Cleaning the Shawsheen
by John Hicks-Courant
johnhc@TheWorld.com

Readers of the last two issues of the Shawsheen Trib will have noticed the basic Editorial Policy unilaterally imposed by the new editor. Each issue is 10 pages long and is dedicated to a specific topic. This issue is dedicated to the subject of Cleaning the Shawsheen..
  Last September, a group of nine hearty SRWA paddlers put in just below the Balmoral roll dam in Andover. Their intention was to paddle the four miles to the outflow into the Merrimack River.
   It should be mentioned that this trip was the last of a series that began in Bedford in April. For the most part, the river seems remarkably free of manufactured debris (tires, refrigerators, shopping carts, etc.) from Bedford through Billerica and Tewksbury to Essex Street in Andover. This is the direct result of more than a decade of determinedly persistent cleanups conducted by the Shawsheen Watershed Environmental Action Team (SWEAT). For several of the SRWA paddlers last September, this was their first exposure to the river through North Andover and Lawrence, a section of the river that has received less attention from SWEAT due to logistical challenges.
   The SWEAT people who joined the SRWA, understandably proud of their successes upstream, had many times described The Bad Old Days when it was impossible to paddle through Billerica and Tewksbury because of all the trash in the river. Back then you would paddle a quarter of a mile and spot more than a hundred tires. Newcomers to the river, paddling unhindered through the pristine river corridor, tended to accredit these descriptions to hyperbole.
   That September trip proved as much a trip back to The Bad Old Days as a trip to the Merrimack. The water was low. There were tires everywhere. There must be 2000 tires in the river bottom through the end of Andover to the Merrimack. Generally speaking, in places where SWEAT has not cleaned again and again, where you see one tire in the bottom you will find at least three when you pull the first one out.
   "This is what the whole river used to look like," the old SWEAT hands told their fellow SRWA paddlers, who were flabbergasted while the old SWEAT hands were depressed. After years of enjoying the fruits of a decade's labor upstream, here was the problem again, or rather, still.
   There is a world of difference between paddling a clean river teeming with wildlife and wending one's careful way around reefs of tires that have dammed the river's flow. This is true especially when it's the same river, in which you're aware that the water you're paddling today may be the very same water you paddled twenty miles upstream yesterday.
   That low-water trip last September resulted in a degree of resolve among all of the paddlers that the river hasn't seen in almost six years. That is, by the time we pulled out of the water in the Merrimack in Lawrence, a Fellowship of the (Steel-Belted-and- Possibly-Steel-Rimmed Rubber) Ring had formed. We are going to get those tires out of the last sixth of the Shawsheen River. We think it will take at least three years to get that last section of the river into the same shape as, for example, the First Meadow in Bedford and Billerica. This is how we will do it:

    Frequent trips throughout the year from the Balmoral roll dam to the Merrimack

    Every tire a canoe can hold will be pulled out and ferried to one of six predesignated holding areas (a kind of poor man's Transfer Station) on each and every trip, regardless of who's making the trip and how many others are with him/her.

    Twice a year (tentatively August and September), we will contract with a tire-disposal enterprise to retrieve and properly dispose of the tires we've collected from the holding areas on the given date.

    This is the basic procedure employed by SWEAT for a little more than a decade, and we have reason to believe that it will succeed here. The larger problem is that there appears to be an active community of industrial tire dumpers operating in the Lawrence area. We will need police and political support to stop this and ensure the punishment of the dumpers. When we issue a call for support for a public hearing on the subject in Lawrence, we hope you will decide to attend.

Conducting a Cleanup
by John Hicks-Courant
johnhc@TheWorld.com

If you're going to participate in the cleanup of a river, especially the Shawsheen River, it will help you to know how to do it. That's the point of this article. This article has six parts and a conclusion:

    Dressing for a cleanup

    Useful tools for river cleanups

    What to look for and how to look for it

    How to extract what you find

    How to load your boat

    How to unload your boat
     

   Experience has taught us that no cleanup should go more than four hours if it can be avoided. This prevents burnout, on the one hand, and allows people to curb their hunger with a meal by early afternoon. 
   I'm hoping that, by the end of this article, you will have gained some understanding of what cleaning a river involves and how to go about doing it.

