings true to me. My friends may give me a hard time for how much I write about birds, but the fact is that birds, more than anything else, have led to my transformation into this creature called an environmentalist. So much of my environmental life has begun with, and sprung from, birds.

I admit this to Dan.

“It makes sense,” he says. “It all starts with simply looking around. And when you look around these days you're unlikely to see too many grizzly bears, whales, or cougars. But you can still see a lot of birds.”

Birds then, oddly, considering how high they fly, are nature's lowest common denominators.

We face another long portage in the middle of Watertown. Dan stays with the boats and sends me off for supplies at the local Store 24. After all this exertion, I feel I can guiltlessly eat anything, which shows in my selection: a store-heated cheesesteak, a bag of Ruffles, a Hostess blueberry pie, and assorted other junk food. Dan grunts with disgust at my offerings, and I have to admit that, as hungry as I am, it does not sit well.

We are not looking forward to carrying the canoe again. At the Store 24 I tried to call for help. One of my oldest friends, Mark Honerkamp, lives not a quarter mile from where we now sit, but he didn't pick up the phone when I called. Honerkamp's life has been ruled, over the last decade, by the cycles of the fishing season. Once April comes round he spends every weekend, and every spare moment, heading out to the Wachusetts Reservoir, an hour to the West. He keeps a notebook where he harvests countless observations of the weather, wind, birds, and animals he sees. When he does consent to pick up his phone the news he bears is not of the worldly sort, but rather the fact that he saw river otters near the dam above the reservoir. Closer to home, Honerkamp has been one of the chief beneficiaries of Dan Driscoll's work, so that now, with a short stroll from his house, he can head to the water below Watertown Dam and see if the herring are running.

Honerkamp's beginnings as a nature-lover might have come straight out of David Sobel's mind. He grew up in
different times than my daughter or any young children today. As a ten-year-old, he lived in upstate New York and his mother's passion was dog shows. The shows were usually on the weekends, and the night before the show, she and her son would find a map of the area they were visiting and look for a river. The next day they would drive to the area and, following the map, find an area where river and road ran close to one another. Son would then kiss mother goodbye and scramble down the bank with his pole and gear. He would spend the day fishing while she spent it watching dogs perform, and then, at a prearranged time, they would meet again on the road.

Leave aside the fact that such behavior would get his mother arrested today and focus on the fact that that time outdoors imprinted itself on the young Honerkamp. He learned, not just about the animals that swam below the water, but those that flew above it. In more recent years, he has accompanied me on many of my nature adventures, following ospreys to Venezuela for instance, and, since his eyes and ears are sharper than mine, I have come to defer to him in the matter of bird identification. But neither of us are real birders. We are rather two guys who feel our lives are lifted when we pay attention to the creatures who are flying through them. Lowest common denominator, indeed.