The Cleanup of the Bayou
by John Hicks-Courant
johnhc@TheWorld.com
 
We have, as of this writing, conducted six major cleanups of the Bayou and one late-season
sweep of the same section. For those of you who don’t understand what we mean by “the Bayou,”
it is the section of the river between the Rte. 114 bridge in North Andover to Costello Park
in Lawrence. We call it the Bayou because, in middling to high water, the channel is so
ill-defined that you can easily get sidetracked in a backwater that goes nowhere.
 
The main reason the channel got lost was that it filled with trash to the point where it
could hold only just so much water. Any amount of water above that limit, and the channel
overflowed to create the Bayou. So, here we are at the end of the second season of a concerted
effort to change the Bayou into the Twelfth Woods. How are we doing?
 
Well, at last count, we have pulled almost 800 tires from the Bayou alone in the last two years,
and the results have been visibly spectacular. When we did our September canoe trip from below
the Balmoral dam in Andover to the Merrimack River, we had reasonably high water, and I paddled through the Bayou without even a moment’s hesitation about where the channel might be. This section of the river has already reached the stage where the sight of a tire in the bottom
jumps out at you.  That’s progress.
 
 This is what cleaning the Bayou looks like, with canoes loaded past the gunnels with tires and assorted debris.