My Green Manifesto

Author:David Gessner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2011-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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