My Green Manifesto Read Online Free PDF Page B

prank. He must have been overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible problem of greening the Charles. Why impossible? Because the land he needed, if he were to re-plant the river’s banks, had been owned or appropriated by individuals and corporations, and had been for decades. How could he possibly convince them that they should relinquish something they thought theirs? Did he glimpse right away that this would be his life’s work, did he follow the vision from the start? No, it would have seemed preposterous. And if he had allowed himself to get excited, it would have led to excitement’s opposite: panic and despair.
    I wonder when it started to change for him. When did the fear and anxiety turn into something else? When did that frozen feeling in his brain begin to melt into momentum? Because, that is the thing about impossible tasks. Yes, they are intimidating; yes, they are daunting; yes, they can paralyze us. But they also can excite us, challenge us, enlarge us. What if I can really do this? he must have thought at some point. Anyone who has tackled anything big—building a house, fighting a battle, writing a book—knows the joy of the moment when the tide finally turns. And if the task is Quixotic, all the better. In his book, Life Work, the poet Donald Hall records the moment when he asked the sculptor Henry Moore what “the meaning of life” was. Moore replied: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing—it must be something you cannot possibly do!” Exactly! Perhaps there was even a point where Dan started to relish how absurd, how huge, the task at hand was.

    Tell me to save the world and I will panic. Some jobs are simply too big, too daunting. Too much for one individual. But tell me to save a chunk of that world, a river say, and I might just become engaged. Give me something to work at, to work with, outside myself, and I will.

FIGHTING WORDS
    I’ve always liked the word “turtle.” Like “boing” or “scrotum” it seems innately comic. Today turtles, specifically painted turtles, are my companions; over the course of the afternoon I see hundreds of them. Almost despite myself, I’m getting to know their yellow and dark-green striped heads, the orange under their shells, the glistening water on those shells before they plop into the water. It’s a beautiful sight, but let’s face it: This marsh is not exactly pristine and in the black banks of muck I see tennis balls and beer bottles and, mysteriously, dozens of orange golf balls. When I finally emerge from the marsh, I pass a dock with a large American flag, unfurled for the coming holiday, and, next to the dock, a massive fire pit on the riverbank.
    It isn’t until mid-afternoon that I pass the first human being I’ve seen since leaving Dan this morning. This is an amazing fact considering I’ve been paddling through the suburban towns of Medfield, Millis, and Sherborn. It’s a guy about my age fishing under a bridge. He claims to have caught eighteen fish—most recently a catfish and a bass. The Charles, I know, used to be a dead place. “Dirty Water,” as the song went, so even the possibility that he has caught this many is reassuring. The guy asks me to look for a lure he lost downstream and I do after shouting goodbye.
    Late in the afternoon I see another kayaker. Strangely though, rather than a feeling of companionship, I experience a prickly irritation, something maybe not too dissimilar
to the way the great blue heron feels upon seeing me. What is this guy doing on my river? Of course I shout hello but it might be more honest to emit a heron-like sproak! The moment passes soon enough, though, and I am alone again. I paddle below a railroad trestle, navigate a field of sunken logs, and enter the Rocky