One Man's Quest to Clean Up America's Rivers
Chad Pregracke's excellent new book, From the Bottom Up, is a young man's memoir about cleaning up rivers, but it's also a powerful bildungsroman navigating a clash of ancient and modern worlds.
Pregracke used to work full days walking along the bottom of the Mississippi river breathing out of a hose and picking up mussels. This job paid well for a teenager and had the added benefit of terrifying his mother. One day he got frustrated by the amount of trash in the water and tried to clean some of it up. He wound up running an internationally acclaimed nonprofit organization.
Pregracke takes us on many journeys at once in this gripping memoir. We join him as he cleans the river he grew up on, but the real work is in learning how many people he will need help from along the way, and learning how to talk to them.
Photograph of Chad Pregracke courtesy of National Geographic.
Chad starts out approaching life with a mussel-diver's mentality. He's got the idea that if he just dives into something and doesn't worry too much about whether he'll survive, it'll work out in the end. This is fairly different from how most nonprofit organizations go about fundraising.
Pregracke catches breaks left and right as people see his conviction and offer their expertise when they realize he hasn't got a clue how to go about the great task he eventually sets out for. We see this happen in a meeting with an Alcoa executive, who not only agrees to donate start-up funds, but also asks his corporate lawyer to help Chad start an official nonprofit. Chad called the executive out of the phonebook and offered to set up a meeting in the company parking lot to explain why Alcoa should put Nascar-style patches on his river-cleaning uniform.
This open-faced idealism is the same strategy that works time and time again for Pregracke's literary and spiritual antecedent -- fellow river rat Huckleberry Finn. Each one innocently asks for help from just about every single person along the river, and each one is constantly learning just how much help it takes to achieve their ideals, or even just to get by.
This book has tales of working all day and sleeping outside in the rain, carrying a fishing boat full of garbage into a yacht show, cooking burritos over driftwood fires, getting hassled by the man over chicken feathers, sinking and capsizing boats and staying committed to a dream of clean rivers. In 2002 Pregracke won the Jefferson Award, sharing the stage with Bill Gates and Rudolph Giuliani. Now he's written a book about what it's like to have a dream in America and to try to get something done.
Pregracke is currently cleaning up the Anacostia River with Capital River Relief. We highly reccommend the book, which you can get in stores or off Chad's website, but we also reccommend you get out there and help clean the river. You can volunteer here.