Growing with the flow

Boston's Charles River is known for its picturesque sailboats, the Fourth of July Boston Pops fireworks, the Red Sox 2004 championship Rolling Rally duck tour, a world-renowned regatta, the song "Dirty Water" and an infamous dive by Governor William Weld in 1996.

The Mystic River, Boston Harbor's other river, is famous for the ills of society.

In 1990, Charles Stuart plunged to his death from the Tobin (formerly Mystic River) Bridge. Recently members of the Chelsea Yacht Club have had to move their boats after chunks of the Tobin Bridge rained down on them. Then there's the weekly stoppage of traffic on the bridge as the Liquid Nitrogen Gas tanker crosses into the Mystic in a homeland security nightmare. In the movie "Mystic River" Sean Penn dumps a body into the murky waters. Even Van Morrison's lyrical "Into The Mystic" -- which many believe is about the river because a once-struggling Morrison lived in Cambridge -- is likely about a different river.

Most people only know Mystic River from a passing view from the Tobin Bridge, an industrial witches' brew of gas, oil, and steel companies. But just beyond the aging Amelia Earhart Dam, within sight of the Bridge, a different Mystic emerges, one that is, in fact, quite beautiful. Blue herons skim the water and turtles bask undisturbed on logs in the sun. One recent summer evening, a rainbow was perfectly reflected on the deserted river.

"It's gorgeous," says Everett Marine Police Officer Patrick Johnston on a tour upriver he often gives to legislators and environmentalists.

Indeed, the tide may have turned for this much-maligned river. Just before Earth Day in April, amidst little fanfare, the EPA New England announced a collaborative Mystic River Initiative to make the river swimmable and fishable by 2010. And a host of groups, led by the Mystic River Watershed Association and 22 communities that line the watershed, have hopped onboard the cleanup. A house bill to establish a Mystic River Water Quality Commission is scheduled for a September hearing on Beacon Hill. Governments along this most urbanized river in Massachusetts are also working to provide better river access. But, unlike the Charles, which gets a healthy B+ grade from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Mystic gets a D. That means bacteria levels are unsafe for swimming 48 percent of the time.

"It's a little unfair to compare the Charles and the Mystic," says Dave Deegan of EPA New England. "The EPA has intensely focused on the Charles for 11 years. This is the first year we are concentrating on the Mystic. We would be delighted to get to the point where it is as equally clean."

Formed by retreating glaciers 10,000 years ago, the Mystic River Watershed was first named "Missi-tuck" or Great Tidal River. Its watershed spans 76 square miles from Reading to Boston Harbor, including eight of the 15 most stressed environments in the state. Its half-million population is crammed into roughly 1 percent of Massachusetts land area. The Mystic, home of the first schooner built by Governor John Winthrop in 1631, and later a 500 clipper ship building industry, has been industrialized and polluted since the mid-19th century. The lower Mystic is especially heavily industrialized and the river's sediments contain centuries of misuse, including lead, petroleum, and arsenic. It's been dammed to prevent flooding and it's been damned by misuse.

Today it is a working man's river. Nobody is passing the Grey Poupon here. Many of the communities, especially on the lower end of the Mystic, are poorer than those on the Charles, so they have less political clout, more industrial polluters, and immigrant populations speaking English as their second language.

"The people of the Mystic include low-income residents who don't have the means to let their voices be heard," says Caroline Broderick, executive director of the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyWRA).

"We don't get a lot of press and when we do it's in a negative vein," says Broderick.

Tour the river and you can feel the pulse of the Commonwealth.

In Charlestown, on the edge of the Mystic in a cloud of dirt, John Harrington, 17, is nabbed stealing second base. It's a bang-bang play in a championship game for bragging rights at the Kelly Baseball Diamond. Harrington, the third out of the inning, just sits there in the dirt, his hands up in dismay. Behind him are tons of rusted metal being loaded into a rusty ship destined for overseas. It is a playground next to a busy port. Each week, when the massive LNG tanker invades the Mystic River with machine gun-toting Coast Guard boats, state police helicopters overhead and divers in the dirty water searching piers for explosives, nobody bats an eye. The current inhabitants are no longer polluters, Johnston says, but there's so much debris on the river's floor the State Police Underwater Dive Team refers to the area near the Distrigas terminal as "the junkyard."

"Where are we going to go if it blows?" says his father, John Harrington III, shrugging behind the backstop. "What are you going to do if it goes? Where can you run to?"

In Charlestown and Chelsea on a hot summer day, kids still jump in, despite crowded shipping in the lower Mystic River. "My sons still do it," says Harrington, staring at the river. "I did it when I was a kid. It's still the same water and I'm still alive."

Says Johnston, "There are people who do attempt to play here and fish here. For some it's some sustenance to feed their people. But more and more people are using the river for recreational purposes."

