Neglecting the Charles
Government needs to pitch in for river cleanup
The Observer cruised down the Charles last week with Tom McNichol. Helluva guy. I was planning to write about the gorgeous stretch above the Arsenal Street Bridge that made me go all arty and think of Monet in Giverny. But I found a better story: trash.
Since 2004, McNichol, 69, has run a guerrilla band of volunteers who clean up the 7 miles of river from the dam at Watertown Square to the Colonel Richard Gridley Locks into Boston Harbor. The outfit is called Charles River Clean Up Boat. Teenagers to octogenarians go out for a day, gratis, to collect crud from the river's surface. They do it because -- guess what? -- no one else is doing it.
Not the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, which has responsibility over the river. Neither the city of Boston nor the city of Cambridge, which benefit immeasurably from its beauty.
Not river users like the four yacht clubs or the three rowing clubs on its banks. Not Harvard, MIT, BU, or Northeastern, whose rowers and sailors are all over the water. (They all kick in some cash.) Not the EPA, which monitors water quality beneath the surface, but doesn't touch what's on top.
"I guarantee you no one was cleaning the surface of the river when we started," says McNichol, retired from computer sales management. "And I know of no one else doing it today."
The lone, 20-foot aluminum boat is out four days a week from 9:30 to 4:30. Volunteers wield sieves on poles to capture junk and dump it into garbage bags onboard. At the end of the day, they drop the bags on the DCR dock by the Hatch Shell, and its maintenance crews remove it.
Whoa, why is the DCR not on the river? "We would love to help keep the Charles clean but unfortunately we don't have the boats or the money," says DCR spokeswoman Wendy Fox. The DCR, to be fair, is underfunded, but that answer won't fly. Governor Deval Patrick, a committed environmentalist, needs to get creative here.
Yo, Deval, either help clean the Charles or pay McNichol to do your dirty work.
But it's not just the state. "Why are we cleaning up around BU's sailing pavilion?" asks volunteer Bob Canterbury. "Why isn't BU picking it up?" BU sends money -- a whopping $500 last year.
The Boston Foundation rejected McNichol's request for help in 2005. Paul Grogan, what's up with that? McNichol says former Cambridge mayor Michael Sullivan promised money if he sent a request in writing. McNichol did and never heard back. (There's a new mayor, whom he hasn't called yet. He has no fund - raising help.) He tried Mayor Tom Menino's office a couple of years ago and was bounced to a woman named Toni who never got back to him.
We find gunk all over the river. The surface sparkles from a distance but can go ghastly up close. We clean up mucho junk floating near the MIT Sailing Pavilion. McNichol regularly removes stuff inside the yellow boom that CFX, owner of the rail yards in Allston, puts out to catch its detritus. A lot of unspeakables come from storm drains after heavy rains. Some one has to clean it up.
Even rowers can be culprits. They leave water bottles on boat house decks that blow into the river. McNichol says he once watched a staffer at the Cambridge Boating dock actually hose debris into the river. That ended fast.
McNichol is a trash connoisseur. He'll tell you the number one plastic bag on the Charles comes from
He'll tell you he finds very few beverage bottles in the river but a plague of small plastic juice bottles and, separately, plastic tops. He has found chairs, desks, portable toilets, a 250-gallon oil tank, a suitcase with a passport in it, a dead body.
There is an array of volunteer groups who do separate pieces of God's work with the Charles. It's rather like the Balkans. We've got the Charles River Watershed Association, the Charles River Conservancy, the Esplanade Association -- it goes on. What we need is a Charles River Authority, an independent, omnibus nonprofit that brings everyone under one umbrella. Egos such as they are, fat chance of that.
There are no real bad guys in the story, but rather a roster of thoughtless players, private and public, who are oblivious to the problem. Either way, the results are the same.
McNichol needs help. His $29,000 budget goes fast. He used his own credit card one year to carry the operation for awhile. (If you feel generous, try cleanupboat@yahoo.com.)
The Charles doesn't need our adoration. It needs money and help on the river. The big players -- the state, Boston, and Cambridge -- can't duck this anymore. Nor can the river users, who need to coordinate their contributions -- preferably as a permanent river compact -- or, better yet, clean up the Charles themselves. Regular river cleanup would make a rowing program sparkle.
In the meantime, hats off to my man McNichol and his volunteers for doing our dirty work.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 
