fragment, c. 2011

I chose the Housatonic because I am a river lover, and I’ve been a champion of the Housatonic ever since I splashed my kayak under a railroad trestle years ago in Great Barrington on a listless July afternoon and took her south, way south, to the Connecticut border. The trip was enchanting – I saw bank swallows, pale carp, heron, and a loping water road through Berkshire County previously unknown to me. At the same time, the trip was squalid; my guidebook warned that the muddy river bottom and much of the wildlife were still afflicted by PCBs, the carcinogenic compound that is the legacy of Pittsfield’s General Electric plant. In many places, the riverbanks were littered with trash – a reminder that our waterways are often neglected and used as dumping grounds for our refuse.
Enchanted and squalid. Those words reflected, to me, the conundrum of what it meant to be a teen. Would my students learn to love the river as I had? Could my colleagues and I take them to the river? If my JRC students wanted to get out and do something after the morning academics, perhaps Housatonic history, ecology and advocacy would engage them.
I returned to the role of the researcher: My role was not to make anyone do anything. Nor was it my role as a researcher and instructor to force the roles of junior riverkeeper, custodian, or advocate on my students. I could not enter the study thinking that it was my job to give them (or my study participants) a voice; it assumed they did not previously have one. However, it was my role to understand how assumptions, hierarchies, the things people say, they way they say them, where they say them, and previously unseen connections (those loping river roads again) came together to create the experiential mosaic.