SWEAT and the Shawsheen River, 1993  Given that this publication is the SWEAT Gazette, and that SWEAT is the acronym of the Shawsheen Watershed Environmental Action Team, it seems appropriate to begin a review of our 1993 efforts with a brief description of the Shawsheen River. The Shawsheen River is a little more than 25 miles long. According to USGS cartography, it rises in Bedford, where it is joined by Elm Brook flowing through Concord from Lexington. The Shawsheen River empties into the Merrimack River in Lawrence after having flowed through Bedford, Billerica, Wilmington, Tewksbury, Andover, and North Andover. It is the only significant tributary to the Merrimack that does not have a dam between its mouth and the Atlantic Ocean, making it a natural candidate for the restoration of anadromous fish populations.  The Shawsheen River is a shallow, narrow, meandering river. Rumor has it that "shawsheen" meant "serpentine" in the language of the native Americans who lived in the area before Europeans evicted them. Oliver Wendell Holmes spelled the river's name as "Shawshine," which was the original name of the town that included areas we now know as Billerica, Carlisle, Tewksbury, and Wilmington. Looking at high-altitude photographs of the region, you notice the Concord River flowing north into the slightly larger Merrimack River. A little bit to the east of the Concord River, you notice a long meandering ribbon of undeveloped green. The ribbon bulges in some places and constricts in others, but it cannot be missed. It is too long to ignore. It stands out on the photograph like a banner of hope. That is the Shawsheen River.  Its channel is too narrow to show up on high-altitude photographs, but the surrounding land it claims as its own is not. It is longer than the Concord River, and in many places its floodplains are broader than the Concord River's. There is something very assertive about the Shawsheen River's ribbon green. Just what it asserts you can't know until you've spent time on it, in the heart of the watershed.           SWEAT folks spend a lot of time on and in the Shawsheen River. It is a magical place. The thick foliage on its banks and in its floodplains shield the river from the rude roar of traffic, and all one hears is the sound of the water and the creatures that live in, on, and near it. Some sections are, even today, even this late in the twentieth century, primordial.  The Shawsheen River's water is clear with a brownish tint that suggests the presence of a fair amount of tannin. We have yet to do any systematic water quality monitoring, so we really don't know what causes the brown tint. Despite the brown tint, the water is clear enough to distinguish between large- and smallmouth bass, brook and rainbow trout, and carp and white suckers as they swim by. You can study a snapping turtle in repose on the bottom five feet below you. You can watch a school of northern redbelly dace as they swirl around the hull of your boat. There is no other bona fide river in eastern Massachusetts with water as clear as the Shawsheen's. There is also no other river in eastern Massachusetts that supports a more diverse wildlife population.     Until recently, there was also no other river in eastern Massachusetts that was more trashed than the Shawsheen River.  As a narrow river with an even narrower channel, the Shawsheen River has suffered tremendous damage from trash alone. The trash fills the channel, trapping sediments, natural debris, and other trash as it drifts downstream. When the channel fills up, the river spreads out. When it spreads out, it slows down. When it spreads out and slows down, it exposes more water to the air and sun. This causes the water to heat up and evaporate. More water is lost to the air, and the river becomes shallower. The remaining water is quite warm. The slow, shallow, warm water provides a perfect environment for a broad range of aquatic vegetation, which takes root in the filled-in channel, creating yet another impediment to the water's flow.  It is the water's flow that creates a river, makes it what it is. It is the movement of the water's surface against the air that helps pull oxygen into the water. It is the flow that creates and sustains the river's channel and its backwaters. It is the flow that creates the microhabitats within the aquatic environment that generates the broad diversity of life unique to a healthy river.  The river's flow is the source of its recuperative powers. Without a steady flow, it cannot wash itself clean. For the last ten years, SWEAT has been working to restore the flow of the Shawsheen River so that it can sustain itself.      I started working with SWEAT as a member of the Divers' Environmental Survey (DES) in March of 1991. That first cleanup was a logistical trial to see how well it would work to have divers working the bottom with canoes overhead. It worked very well.  Since that trial, SWEAT and DES have accelerated the pace of the cleanup effort. A good estimate of the amount of debris we've pulled out of the river bottom in 1991, 1992, and 1993 is around a hundred tons, or 200,000 pounds of car parts, household debris, bottles and cans, shopping carts, industrial appliances, and every other manner of object other than airplane parts. (We haven't held a cleanup by Hanscom Field yet.)     Slowly, but surely, signs of success have been appearing. In November of 1992, I saw brook trout swimming in the river. The first one swam under the bow of my kayak as I drifted quietly downstream. The second one swam by inches from my feet as I stood looking into the water, thoroughly discouraged by the discovery of a new dump next to the river just a few minutes earlier. "Why do I even try?" I was thinking. "How can we hope to clean up the river and bring the salmon back if people won't stop dumping into it? What's the use?" and then the brook trout swam slowly by, heading upstream. There was my answer. 