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"Garbage is not the biggest problem the river faces," Pregracke says, "but it's the one I can make a dent in myself." If this goal sounds overly ambitious for a shoestring operation with an annual budget of $200,000, you haven't seen Pregracke at work. He's tireless. Today he's driving a forklift around his barges, sorting old car seats and lawn ornaments and tractor chassis into separate piles for recycling. All sandy hair and freckles, dressed in a life jacket, cap and khaki shorts and sporting a pair of wraparound dark shades, Pregracke could be a latter-day Huck Finn. His grin is impish, his body compact and coiled. Two lean, tanned young women in similar uniforms--Jennifer Anderson, 26, and Lisa Hoffman, 22--toil alongside him, heaving corroded truck tires onto a towering stack. "It's hard work, but it's fun work," Hoffman says, describing a regimen of 12-hour days hauling discarded Porta Potties from stagnant, snake-filled sloughs.The crew will scour 900 miles of river this year, stopping off in towns along the way for daylong community-cleanup festivals that bring out hundreds of local volunteers.
Pregracke is a blue-eyed Midwestern patriot who flies a pair of large flags from one of his barges: Old Glory and a black banner reading THANKS VETERANS FOR OUR FREEDOM. Though he hasn't experienced combat, he feels a mystical bond to fighting men that he says he can't explain but that fills him with gratitude when the going gets tough. "When it's really hot and the mosquitoes are tearing you up, I just think, 'At least I'm not getting shot at. At least I'm not getting my head blown off," he says.
For all his idealism though, he's not naive. He knows the value of modern public relations. He decorates his barges with the logos of sponsors, from Cargill to O'Douls, and maintains a cutting-edge website, www.cleanrivers.com From his sleeping bag on the houseboat, he uses a pair of cell phones to drum up funds and give interviews to journalists. He's made some influential friends as well, including Robert Kennedy Jr., whose own conservation group, Riverkeeper, Pregracke admires and draws inspiration from.
Part innocent, part impresario and a natural motivator on a par with the slickest infomercial guru, Pregracke has big plans. His Adopt a Mississippi Mile Program hopes to do for the father of waters what similar land-based efforts have done for the nation's highways. Once the program is on its feet, he's heading east.
"I'm going to clean up a lot of the major rivers in America," he says. Next year he intends to attack the Ohio, from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. He'd love to clean up the Hudson too and, maybe, while he's at it, the Potomac. What would help is a tugboat of his own (the homemade John Deere rig is showing its age, and hitching rides with commercial haulers is a hit-and-miss affair), but even without one, he vows, he'll plunge ahead, refrigerator by refrigerator, prosthetic leg by prosthetic leg. "I'm going to do it right," he says, steering his runabout into a small bay filled with hundreds of bobbing plastic soda bottles, "and I'm going to finish it."
Believe him.