On a Sunday afternoon, Cory Lancaster of Medford, an environmental engineer, has just finished gliding his kayak down the brackish river, through the Earhart Dam, under the Tobin Bridge and into Boston Harbor, where that other river also empties. From here, downtown Boston is fewer than five minutes away.

"I think it's great," says Lancaster, sweat gleaming on his brow. "It's a pretty little river. It's less crowded than the Charles. You might see just one or two obnoxious power boaters. I know CSOs [combined sewer overflows] are still an issue, so I don't swim in it and I keep my mouth shut."

At the other end of the river, where it slowly meanders out of the Lower Mystic Lakes on the Medford-Arlington line, people are also keeping their mouths shut for a different reason.

"It's the best-kept secret in this city," says John Chiesa, manager of the Medford Boat Club, which is smack-dab between the Upper and Lower Mystic lakes. If Everett is the beast of the river, this is the beauty. There is water skiing, tubing, water slides, and beach.

"People say, 'Oh my God, we didn't know this was here,' " Chiesa says as he surveys the idyllic shores that lead into the mouth of the river. "I always say that if we blindfolded you and took you on a two-hour ride and said, 'Where are you?' you'd say Vermont or New Hampshire. That's the true beauty of the place."

Fish are returning, too. Each spring, volunteers wade into the chilly water to form a human fish ladder to boost the spawning herring from the Lower Mystic Lake into buckets over the crumbling dam and into the Upper Mystic Lake. This year, they counted 10,000 of them.

Now on a recent steamy August afternoon, a group from Woburn wades in the river's mouth, their clothes hung on tree limbs on shore. One naked man surprised by boaters dives into the water for cover. Then he smiles. He's cool and covered.

Downriver, Gary Caldwell prefers this dirty water over the Charles.

Caldwell, head rowing coach of Tufts University, left the Charles River to practice on the Mystic and its tributary, the Malden River, on which Tufts built a $2.6 million boathouse.

"We used to share space at Harvard's boathouse," says Caldwell. "We had a nice relationship. But a tenant is a tenant."

Rowing on the Malden and into the Mystic offers some plusses, Caldwell says. "The area is an undiscovered jewel. The Charles was getting more and more crowded. [Here] it's calm. It's terrific. It's a good place for us. You see coyotes, we had a bald eagle, red-tailed hawks, swans and carp 2-feet long."

At the Riverside Yacht Club, whose dock sits in the middle of the Mystic River in Medford, old-timers sit around and talk about the river -- how Route 93 changed its course and how the Amelia Earhart Dam made it a flat tide with brackish water. "We used to jump from the buildings in Malden and it was more than 20 feet deep, now no more, it's like 6 feet deep, " says one old-timer who refused to be identified.

"I would guess 98 percent of the people of Medford have never been on the Mystic River," says Medford's mayor Michael McGlynn, who as a kid used to keep his sneakers on when he jumped off the Route 93 overpass when it was under construction in 1961. "It's come a long way from all those sulfur gases. When I was a kid, some of the little tributaries were orange and blue and green water. It was bad."

Downtown Medford was built with its back to the river, which McGlynn acknowledges was a mistake. He envisions boardwalks in west Medford square and water taxis running up and down the river. What he calls "connectivity" between parks on both sides of the river.

A boat in the Lower Mystic Lake in Arlington can navigate into the Atlantic Ocean. Someday, bike and pedestrian paths should go all the way to the sea as well, advocates agree.

"It's going to make a big comeback," says McGlynn. "Our goal is to bring people back to the river."

Tomorrow, volunteers from MyWRA will remove some of the water lilies, overfed by nitrogen runoffs from lawns, which are starting to choke the river.

"It's unfortunate," says Patricia Barry, Medford's environmental agent. "There's been a horrendous influx of vegetation."

Volunteers for MyWRA are needed.

"The Clean Water Act is an unfunded mandate," says Barry. "Where are you going to find the money when people are more concerned with hiring policemen and teachers."

And fixing the river is not so easy. "The major source of pollution is old sewage pipes in the Mystic River watershed," which leak and overflow after rains, says Broderick, adding that Winchester's sewer pipes were built in 1879. "It's not a sexy problem and the solution is pipe by pipe." But Johnston remembers something from his childhood that pulls him closer to the water.

"When I was 6 I lived in Charlestown," he says. "We found an abandoned rowboat and peddled around like conquering heroes."

Until he fell in.

"I couldn't swim a lick. I was lucky the kids still in the boat pulled me by the scruff of the neck. I was so covered in grease and oil it took my mother three days to get the grease and oil out of my belly button. So I was baptized in the Mystic, and that's why I'm still here today, to get it clean so I never have to scrub that hard again."