1992 was the first year that trout had survived the stocking/fishing trauma on the Shawsheen River in more than a decade. And the trout seen weren't rainbow trout or brown trout, but brook trout. So we've succeeded in restoring enough of the river that at least some of the "native" fish can survive. Whether we can get it clean enough that they'll reproduce is another question we're working to answer.     Then in the spring of 1993, the Shawsheen flooded, as did most of the rivers in northeastern Massachusetts. Except for the wholesale dumping of more than 10 million gallons of inadequately treated sewage into the river by the towns of Burlington and Bedford and the seepage of septic systems belonging to people who built their homes in total disregard for the health of the river they wanted to be near, the flood was a great help to the Shawsheen. It provided a much-needed flushing, and it reminded people that the floodplains along the river --- which turned into expansive lakes --- belong to the river.  Clearly, the Shawsheen River is becoming healthy enough to support a decent fish population. We saw many Great Blue Herons, Common Mergansers, and a few Ospreys all along the non-urbanized stretches of the river last spring, during and after the flood. An otter made its way upstream early in the spring, apparently having no trouble finding food. It was seen repeatedly submerging through a hole in the ice and emerging with a fish in its mouth each time. At least one Black Capped Night Heron made the Shawsheen River its feeding grounds toward the end of the summer. The mink population seems to be doing quite well, despite the intensive trapping efforts. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the beaver population. The two families of beaver that we came across in the Shawsheen early last spring were killed; we came across some of their bodies, skinned and bloated, floating among the trash at downstream cleanups.  The 1993 Shawsheen River Cleanups:  in 1993, we continued our cleanup of the Shawsheen River. We conducted seven cleanups in 1993: Tewksbury, Andover, Lawrence/North Andover, Bedford, Billerica, Tewksbury, and Billerica. 1993 was a good year for the Shawsheen River.Cleanup 1, Tewksbury:  At the first cleanup, in Tewksbury in March, the snow was still about a foot deep, and the river was in flood. We collected what trash we could from the calm backwaters, but most of the cleanup concentrated on removing a big old oak from the river. It had fallen into the river several years ago, a victim to erosion exacerbated by the channel's having been filled with trash. Bob Rauseo had been working on pieces of that tree for years. At that cleanup, there were nine of us. The water was too swift to allow any meaningful underwater work, so the divers waded into the water to wrestle the tree out of the bottom. With a chainsaw, a come-along, lots of rope, and all the strength and energy nine men could muster, the remains of that oak came out of the river. My most vivid memory from that cleanup is the sight of Joe Gobbini --- a tall, 100% Italian with a deep fondness for warmwater diving --- waving arrivederci as he drifted by in his wetsuit, feet firmly planted on an ice floe.  Cleanup 2, Andover:  The Andover cleanup took place three weeks later, and the flood hadn't finished receding yet. Even overweighted, the divers couldn't negotiate the channel. They clung to the edge of the channel and worked the calmer water. The cleanup was part of Andover's annual Earth Day cleanup, and it spawned this passage in the weekly column "On the River" that I wrote for the local paper last spring:"The second cleanup of 1993 on the Shawsheen River took place in Andover last Saturday when the town held its annual Earth Day Cleanup. People all over town were out, despite the inclement weather, clearing away the trash. The Andover Sanitation Department cruised the city loading it all into their dump trucks.There is a real benefit to having a lot of groups out working to solve the same problem. We had been pulling things out of the river for about three hours, and we were already tired, when we came upon an area where somebody had been dumping. It wasn't as bad as the Pines area of Billerica, but it was more than some of us were prepared for after three hours of work. The sight of nearly a hundred tires neatly stacked on the edge of the river bank, just waiting to fall in, compounded the sense of hopelessness. "If people do this, how can we possibly make a difference?" was the basic feeling. Despite our dispirited moods, we started filling garbage bags. As we worked, three young men came to the edge of the bank and asked what we were doing. Suspecting this might be a confrontation with the dumpers themselves, somebody rather defiantly said, "We're cleaning out the river. What does it look like we're doing?""Great!" was the response. "We just spent the whole morning pulling all of these tires off the bank here. Some of them were even in the water!"The ensuing conversation was little more than a ritual condemnation of people who trash the world, but it encouraged us, and it encouraged the three men up on the bank.ÝThey had stopped after pulling up the tires because there was just too much more trash left after all that work. In the following hour, we got the rest of it. We felt a lot better, and the river looked a lot better.  