Dressing for a Cleanup

   There are three things that you can take for granted when you come out for a river cleanup with SWEAT and the SRWA: you will get wet; you will get dirty; and you will get tired.

Early Spring/Late Fall

   In spring, when the water in the Shawsheen River is high with snowmelt and spring rains, cleanups consist of what we call "river sweeps," in which canoers paddle the river collecting all floating foreign objects. This is also the time when we can get out of the boats and extract tires and other cast-off objects that have landed away from the main channel in the floodplain. This is impossible later in the year, when the sedge grass, loosestrife, and cattails have grown up to hide the garbage.
   The best way to dress for this kind of cleanup is in layers. Be sure to bring a sealable dry bag to put your shorn layers into as the morning progresses and as you and the air both warm up. You'll want to wear calf-high rubber Wellington boots. These can be purchased at any hardware or gardening store at reasonably inexpensive prices. You'll also want to wear work gloves with thick palms. (Don't bother with the thin cotton gardening gloves. They rip to uselessness almost as soon as you've put them on, and they do nothing to protect your hands from sharply jagged corners.)

Late Spring/Summer/Early Fall

  This is the season when the most work gets done. The water's low, and it's relatively warm. This means that, except in the various pools where the water is likely over your head, you will be walking in the river beside your boat. So you should wear long pants such as jeans, and light shoes or boots, that can get wet. A t-shirt is what we typically wear. Each of us has a set of "cleanup clothes" that have seen hundreds of cleanups. Some of the SWEAT folks show up at the cleanups looking as dirty as they will at the end. The mud is in the fiber of their pants and shirts.

Useful Tools

  There are several standard tools each canoe carries through a cleanup. Sometimes all of the tools get used, and sometimes only one gets used:

Canoe — Sturdy, plastic or composite canoes are best. It should be able to withstand scratches, gouges, and severe scraping without complaint.

   Potato Rake — This is a four-tined claw at the end of a four-foot handle. Each tine of the curved claw is about six inches long. These come with plastic or wooden handles. Our experience tells us that the wooden-handled potato rakes are most effective and are more easily retrievable when dropped into the water. These are used to reach into the river at depths up to four feet to pull things out without leaving the boat. They are also useful for reaching into the brush and under low-hanging branches without leaving the boat.

   Come-Along — This is a cranking device that you attach by one end to an anchoring object such as a tree or a car bumper. At the other end is a cable with a hook, which you attach to the object you need to pull out of the bottom. The come-along has several orders of magnitude more strength than the strongest among us. The only drawback to the come-along is that it's really only useful in wooded areas where trees border the river. In the meadows, which constitute something like 70% of the Shawsheen River, the come-along is just ballast.

   Pry Bar — There are actually two of these. One is the standard "crow bar" such as you see in car jacks and burglar tools. You should paint several blaze orange stripes on this so you can see it in the murk when you drop it in the river. The other pry bar is the five-foot long, heavy iron bar. Pry bars are used to lever everything from tires to bathtubs out of the river bottom.

  Rope — You'll often need rope for the come-along, which has a ten-foot-long cable at one end but nothing but a hook at the other. When the nearest tree is thirty feet away, you need at least thirty-five feet of rope. Rope is also useful for extracting large objects from the river bottom when one end is attached to the heavy object in the bottom of the river and the other end is attached to a truck bumper. These uses aside, the most common use for rope in the river is to control the direction of the fall of a large limb or tree to prevent damage to other trees or people.

  Garbage Bags — The large 40-gallon "Contractor's Bag" garbage bags work best. They're heavy duty, and they can hold a lot. You use them to hold all of the bottles, cans, and other debris that you simply dumped into the bottom of your boat during the cleanup.

Finding Foreign Objects

  There are three things you should remember when looking for manufactured debris in the river:

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