(3 of 4)
On the river, these two behave toward each other with the casual care of brothers; they intuit each other's presence, but they rarely speak, except in a code born of their joint mission and of the fact that "we talk 10 times a day." One will say, "Smith called. He didn't like what we wrote." The other will say, "Did you read what the EPA said yesterday... Once they acknowledge that, they're screwed." I have no idea what they're talking about, but everything has the tone of frontline bulletins. Standing beside Kennedy near the bow, I realize he looks like a Kennedy. He has made me forget his lineage until, as part of something else he is saying, he adds, "when my uncle was in the White House."
As we head upriver, away from the power plants, I ask whether the river, let alone, would repair itself. Not always, they say. The toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs, which were discharged into the river by General Electric plants until the company agreed to stop, do not biodegrade; they have to be removed. Pollutants have a cumulative effect--what Cronin calls "the death of a thousand cuts." An individual polluter says, "What I alone am doing is not harming this river," which may be so. But Kennedy and Cronin insist the plants that we passed--four in five minutes--are working together, even if they adhere to EPA standards, to slowly destroy the estuary ecosystem.
Different pollutants work differently. Some, such as PCBs, are subtle. A female striped bass produces 6 million eggs in a lifetime. If some die from PCBs, it won't be noticed. But humans are also affected when they eat fish contaminated by PCBs; the chemicals can cause cancer and disrupt the functioning of hormones in the body. Other forms of pollution, like nitrate and phosphate runoff from farms, kill the ecosystem by starving fish. These nutrient pollutants are found in fertilizer and in sewage, and they cause excessive growth of aquatic plants when they hit the water. Algae, during their natural course of life, die and sink to the bottom, where they are devoured by bacteria, which use oxygen. Too many algae deprive fish of oxygen.
Yet as he indicated earlier, Kennedy does not see factories as blights on Eden but as signs of a rich and useful economy. Neither he nor Cronin is opposed to industry, condominium construction, powerboat use or anything that might bring the fullness of communal American life into contact with the river. They simply oppose anyone destroying the river. "This is a fight to save a resource for as many constituencies as possible," says Kennedy. "Here there is room for everyone." As he speaks, a trio of ducks puts on a brief air show high above the electrical wires that cross the river. A great blue heron is spotted over the Lovett plant.
"The beauty of my job," says Cronin, "is that it allows me to be in touch with the rhythms of the river and to understand what it means to fit the rhythms of your life around those other rhythms. When you are a fisherman, one of the rhythms is the tide. To fish for shad, you go out two hours before high tide, but every day the hours change. One week you're having breakfast at 7 a.m., the next at 2 in the afternoon. And all this extends to life on the shore, to the people who come down to watch the boats come in. The whole community participates in the rhythms of the river."