My Green Manifesto Read Free

come to get to know my neighbors, neighbors that include birds and beavers and muskrats and an occasional moose or fisher. And this is where I come to connect to the greater world since this un-stream-like stream eventually flows into the river and then that river flows into the ocean.
    Well, his backyard is extraordinary, you might argue, as was Henry David Thoreau’s backyard, which held Walden Pond. But I think that is exactly the wrong point to take away. As a kid who grew up in Massachusetts, I can tell you that ponds like Walden are a dime a dozen, a few hundred others just like it scattered around the state. “Oh, it’s nothing special!” people often say when they first see the pond. Which is the whole beautiful point! It’s as ordinary as it gets,
and that is why it’s so important. It means that your own ordinary backyard might just be extraordinary, too. It means that your own territory might also be worth exploring.

    When most people think of the Charles, if they think of it at all, they imagine a tame and preppy river, a river that got into the Ivy League, a river of boathouses and scullers. But when Captain John Smith spied the Charles from Boston Harbor in 1614, he wasn’t thinking about scullers or tea parties or final clubs. 2 Like any explorer worth his salt, his dreams were of discovery—the main chance—and in the river he thought he’d hit upon it. He took one look at its great gaping mouth and assumed that it was a raging torrent of water that cut deep into the continent. It turned out he was spectacularly wrong in this assumption: not only does the river not reach halfway to California, it barely makes it halfway to Worcester. What Smith had not anticipated was that the Charles, like many people, has a mouth too big for its body. His disappointment over the river’s length did not stop him from naming it after his king, forever saddling the poor river with a name that is stiff and a little goofy. Imagine the difference if he had called it “The Chuck.”
    As for the river’s length, it covers, as the crow flies from source to mouth, about twenty-six miles, almost exactly the same distance as the Boston Marathon. This makes sense since the Charles, like the Marathon, begins in the town of Hopkinton. The difference is that the river, unlike the runners, isn’t interested in traveling straight and fast. By the time it wends its way to the harbor it has actually covered something closer to eighty miles, earning
its Indian name of Quinobequin which means “meander.” That name is currently under debate, as is the river’s actual source—the good folks of Milford claim the river starts in their town, not in Hopkinton—but most agree that it emerges in the latter town, as my own observations confirm.

    I had agreed to drive Dan’s boats from Cape Cod to his house in Boston, but, a born meanderer myself, before delivering the boats I had to go to Hopkinton to search for the river’s beginnings. With a large canoe and a kayak atop my car, I rattled down Granite Street, where I observed small muddy creeks trickling into a manmade reservoir named Echo Lake. I couldn’t see how to get into the lake since the woods were posted with signs that said NO TRESPASSING: TOWN OF MILFORD WATER SUPPLY, and I couldn’t very well leave Dan’s kayak and canoe unwatched, so I drove up a smaller street until I saw a woman in her front yard washing her car. I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers, and sure enough when I pulled into the driveway and got out to say hi, the woman immediately pointed at the kayak and told a story about a recent canoe trip she’d been on. Her name was Amy Markovich and she ran a business called Echo Lake Adirondacks which sold the elegant wooden chairs that were displayed on her lawn. She was delighted that I was going to paddle the length of the Charles, and rushed inside to print out