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"That's where I lived when I first began working for the reservation," he says, pointing toward Ware's Cove. "That's when I bought this canoe. It was an intense and difficult time. We had written up a master plan for what we called the Charles River Reservation, but almost everyone was against it. I went to a meeting in Newton, and 130 residents showed up--all angry and all against the plan. Some people were saying that my paths were going to bring crackheads into their neighborhoods. In one area, for example, they said if I built paths by the river they would erect an eight-foot chain-link fence. Then [Representative] Barney Frank's office called and tried to stop us. Local officials had told him I was building a motorcycle course on the river, and I had to prove to him it wasn't true. On top of that I was battling the state bureaucracy.
"After the depressing meeting in Newton I walked out on a bluff above the river. I was angry, sick of it all. Then, while I was staring out, a black-crowned night heron landed on a branch near me. Then another and another until there were 12 or 13 of them. That rejuvenated and remotivated me to go back into that maze of human obstacles to make it happen. Screw humans, I thought. I'll do it for the animals."
He describes what he calls his radical idea that being environmental isn't about education or politics. It's about what Thoreau called contact--about falling in love with something and then fighting for it.
"When I grew up in Newton we always had our butts dragged out to Lincoln to learn about 'nature,'" Dan tells me. "Now a kid in Newton can just walk out his back door and down to the river. The way I look at it, if I build these paths and one kid comes out here and has contact with nature, then maybe that will do something. Maybe he'll be inspired to fight for the place. Maybe he'll be the next John Muir."
He pauses, seeming to realize that he has perhaps slightly overstated.
"Or at least maybe he'll be less of a jerk."
By all accounts it was Dan's affable straightforwardness, as well as his stubborn streak, that won over angry residents like those 130 Newtonians. Often he would seek people out by knocking on their doors and showing them his plans, inviting them down to the river so he could give them a tour and describe his vision. Although the encroachments on state land were illegal, every case was settled out of court, and many of those who opposed the idea are now its greatest backers. So far the bike paths haven't brought crackheads to the neighboring towns, and the banks now flower with viburnum, berrying shrubs, native blueberries, and white pines, supporting an ecosystem of increasingly varied animal life: roosting herons, fox, muskrats, white-tailed deer.
As we climb back into the boat, it occurs to me that Dan might just be the perfect eco-hero for the times. Not an oversize Arnold Schwarzenegger posing on the cover of Newsweek, or even a Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon, but a regular guy fighting a local fight for a limited wilderness, the only sort of wilderness available to most of us. Maybe what is needed isn't a raging prophet of doom or stern-faced administrator or action hero, but a slightly goofy, joyful former stoner, an ex-Frisbee player of modest proportions, a stubborn guy who fell in love with a place and then fought for it.
We paddle into Waltham, the site of Dan's earliest real success story. "That was the biggest eyesore on the whole river," he says of the spot right above the Moody Street Dam. "There was a parking lot right to the edge of the water. Now it's a restored wetlands and everything's thriving, a true habitat--from a parking lot to a complex ecosystem."
Among the beneficiaries of this ecosystem are the tenants in the adjacent low-income housing. But as we pull over to portage through downtown Waltham, Dan warns me that it is still a rough neighborhood, and that we will not be able to leave our bags and equipment and make two trips, as we have done during more rural portages. As if on cue, two young men come strolling up the bike path, just the sort the casual profiler might fear. But I, perhaps buoyed by the beer and cigar, decide to treat their arrival not as threat but as opportunity.
"Can you guys give us a hand?" I ask as they walk up, and they, before they can think to say no, find themselves helping us portage our 100-pound boat for the next 550 yards through the streets of Waltham. Wilson and Juan are both unemployed, or thought they were until this minute, and as they walk they tell us that their parents moved here from Guatemala, and that they were born in the building next to Dan's restored wetlands. We wait for the light at a crosswalk, then cut down the bank behind the historic Moody Street Mill, kicking a shopping cart out of the way as we carry the boat down a steep dirt path to the water. Before we climb back in the boat, Dan hands Wilson a twenty.
Below the dam we come into the thick of it. Many of the places upstream bear Dan's mark, or at least are sites for future projects, but it is here, on this once-grim eight-mile stretch of water running through the grit of Waltham, Newton, and Watertown, that Dan's dreams of giving people contact with the river have come to fruition. He points out spots on the bank as if they were events in his life--which of course they were.
This is where he first came with survey crews and old maps and learned almost immediately that the land that would be his green path had been claimed by businesses and residents. And it is here that he had to knock on doors and make phone calls and try to convince people that land they thought was theirs was in fact not.
"Were they pissed off?" I ask.
"Life-threatening."
He points at another building that we glimpse through the trees.
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