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What Riverkeeper has been fighting for, then, is biodiversity--a complex way of life sustained by various hectic interdependencies, for which the Hudson is the pumping heart. All the same, when we finally come to a point near the Hudson Highlands that is without power plants and condos--where the water gets bluer as one looks into it and the ripples touch the brown rocks on the shore and the thick hills rise like tufts of broccoli--one's own heart lifts with gratitude for untrammeled nature, and with ancient expectation.
We are in a bend in the river, and suddenly everyone is still--the way, I imagine, that all people have been stilled since coming upon the first bend in the first river. Here too is the past, and it re-creates the eternal sense of promise and danger that river bends have always presented and that have bred civilizations. America itself was a bend in the river, and on days like this it still is.
Kennedy says his happiest moments are when he takes his kids camping on the banks, where they fish out of tents and hear coyotes "in the jet-black night." Cronin recalls a different, untamed moment in 1982, when he was working as a commercial fisherman, setting crab traps near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
"Suddenly a storm came rolling over the mountains out of the Highlands," he says. "We were heading back with a couple of bushels of crabs, and out of nowhere we were beset with winds and darkness. We raced to beat the storm, but it overtook us. The mountains shone a brilliant green. The sky exploded. I was never so aware of how little control I had over the environment, how the forces of nature can play with us. It was a defining moment in my relation to the river. It put me in my place."
Roger Rosenblatt, an editor-at-large for Time Inc., is the editor of Consuming Desires, a new collection of essays on consumption and the environment, published by Island Press