Riding the Wild Charles

(Page 5 of 5)

"These guys had a 100-car parking lot--an illegal encroachment. They fought me tooth and nail at first but now they love it. They have a full maintenance agreement--they take care of their part of the river path for us. They have their business meetings out here. Encroachers have become stewards. They just couldn't see it before. All they could see was a wasteland. They said, 'This isn't going to work.' I had to sell them on the vision."

Perhaps the hardest sell of all were the observation decks that now jut out over the river. "I wanted to have these decks where people could sit and watch the river," he says. "Everyone, including the state's landscape architect, thought it would just be a place for teenagers to drink and smoke pot."

In fact the occupants of the first two decks we pass are women, one reading and the other doing yoga, and the deck we pass now holds teenagers in the midst of a make-out session, oblivious to our canoe floating below. It's true that in one of the scenic clearings--so-called interpretive sites that Dan conceived of himself--two grizzled men were passing back and forth a paper bag with a bottle jutting out, but so far, with the exception of a few pieces of graffiti, there have been exactly zero reported incidents of the crime that the residents so feared.

We pass under the Blue Heron Bridge, a delicate footbridge that connects Newton to Watertown and that also solved what appeared to be an intractable problem when access to the river was blocked on the Newton side. Dan had been stymied for a while but then crossed the river into Waltham and Watertown and talked local businesses into gifting critical land. Today, the Fourth of July, the bridge is in full use: people chatting and bike riders and kids with balloons. Past the bridge is another deck, a spot where Dan once came upon two sisters scattering their father's ashes. They told him that their father had lived his whole life in Watertown and that the new greenways had become his favorite part of the river.

When most people think of the Charles, they picture the Basin, the wide city river of boathouses and colleges and scullers, the place where the river briefly attends the Ivy League. Right now that Basin is filling with boats, the boaters anticipating tonight's fireworks and Boston Pops concert, and I will be joining them, hitching a ride in a canoe with some scientists from Woods Hole and watching the fireworks up close. The reason I will need to hitch that ride is that Dan will pull the canoe out just short of Harvard. He has places to be, and anyway, the big river, the fancy river, isn't for him. 

"They complain about all the Canada geese down there and then they mow the grass on the banks so it's like a golf course," he says.  "If you don't want geese, then plant native plantings, not grass."

It's true that the possibilities near downtown are somewhat limited by the heavily trafficked roads that sandwich the Charles so that it looks like the middle of three parallel-running rivers. On the other hand, Dan points out with a smile, there have been winter sightings of coyote footprints on the frozen river. We aren't the only ones who think of the river as a path.

For now the fireworks can wait. We paddle below the Blue Heron Bridge and come to a spot where, less than 100 years ago, the Waltham Bleachery and Dye Works changed the river color almost daily with its discharge. Today maple branches span out over the river, and on one I spot an Eastern kingbird. A floating can of Bud Light bobs by, but then, a few seconds later, a female Baltimore oriole flies past too.

"The thing is, for all the work and fighting, you don't really have to do that much to heal a place," Dan says with a laugh. "You just get it started and nature does the rest."

Proof is the floodplain through which we float: a classic silver maple forest, despite the occasional half-submerged shopping cart. Maybe, I suggest to Dan, fighting for a limited wilderness is the most vital fight, since most of us won't ever go to Everest or the Amazon; maybe the most important wilderness is the one closest to home.

"Maybe," Dan half agrees. "But maybe it doesn't have to be so limited. I see this as just a start. What if we can connect this green corridor to the Mystic River and complete the Neponset greenway as well? What if these wild paths run all through Boston?"

What if?

I take in this green world that Dan once imagined, enjoying the light pulsating on the underbranches of a maple. Meanwhile his mind races elsewhere, no doubt weaving greenways all through the Boston area and beyond. As we drift toward the city, he plans and schemes and dreams.