Housekeeping
I’d like to think that people who eat Stone Blue chips (as I do) don’t throw the packaging overboard or out the window of a speeding car. But it seems they do. I picked up the wet and silt covered bag along with an empty Gatorade bottle, a plastic coffee container and other stuff that littered the Tivoli landing. The debris washed up on shore shook me and made it near impossible to get my boat into the water. I spent twenty minutes picking up trash before I could slide my kayak into the water on my first paddle of 2017.
In spring, snow melts and the roadsides are revealed for what they are: dumping grounds for people’s stuff. Some is overt, like the trash bag tossed that then bursts or is torn apart by a hungry raccoon. But most are items casually flung from a car window. I like to undertake a thought experiment: I picture myself sailing down the road in my Subaru and I toss a Ginger Ale can from the window. I can’t do it, even in my imagination.
I’d like to think that people who eat Stone Blue chips (as I do) don’t throw the packaging overboard or out the window of a speeding car. But it seems they do. I picked up the wet and silt covered bag along with an empty Gatorade bottle, a plastic coffee container and other stuff that littered the Tivoli landing. The debris washed up on shore shook me and made it near impossible to get my boat into the water. I spent twenty minutes picking up trash before I could slide my kayak into the water on my first paddle of 2017.
In spring, snow melts and the roadsides are revealed for what they are: dumping grounds for people’s stuff. Some is overt, like the trash bag tossed that then bursts or is torn apart by a hungry raccoon. But most are items casually flung from a car window. I like to undertake a thought experiment: I picture myself sailing down the road in my Subaru and I toss a Ginger Ale can from the window. I can’t do it, even in my imagination.
In the same way that our careless ways are revealed to us in the roadside so too does the river tell our dirty story. Stuff collects under the ice, in the snow that laces the edge of the river. Released, it travels about, along with logs and sticks, stumps that have floated free from land. There’s no other way to say it: yesterday the river was a chocolate mess.
There’s something invigorating about this mess: I have something to do. It was Marjory Stoneman Douglas who wrote “It is a woman’s business to be interested in the environment,” she wrote. “It’s an extended form of housekeeping.” She wrote The Everglades: A River of Grassin the Rivers of America series, transforming the way people view this land from a treacherous miasmic swamp to a beautiful river of grass.
And I hate to say it, but in my case, she’s right: I love picking up garbage. One minute the shoreline is littered, then it is clean. My work is fast and obvious. In this political climate having that sense of small accomplishment seems essential, gives me energy to embark on the larger house cleaning issues.
As my friend Kate and I paddle the river south, past Magdalen Island, then Cruger and into the South Tivoli bay I see the Cormorants V-ing north along the river, I see the Osprey perched on the channel marker. I delight in the Green-winged Teal that flushes when we enter the Bay. But I also take note of the plastic barrel, the Styrofoam, the jugs and buckets bobbing about in the water, the logs that I must miss lest then flip me over.
I can’t wait to get out and sweep these things out of the river. And so I look forward to Riverkeeper Sweep, now in its 6th year. On May 6, thousands will take to the shoreline picking up trash. We’ll all be house keeping the earth. In Tivoli we’ll be tidying our shoreline. Come join us—surprise yourself with how satisfying a clean house is.
Goodbyes
This is the week of goodbyes. Over the course of the next three days I will be saying goodbye to the seniors graduating from Bard College. Tomorrow marks the first goodbye, with the baccalaureat ceremony, followed by the always-rowdy senior dinner. Friday night at the President's dinner we say farewell in a more sedate manner. What follows the dinner is my favorite part of graduation, the senior concert. The American Symphony Orchestra performs pieces composed by graduating seniors. The music is always inspiring. To hear a work of a young composer performed by such a talented orchestra is thrilling. And then Saturday, those students march across a stage and are gone. So fast. I've watched some grow up, intellectually, emotionally, physically. The young men change more than the women, it seems, growing taller and broader in four years.
This is the week of goodbyes. Over the course of the next three days I will be saying goodbye to the seniors graduating from Bard College. Tomorrow marks the first goodbye, with the baccalaureat ceremony, followed by the always-rowdy senior dinner. Friday night at the President's dinner we say farewell in a more sedate manner. What follows the dinner is my favorite part of graduation, the senior concert. The American Symphony Orchestra performs pieces composed by graduating seniors. The music is always inspiring. To hear a work of a young composer performed by such a talented orchestra is thrilling. And then Saturday, those students march across a stage and are gone. So fast. I've watched some grow up, intellectually, emotionally, physically. The young men change more than the women, it seems, growing taller and broader in four years.
I am always a bit heartbroken at the end of graduation. On that day, a shift happens. These graduates no longer need me--to read their work, encourage them through finals, figure out a paper topic. I applaud this, of course. But it leaves a hole. And then I will wait for the next shift, that moment when they write needing a letter of recommendation for graduate school. They write to tell me of jobs or marriages, of children born. They write to tell me they are writing.
To add to the leavings, I too am leaving, off to Alaska for a month. My own departure for such a stretch of time has its own sense of loss. Of course I'm thrilled to be off to this big place I have visited before. I have never been disappointed with my adventures in Alaska. But for a stretch of a month, I will be off the river. This has created in me a sense of quiet desperation. I've been out in my boat as much as I can, as if I can absorb the river into my body and take it with me.
I've come to need the river, and the egotistical side of this is that I sense the river needs me as well. It doesn't, of course. Recently I received an email from Riverkeeper in which they describe their captain, who is also my good friend, John Lipscomb, as the eyes and ears of the river. He keeps a watch on the river, reporting back what he finds, taking action against polluters and illegal developers. But I really see him as the voice of the river, speaking for what the river needs. The river does need him. Perhaps the river does need all of us.
This morning, under a half-blue sky, I shoved north from the Tivoli launch, headed toward the Saugerties Lighthouse. I dipped into the bay south of the lighthouse, the same bay that will be clogged with water chestnut and spatterdock by the time I return from Alaska. I was about twenty feet away from shoreline when I spotted the eagle, perched low in a snag. It sat there as I bobbed in the water; it preened, and ignored me. Of all the birds on the river, this is the one that people are most excited to see. "See any eagles?" is the first question I get when people see my binoculars. What most people don't understand is that the eagle is an obvious bird; birders are looking for smaller, more elusive birds. And yet--seeing an eagle, especially so close, remains a remarkable thing. I thought of all of the eagles I will see in Alaska. My memory is that they are everywhere, so common you stop paying attention to them. I'll hold onto this image of my Hudson River eagle, part of the success of restoring this river. Restored because people need this river but the river needs us as well to care for the shad and sturgeon, the eels and eagles.