Cleanup 3, Lawrence/North Andover  The Lawrence/North Andover cleanup was a breakthrough for the SWEAT/DES team. Early in May, Bob Rauseo from SWEAT and I met with the Lawrence CityCorps group in Lawrence. CityCorps is a federally funded work/study program for socially disadvantaged youth. We told them about the Shawsheen River, SWEAT, and DES. We offered to show them the Shawsheen River in Lawrence, and we asked them to join us on the cleanup in Lawrence later that month. A week later, Bob brought two rafts to the Shawsheen River where it forms the border between North Andover and Lawrence. He filled both rafts to overflowing with CityCorps folks. We took off downstream with me leading in my kayak, clearing obstructions so the rafts could get through. It was the first time many of them had seen the river. They joined us a week later for the Lawrence/North Andover cleanup. We concentrated on tires and managed to pull 78 car and truck tires out of the river by noon in a stretch less than a quarter mile long. The experience generated this text:  The most gratifying thing about the cleanup for me was that I was moving upstream toward the site of the last two Shawsheen River Cleanups in Lawrence.As I pulled myself along the bottom, I encountered tires every few feet. Then suddenly there were none. I pulled myself along the bottom for another ten yards not encountering any tires before I surfaced and looked around. I had reached the area where, last fall, Tom Gloria had been maniacally pulling tires out of the bottom. Despite our telling him that the cleanup was done (12:00 noon), he kept going until his tank was empty. (We were a little concerned for him because he had been up all the previous night working and had come to the cleanup from the office, obviously thoroughly exhausted.) I had swum all the way upstream past the area where Tom had run out of air, and I wasn't finding any tires. Wow! There's really something to these cleanups! The trash doesn't really regenerate!This cleanup was a success for another reason. We had finally gotten some of Lawrence's youth to participate. They seemed very pleased with what they had accomplished, and the managers of the CityCorps program were very happy about their participation. (At one point, just after I and five City Corps folks had wrestled a needlessly cut tree out of the current into a position parallel with the bank, one of the managers turned around and looked at the now-flowing river. "Listen!" he yelled. "The river's saying `Thank you!'") I love doing this stuff. Cleanup 4, Bedford: The Bedford cleanup in June was one of those tests of will. The Bedford stretch of the Shawsheen River has suffered from malign neglect for a long time. I showed up at the appointed hour on Saturday morning, and the only other person there was Dan Fabiano. We put the new DES garbage barge and Dan's canoe in the water, and we headed upstream. Dan paddled, and I walked. We reached an area that the Bedford DPW has been using as a dump for years, and we set to work. By the time we decided we had filled both our boats, it was 10:30 and time to head back downstream to unload. Both boats were too full to float. We ended up making several trips. It was a hot, cloudless day, and by the time we had moved the last heavy object to the pile for retrieval by the DPW the following Monday, we could hardly bear the thought of walking all the way back to our cars, which were only about 300 yards away. It was while we were working in the river, pulling barrels and spools of conduit out of the bottom, that Dan asked me, "If I hadn't been here today, would you have stayed and done this anyway?" I told him I would. "It's not often you have the chance to do something on this scale and have somebody ready to dispose of the stuff properly," I said. "You have to take advantage of it when the opportunity is there."  When I finally scraped the energy together to walk back to my car, I discovered a note from Bob LeBeouf, one of the SWEAT founders. He and his brother had been working downstream from us. They had pulled an equal amount of debris from the river. It turned out not to have been such a poor effort that day after all. The Bedford DPW picked up both piles the following week.  Cleanup 5, Billerica  The first Billerica cleanup was one of those impromptu acts that make working with Bob Rauseo a real pleasure. I had been out on the Shawsheen River for an early morning paddle in Billerica one morning, and I saw a couple large objects in the bottom in an area where we had never held a cleanup. It was probably the twentieth time I'd seen them. One was a barrel, and the other was a large round metallic thing of unknown origin. I spent the rest of that paddle trying to think my way through the logistics of holding a cleanup in that area, in the middle of the floodplain, with wooded marsh on all sides. The more I thought about it, the more impossible an organized cleanup seemed, and the more aggravating the presence of those objects became.When I got home, I called Bob Rauseo and asked him whether he'd be willing to join me some morning to pull those two things out of the water. Later that week, we put my kayak and the new DES garbage barge, a 9-foot tub of a plastic-coated fiberglass 5-feet wide and 3-feet deep, in the back of Bob's truck. We tied the barge to the stern loop on my kayak. Bob got into the barge, and I towed him downstream. By the time we finally reached the two objects we'd set out for, Bob was wading in the river, walking the barge. There wasn't enough room for him in the boat anymore. The barrel in the water turned out to be one of those blue plastic drums used to haul hazardous waste. It had been perforated with .22 caliber bullets, presumably to sink it. By the time we reached it, there was nothing but silt and water in it. The barrel sat lightly on top the pile in the barge.ÝThe other object proved to be the drum and motor of a commercial laundromat dryer. The coin box was empty. It weighed about 150 pounds after it had been emptied of silt and water. We ended up leaving it up on the bank. We'll get it sometime later this year when we go back with the other DES garbage barge, an 11-foot metal skiff with 1-foot sides over which it should be easy to lift the dryer drum. We left the contents of the garbage barge in a corner by the takeout. Bob retrieved the pile three months later during a break in the last Billerica cleanup of 1993.  