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After passing under a railroad trestle, I camped for the night on a beach near the entrance to the Rocky Narrows Reservation. I slept well, disturbed only once when the whistle of a commuter train set off a pack of howling coyotes, and woke on a small ledge of grass above a river shrouded in mist. An hour later I was meeting Dan at our agreed-upon spot, and we were throwing the (slightly bruised) kayak up on his car and pulling down his Mohawk canoe.
We pass the morning paddling through the Audubon Society's Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary in Natick, where we see our sharp-shinned hawk spreading its tail like a delicate oriental fan; then we portage around the South Natick Dam and float past the backyards of Wellesley's stately mansions. The water is low and Dan points to the mowed lawns that we pass, fingering them as the culprits. "The fish are back since the Clean Water Act," he says. "But the problem these days is more water quantity than water quality. Towns are siphoning off the water so they can water their lawns." He puts a derisive spin on the last word and points out how some homeowners have illegally stripped vegetation right to the river. "We need to get someone out here and sue their asses."
Later we portage again (this time through poison ivy) and survive a series of minor rapids only to nearly split the canoe in half on a sewage conduit that runs across the river. Fortunately, I have duct tape in my bag and now, despite ankle-deep water in the taped-up boat, we are paddling toward the night's destination, an artificial tributary of the Charles called Long Ditch, which citizens of Dedham are reputed to have dug in 1654 in an effort to reduce flooding of the town's lowlands. The ditch looks, to my eye, very ditchlike, and the mucky banks lead up to chest-high grasses, which I imagine are filled with ticks. When I suggest we camp in the wooded park nearby, Dan says, "The parks aren't safe once you get this close to the city. We're better off on state land--no one comes here." Then he adds, "This grass looks like it's free of ticks." I'm not so sure about this, but we tie up our boat to the root of a black willow tree, and then Dan charges into the grasses. Using his oar as a machete, he hacks clear a place for our tent.
Once we have set up camp we get back in the canoe and paddle from our ditch out onto Cow Island Pond, where we see a hovering osprey at dusk, and then to the pond's other end, to the intersection of the Charles with Route 1. There we find the Olde Irish Alehouse, a rickety wooden building that looms above us like a decrepit barge, seemingly ready to tumble into the river. The building itself is a kind of kitschy monument to the Old Country, dotted with leprechauns and crowned by a wooden sculpture of two swans that appear to be making out. But at least it, unlike so many of the buildings around here, has not entirely turned its back to the river: diners two floors above us look down through the window and wave.
We tie up to a tree root and scramble up a dirt bank near a Dumpster and into the parking lot, observing multiple signs of civilization, including several gas stations, a Dunkin' Donuts, and an Entering Boston sign. Inside we devour mashed potatoes and undercooked steaks and top it off with several vodka gimlets. We paddle home drunk to our murky campsite in the ditch, which is now lit with fireflies, and sleep well despite a strange rustling in the grass that brings to mind the movie Alien. We wake early, and I am watching an orchard oriole in the willow tree when Dan notices that someone has left a huge hobnailed boot on our campsite doorstep. We know it was not there when we arrived, and it reminds us that we are now truly entering the urban wild.
This morning, our second on the river together, Dan, despite a hangover, is in his full glory. We cross below the six lanes of Route 128, which serve as a kind of St. Louis arch for the Charles, a gateway to the city proper.
"The strange thing is that the land along the river is valued greatly in the suburbs," Dan says. "But once you get in here everything changes. Where you think you'd see expensive houses, you see this instead."
He points to places along the banks that prove his point: industrial parks, abandoned cars, chain-link fences right on the river. Dan has plans to revitalize this area, of course, and he stresses that even here people are trying to connect to the river: a hole in the fence yawns, and someone has plopped an old stuffed chair above the riverbank, where he or she can creep down during lunch break to watch the river flow.
"Of course the land should be more valuable here where it's people's only contact point with nature," Dan adds.
The view opens up as we enter the so-called Lakes District, an area of impounded water that was a celebrated part of the city's life during the early twentieth century, home to big-band dance halls and thousands of regular canoeists, a great river community center, just the kind of thing Dan is trying to restore. In fact, the land that Dan has reclaimed along the Charles was originally purchased by the state in the late 1800s under the direction of the visionary landscape architect Charles Eliot, who saw the banks of the river as a place of solace from the ever-growing city; without that original purchase there would have been no hope for the present greenway. Each generation, Dan explains, has its own view of the river, and Eliot's vision thrived in the early part of the twentieth century until it was supplanted, after World War II, by a view of the Charles as a dumping ground, a foul place that most of the city turned its back on.
We pull over to a small wooded island next to Quinobequin Cove and sit in the shade below a red maple. We drink late-morning beers and I smoke a cigar while staring out at the water. For Dan this area is steeped in personal history.
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