Meet the New Huck

His passion for the river means cleaning it up, one object at a time

by WALTER KIRN

One hundred and seventy-nine refrigerators. One hundred and twenty-five jugs of pesticide. Four motorcycles. Three hundred propane tanks. Two Jacuzzis. Seven lawn mowers. One prosthetic leg. And it goes on — a partial inventory of the debris that Chad Pregracke, 25, has hauled from the depths of the muddy Mississippi in a lonesome crusade to Roto-Root the river all the way from St. Louis to Dubuque. It's an all consuming mission, worthy of an aquatic Don Quixote, and Pregracke's Mississippi River Beautification and Restoration Project has been at it for almost four years. After waking each morning on the crowded houseboat that is home to himself, five assistants and three dogs, he ventures out among the sloughs and sandbars to battle a rising tide of trash and fill the small flotilla of rusting barges that he pushes upstream with the help of passing tugboats, a clutch of corporate sponsors and sheer willpower.

The project is not a cause; it's a quest. Pregracke grew up just feet from the river in East Moline, Ill. He spent his summers as a teenager diving for freshwater mussels with his father and selling the iridescent shells to the Japanese cultured-pearl industry. To save money, the pair camped out on islands and beaches, living a fresh-air, idyllic life straight out of Mark Twain. By the time he started college though, Pregracke had come to see the river differently — not as a source of income and diversion but as a threatened, fragile living creature that needed his help. Crawling on the weedy bottom in his search for shells, attached by a hose to an air tank on the surface, he couldn't see much — the water was too turbid — but he could feel things. Things he didn't like. Sunken tires. Barrels of chemicals. Microwave ovens and deflated basketballs.

Pregracke decided he had to do something. "When I started out, a lot of people thought I was nuts," he says. "But in America, it's still possible to do something like this. There was an opportunity for me to make a difference." In the summer of 1997, without outside funding or public recognition, he single-handedly removed 45,000 lbs. of junk from a 100-mile stretch of shoreline. Soon a modest grant arrived from Alcoa Corp.

With little money but plenty of boyish zeal, Pregracke began to enlarge upon his ambitions. He hunted up a couple of outboard motors, the barges, two aluminum runabouts and an Army-surplus bridge-building boat, which he equipped with a John Deere combine cab to make a sort of tugboat. He raised a sinking houseboat, made it seaworthy, assembled an eager young crew and hit the river — vowing to spend his summers on the water until the job was done.

"Garbage is not the biggest problem the river faces," Pregracke says, "but it's the one I can make a dent in myself." If this goal sounds overly ambitious for a shoestring operation with an annual budget of $200,000, you haven't seen Pregracke at work. He's tireless. Today he's driving a forklift around his barges, sorting old car seats and lawn ornaments and tractor chassis into separate piles for recycling. All sandy hair and freckles, dressed in a life jacket, cap and khaki shorts and sporting a pair of wraparound dark shades, Pregracke could be a latter-day Huck Finn. His grin is impish, his body compact and coiled. Two lean, tanned young women in similar uniforms — Jennifer Anderson, 26, and Lisa Hoffman, 22 — toil alongside him, heaving corroded truck tires onto a towering stack. "It's hard work, but it's fun work," Hoffman says, describing a regimen of 12-hour days hauling discarded Porta Potties from stagnant, snake-filled sloughs.The crew will scour 900 miles of river this year, stopping off in towns along the way for daylong community-cleanup festivals that bring out hundreds of local volunteers.

Pregracke is a blue-eyed Midwestern patriot who flies a pair of large flags from one of his barges: Old Glory and a black banner reading thanks veterans for our freedom. Though he hasn't experienced combat, he feels a mystical bond to fighting men that he says he can't explain but that fills him with gratitude when the going gets tough. "When it's really hot and the mosquitoes are tearing you up, I just think, ŒAt least I'm not getting shot at. At least I'm not getting my head blown off,''' he says.

For all his idealism though, he's not naive. He knows the value of modern public relations. He decorates his barges with the logos of sponsors, from Cargill to O'Douls, and maintains a cutting-edge website, www.cleanrivers.com. From his sleeping bag on the houseboat, he uses a pair of cell phones to drum up funds and give interviews to journalists. He's made some influential friends as well, including Robert Kennedy Jr., whose own conservation group, Riverkeeper, Pregracke admires and draws inspiration from.

Part innocent, part impresario and a natural motivator on a par with the slickest infomercial guru, Pregracke has big plans. His Adopt a Mississippi Mile Program hopes to do for the father of waters what similar land-based efforts have done for the nation's highways. Once the program is on its feet, he's heading east.

"I'm going to clean up a lot of the major rivers in America," he says. Next year he intends to attack the Ohio, from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. He'd love to clean up the Hudson too and, maybe, while he's at it, the Potomac. What would help is a tugboat of his own (the homemade John Deere rig is showing its age, and hitching rides with commercial haulers is a hit-and-miss affair), but even without one, he vows, he'll plunge ahead, refrigerator by refrigerator, prosthetic leg by prosthetic leg. "I'm going to do it right," he says, steering his runabout into a small bay filled with hundreds of bobbing plastic soda bottles, "and I'm going to finish it."

Believe him.