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Driving down Granite Street in Hopkinton, I observed several small, muddy creeks trickling into a 352-acre man-made reservoir named Echo Lake. Skirting the No Trespassing signs, I hiked toward the lake along some ATV trails. After about a mile I came upon the lake, which gave me my first hint that there was a hidden wilderness within the Boston suburbs. It's true that my first sight was of litter at the base of a red cedar--a pile made up of not just Coors Silver Bullet empties but spring water bottles and a Newman's Own salad dressing container (as if these had been particularly health-conscious litterbugs). But my next sight was the blue bowl of the lake itself. Silver shone off the water through the beech and pine, and with the lake's many small coves you could easily imagine you were in Maine. I tramped around for a while, following deer tracks in the mud and trying to determine the undeterminable: which of those muddy brooks, barely trickles now in early summer, was the true source of the Charles. What I did know was that the small unnamed creek that exited the other end of the lake was the water that would become the Charles and that, after dribbling along Route 85 next to Wendy's and Pizza 85, it would gradually pick up force and momentum.
Gradually. The first miles of the Charles are marshy and often non-navigable, and the river doesn't really get rolling until it exits Populatic Pond, about 20 miles from Echo Lake. That was where I put in my boat, at a launch off River Road in Millis. The plan had been for Dan Driscoll and me to paddle to the harbor from there, but it turned out that for Dan the business of fighting for the Charles had taken precedence over the pleasure of floating atop it. A state meeting had called him away, so I would have to paddle the first day solo in Dan's kayak, and he would meet up with me early the next morning with the two-man canoe that would carry us into Boston.
Dan was able to get away from work just long enough to drop me at the launch, however, and as we drove too fast down the back roads of Medfield and Norfolk, drinking tubs of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, he excitedly described the beginnings of what he consistently called his vision.
"I was raised in a blue-collar house in Newton, kind of a typical teen without any environmental conscience. Then my family began spending time during summers in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Suddenly I was in a place that had marshes right out the back door. I spent whole days mucking around out on the marsh, digging steamers and mussels and oysters. Some nights I fed our family from the marsh, and I also sold shellfish to neighbors. I think in a lot of ways falling in love with Wellfleet was the catalyst for the work I've done on the river. If I, through my love of the marshes on the Cape, could be transformed into someone with an eco-conscience, then so could others. I thought, well, let's create other places for kids who maybe aren't lucky enough to go to the Cape. Let's give them some nature right near home."
Dan is a man of modest height and proportions, fit and compact. Though I met him back in the days when we both played Ultimate Frisbee, I didn't get to know him well. Since those days his hair has gone white, but his intense eyes still shine out a slightly cracked blue. There is something of the true believer about Dan, as maybe there has to be in anyone who will take on a fight of this sort. On the other hand, that intensity is leavened by a certain regular guy-ness and sense of humor.
As we drove I asked how he had first begun to work for the state.
"Well, I had been kicking around from job to job in my twenties. I was finally about to begin something real. I was going to start a nursery on Cape Cod. I had all the money together and everything. Then I drove down to Wellfleet and stayed up all night thinking. The next day I drove back to the University of Vermont, where I'd gone to school, and talked to my old professors. They told me I could start getting extension school credits toward a master's in natural resources planning."
Dan shook his head.
"My father said, 'Don't do it. You're running away. You're not facing the world.'"
Left unsaid as we pulled over at the small landing was that his father had been wrong: this was exactly how Dan would face the world.
The kayak I'd be paddling was an expensive one, a loaner from one of Dan's friends, and even though he was pressed for time, he was nervous enough about my navigating my first rapids to drive ahead to the Pleasant Street bridge and spend 10 minutes coaching me through the initial series of rocks. He was right to be nervous, it turned out; I had kayaked only on ocean marshes before, and while the rapids on the Charles pale beside true river rapids, they were challenging enough to do damage to the boat, if not to me. Dan stared down from the bridge above, no doubt wincing as I slammed full on into a half-submerged boulder, then as I self-consciously picked my way along until, at last, I landed in a strong trough of current that whooshed me away and down the river.
Over the next eight hours I would not see another kayak or canoe, but I would see a dazzling array of birds -- hawks, wrens, warblers, orioles, tanagers, woodpeckers -- and a variety of landscapes that not even the most optimistic nature lover would expect within the great highway circle of Route 495. After the exhilaration of the early rapids, I found myself riding a current of tannin-dark water that reflected back the overgrown banks of maple, swamp oak, and beech. Occasionally I would notice a tire swing or dock that indicated I was paddling through someone's backyard, but more often the feeling was one of solitude, with little indication that I was entering a metropolitan area of more than four million residents.
After several miles the river began to double and triple back on itself, twisting and turning through the great marsh that divides Millis and Medfield, a landscape filled with the rustling of tall phragmites and the whistle-skreek punch lines of red-winged blackbirds. The day's weather was as variable as the landscapes, great cloud continents shifting overhead, so that at one moment I paddled in midsummer heat, shirt off and sweating, and the next I found myself in the midst of a rain shower. All the while water bugs played across the river, leaving a pockmarked surface, a theme that was repeated by the raindrops during the brief showers. As I floated past, painted turtles plopped off the mud banks and a great blue heron waited and flew off, waited and flew off again, as if engaging me in a morning-long game of tag. Swallows carved the air above the river, hunting for insects, and fish jumped, and at one point I watched a beaver plow by with a sprig of vegetation in its mouth, leaving a V wake behind it.
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