Cleanup 6, Tewksbury:  The Tewksbury cleanup in August was a refreshing reminder that we are making progress. We worked a section of the river that SWEAT has cleaned up no fewer than a dozen times over the last decade. We were given nothing more than a five-yarder dumpster to fill. On a previously unworked section of the Shawsheen River, the ten people who helped on that cleanup would have filled a dumpster that small in less than half an hour. Instead, we worked all four hours and came up with no more trash than the dumpster could handle with careful packing. After seeing how little debris there was to recover in that area, I took two of the teenagers downstream with me and started working on the removal of the debris of a breached dam. (SWEAT and DES usually think of the Shawsheen as having only four dams, all in Andover, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' database of dams shows that the Shawsheen has twenty-two dams. Eighteen of those dams have long since been breached, and all that remains of them are boulders and stones -- hazards to navigation and obstructions to fish movement in summer's low water.) The dam had been built on either side of an island in the middle of the channel. The three of us cleared the channel on one side of the island. Later this year we'll go back and continue clearing that side. Cleanup 7, Billerica: The final cleanup of 1993 on the Shawsheen River took place in Billerica in October. This was the most satisfying cleanup of the year for me. In 1992, we held a cleanup in the same section of the river, an area we now think of as "Garside Bay" because Tim and Kathy Garside's house serves as the base of operations for the cleanups, with the dumpster in their driveway and a barbecue on their front lawn afterward.  In 1992, we held the Billerica cleanup at the same site. The island in the river behind the Garside's house --- the remnant of another dam constructed to create a pool for vacationers to swim in --- was a small mountain of garbage, and the bottom of the river was a wet landfill. After that cleanup, the area was clean, and the island looked like an island rather than an uncapped dump. We discovered a problem on that first cleanup, though. The bank of the river behind the Yeo property next door to the Garside was a wall of tires, barrels, culverts, shopping carts, and all manner of miscellaneous debris. The Yeo family had driven pipes into the bank and hung tires on them. On the shelves thus created, they dumped everything else, covering it all in successive layers of yard waste. The bank was about twenty feet high and at least ten feet deep. Photographs and video of the site were submitted to the Billerica Conservation Commission and Board of Health immediately after the cleanup. We were looking for an Enforcement Order. We offered to clear the stuff out if the owner would let us. Nothing happened for a year, despite periodic calls to the Conservation Commission and the Board of Health.  During the 1993 spring flood, I paddled the six miles of Shawsheen River in Billerica. The previous November, a group of nine boats traveled the Billerica stretch of the river in what we called a "river sweep." In that sweep, we posted No Dumping signs and picked up any trash found on the surface, including tires. The purpose was to allow us to gauge the amount of debris entering the river during the winter months. Except for a couple places toward the end of the Billerica section of the river when all our boats were too full to pick anything else out of the river, we got every tire that could be seen. When I explored the same section of the river five months later, I found no tires in the river until I got to the Yeo property. The flood had swept tires off the wall, baring a new layer of garbage and littering the river with tires as far as half a mile downstream.  I went to the Conservation Commission with the video and photographs and asked them for an Enforcement Order. They agreed, and issued one two weeks later.  Then nothing happened. Five months later, in early October, I went back to the Conservation Commission on an informal basis to find out what was going on. I discovered that Mrs. Yeo had called the chairman of the Board of Selectmen. Afraid that she would lose her home due to the expense of complying with the Enforcement Order, she pled poverty and asked for protection from the Conservation Commission. I called the chairman of the Board of Selectmen and explained that we just wanted to clan up the river and had no intention of ruining Mrs. Yeo. I asked him to get her permission for us to go on her property and begin removing the garbage. We promised to remove it and dispose of it for her, free of charge. He made the call, and Mrs. Yeo gave us permission.  On the day of the cleanup, Canelas Waste Management donated the largest dumpster I had ever seen. It was a sixty-yarder, about the same size as a fully appointed one-bedroom mobile home. We filled it in four hours with the garbage from the Yeo site and the debris pulled out of the river on two previous informal cleanups in Billerica. The Yeo site still has another two or three major cleanups' worth of garbage, but we pared the wall back far enough that it is unlikely to release much trash in the spring floods of 1994.  1993 was a good year for the Shawsheen River. 1994 will be a bettr one. We hope you'll join us. very pair of hands makes a difference. As Bob Rauseo will tell you:  We don't want your money. We don't want your technology. We want you! John Hicks-CourantDivers' Environmental Survey Shawsheen Watershed Environmental Action Team Billerica, MA January, 1994.