Clearwater

I woke up with Pete’s voice in my head and Marley on my chest. 

 

My life flows on in endless song

Above Earth's lamentation

I hear the real, though far off hymn

That hails the new creation

Above the tumult and the strife

I hear the music ringing;

It sounds an echo in my soul

How can I keep from singing?

 

What though the tempest loudly roars

I hear the truth, it liveth

What though the darkness round me close

Songs in the night it giveth

No storm can shake my inmost calm

While to that rock I'm clinging

Since love is lord of Heaven and Earth

How can I keep from singing?

 

I sing it to Gretchen while I am dusting her off because she decided to crawl behind the unused stove for some inexplicable feline reason.  Gretchen, I have learned, is a cat who does not appreciate any form of grooming by humans, but she approves of the song and starts to purr. 

 

Washing the dishes as rain pours down outside the kitchen window, a very welcome break in the heat, I think maybe Pete came to mind because the Clearwater was kicked out of the tall ships parade that passed near my house last Saturday, escorted away by the Coast Guard. They had a couple of messages on their sail, which they do often. Neither was particularly controversial to my mind. “Save the Clean Water Act” - who is against clean water??? 

 

But I know that Trump and his robber baron buddies oppose environmental rules because they think protecting the earth is reducing their already obscene profits.  Somehow the idea that if we don’t have a planet, there will be no more profits and nothing to spend them on doesn’t seem to dawn on them. Even if they think they are protected by their bunkers or that there will be a moon colony, neither of those would be anything like the pleasant lives they are accustomed to.  And apparently what happens to their grandchildren does not matter to them, either.

 

Growing up in progressive NYC when I did meant growing up surrounded by Pete Seeger.  We sang his songs in pre-school and our elementary school chorus.  We sat around him on the cold floor of the library basement listening to him sing/tell the story of Abiyoyo.  We folded origami cranes with him, our small hands struggling to get the folds right.  And year after year, we sat in the audience at Carnegie Hall while he and Arlo did their thanksgiving concert right up until just a few months before Pete’s death in 2013  He was frail then, and Arlo had been using his children and grandchildren to help carry the show for several years.  That last year, they had decided to do only his songs, and when Pete made his way to the stage, the whole audience was on their feet, chanting “Pete, Pete.” 

 

Clearwater was Pete’s project, a replica schooner he and a group of activists built in 1968 as a way of starting a movement to clean up and protect the Hudson River.  Since 1969, the Clearwater has sailed up and down the Hudson spreading environmental education and folk music.  Generations of children have gone on class trips on the Clearwater, watching them scoop up tanks full of the river and then show them what they’d gotten.  Clearwater’s lobbying and activism has had a huge impact on the river.  From the extremely polluted river it was back then, it has become clean enough to swim in north of NYC in the mid to upper estuary, near Pete’s home in Beacon, and further up.

 

I had been on the Clearwater as a kid, all of us pulling on the ropes in time to the sea shanties, but I got really involved in junior high.  I was in charge of the summer camp daily newsletter, and I got in trouble for refusing to censor it, the same issues I had with my school paper during the school year.  One of my friends at the camp had a mother who was involved in Clearwater, and hearing about the kerfluffle she invited me to write for Clearwater’s newsletter, the River Rag.  I wrote about various things like the Hudson River Greenway, which was just a concept then.  Once I had their confidence, I got my big assignment - to interview Jim Florio, the Governor of NJ, about incinerators.  I had to do it on the phone to hide how young I was.  They must have thought I was at least 18 because after that interview, they started sending me campaign mail.  That was the article that earned me Pete’s praise, in the form of a type written letter signed with his typical little banjo drawing next to his name.  Eventually I got involved in other things like ACT UP and paper newsletters went out of style, having been replaced by the internet, but I have always kept an eye on the goings-on at Clearwater, showing up for a fundraiser or a potluck or the music festival now and then.  It was at a Clearwater potluck that I once met a man with two broken arms from tripping over his cats, something that has made me proceed carefully when mine are swirling underfoot.

 

If the Coast Guard’s goal was to silence the Clearwater’s message, they could not have picked a worse way to do it because the number of people watching the ships go by was finite, but the number of people reached by the media and social media coverage is endless.  I am not involved enough anymore to know whether Clearwater knew they were risking being ejected by hoisting that banner, but either way, they got the message out there.