Yet as he indicated earlier, Kennedy does not see factories as
blights on Eden but as signs of a rich and useful economy.
Neither he nor Cronin is opposed to industry, condominium
construction, powerboat use or anything that might bring the
fullness of communal American life into contact with the river.
They simply oppose anyone destroying the river. "This is a fight
to save a resource for as many constituencies as possible," says
Kennedy. "Here there is room for everyone." As he speaks, a trio
of ducks puts on a brief air show high above the electrical wires
that cross the river. A great blue heron is spotted over the
Lovett plant.
"The beauty of my job," says Cronin, "is that it allows me to be
in touch with the rhythms of the river and to understand what it
means to fit the rhythms of your life around those other rhythms.
When you are a fisherman, one of the rhythms is the tide. To fish
for shad, you go out two hours before high tide, but every day
the hours change. One week you're having breakfast at 7 a.m., the
next at 2 in the afternoon. And all this extends to life on the
shore, to the people who come down to watch the boats come in.
The whole community participates in the rhythms of the river."
What Riverkeeper has been fighting for, then, is biodiversity--a
complex way of life sustained by various hectic
interdependencies, for which the Hudson is the pumping heart. All
the same, when we finally come to a point near the Hudson
Highlands that is without power plants and condos--where the water
gets bluer as one looks into it and the ripples touch the brown
rocks on the shore and the thick hills rise like tufts of
broccoli--one's own heart lifts with gratitude for untrammeled
nature, and with ancient expectation.
We are in a bend in the river, and suddenly everyone is still--the
way, I imagine, that all people have been stilled since coming
upon the first bend in the first river. Here too is the past, and
it re-creates the eternal sense of promise and danger that river
bends have always presented and that have bred civilizations.
America itself was a bend in the river, and on days like this it
still is.
Kennedy says his happiest moments are when he takes his kids
camping on the banks, where they fish out of tents and hear
coyotes "in the jet-black night." Cronin recalls a different,
untamed moment in 1982, when he was working as a commercial
fisherman, setting crab traps near the U.S. Military Academy at
West Point.
"Suddenly a storm came rolling over the mountains out of the
Highlands," he says. "We were heading back with a couple of
bushels of crabs, and out of nowhere we were beset with winds and
darkness. We raced to beat the storm, but it overtook us. The
mountains shone a brilliant green. The sky exploded. I was never
so aware of how little control I had over the environment, how
the forces of nature can play with us. It was a defining moment
in my relation to the river. It put me in my place."
Roger Rosenblatt, an editor-at-large for Time Inc., is the editor
of Consuming Desires, a new collection of essays on consumption
and the environment, published by Island Press
PAGE
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
BACK TO HEROES HOME
