1 of 3
|
|
|
|
If you're fortunate enough to fly fish with Heraclitus, you don't quibble over details. I initially suggested we cast our lines onto the waters of Montana's great trout streams. I knew he admired the work of Norman Maclean and figured he would appreciate the opportunity to wade into the Blackfoot. Heraclitus insisted, however, that if he was going to come all the way to America, he would fish the quintessentially American river—the Mississippi. Yes, A River Runs Through It was a very impressive book, but he wanted to stand on the banks of the river where Mark Twain learned his trade as a pilot, the river that inspired Huckleberry Finn. Heraclitus knew we would have to cast streamers into the Mississippi—on the Blackfoot, we would have used dry flies—but that was a compromise he was willing to make.
As we approached the Mississippi near Hannibal, Missouri, I could tell that my companion's mood was shifting from great anticipation to something pretty close to despair. Certainly, the man who famously said that "one cannot step twice into the same river" knew ahead of time that we wouldn't be fishing in the river Mark Twain described. But he wasn't expecting what we found: a river teeming with garbage, littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, shreds of plastic, and unidentifiable scraps of metal, and topped with a thin residue of motor oil. The changes that had taken place between Twain's day and our own were gradual, perhaps imperceptible day-by-day, but their cumulative result was jolting.
We were about to leave when we noticed a group of barges working their way down the Mississippi. As they stopped in various places, their crew appeared to reach into the water and draw out some of the larger items fouling the river: tires, oil drums, discarded appliances. We hailed them when they came upon us. Their leader, a young man by the name of Chad Pregracke, told us they were cleaning up the Mississippi—and working more generally to raise awareness amongst Americans. Our waterways have reached a critical point: if we don't join together to restore them now, it will be too late. He added that if we were interested in learning more, we should read his book From the Bottom Up: One Man's Crusade to Clean America's Rivers, written with Jeff Barrow. He wished that he could stay and chat, but the current state of the Mississippi left him with much work yet undone.
Soon after Pregracke waved goodbye and resumed his efforts, Heraclitus indicated that he too needed to continue on his way. A few days later, with that encounter still fresh in my mind, I picked up Pregracke's book. He grew up on the banks of the Mississippi, near East Moline, Illinois. As a boy, he learned the art of the "sheller," diving for mussels; experts could make more than $300 a day. On the bottom of the river, shellers "develop a sixth sense because zero visibility forces them to use their brains in a different way. They often sense obstacles just before reaching them—perhaps because they can feel the subtle shift in the current as it passes an obstruction." As a sheller, Pregracke's identity was inextricable from the river. But even as he came to know its every twist and turn, the river was changing. He found it increasingly difficult to make his way along the bottom—and to find mussels—amidst the refuse. One day, he recalls, the biggest mussel was found in the bowl of a toilet that had been dumped in the river. Was the trade he had learned at a dead end? Who was he if he was no longer a sheller? He decided that someone had to take responsibility for cleaning up the Mississippi.
share this page
RSS Feed
