Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
As all of you who have them will know, two-year-olds are better than any alarm.
Meredith Brown’s day begins when her son says it does, and then for an hour or so he and his older sister are the focus of Meredith’s world. By the time most of the other wage earners have made it into the great beehive, Meredith comes down out of the Gatineau Hills and, today as most days, crosses the Ottawa River over the Portage Bridge then beetles along the Parkway, the wide river running in the other direction on her right shoulder.
There is rock-show mist on the cold sluicing rapids by Island Park, and Meredith is entranced by the slivers of ice that glint in the water like darting fish. Her eye, either the real one or the one in her mind’s eye, is pretty much always on the river, because, and this is official, she is its keeper. Since April 2004, Meredith has introduced herself as the Ottawa Riverkeeper and the executive director of the organization of the same name. The river’s health, presence, dirty secrets, treasures and appearance are her concern every day and often into the evening. She’s very much on the river’s side.
Turning away from her waterway, Meredith arrives in Ottawa’s truest neighbourhood, Westboro, and makes her way through the aisles of outdoors-iness up and to the back of Mountain Equipment Co-op, where she shares an exceedingly cramped office with the store manager, and her co-worker Delphine, who handles outreach. In this case, way-outreach, because the watershed of the Ottawa River is an area larger than Cuba, to which it bears no resemblance, and bigger than Switzerland, to which it does. Ottawa is almost at the end of the river, in point of fact. There’s a thousand kilometres upriver from us, a mere 150 to Montreal.
Anything nasty that happens in a pollutive or ugly way inside that watershed stands a good chance, sooner or later, of getting into the river from above or below. A lot of nasties already have, and some have ended up in front of judges. While many see the Ottawa as a cherished heritage, there are plenty who view it as a convenient sewer or revenue source, and their enthusiasm for doing the wrong thing for the river’s future needs curbing.
Beside the maps, brochures, calendars and the other usual suspects pinned above the computers, one of which is playing up, there is a photograph of Meredith in kayaking gear, a good one actually, which highlights the determination that never leaves her face, even when her huge smile turns on, to do right by the river. She is one of those people you come across who seem to have arrived where they were always supposed to be, their prior careers (Meredith has an engineering degree) a training for the real thing.
After discussing the day’s entrails with Delphine, Meredith begins to drain the e-mail pool and click through the phone messages. On any given day she is likely to hear from friends of the river (often), enemies (rarely, and if so probably a lawyer), and the great body of persons in between. In no particular order of merit, these might be: a director from the board, a municipal official, one of the other eight Canadian water keepers, one or more of the good souls in the River Watch program who volunteer to be benignly nosy, a teacher looking for a presentation, a media type, a whistle blower or just someone with a general love of rivers in their heart who wants to know more about ours. Meanwhile, there is the search for more space and someone to be hired, because the job is ever expanding.
This being winter, unless she takes to her beloved skis, Meredith will not set foot upon the river today, or any day this week. In summer, a season she daydreams about several times a day just about now, she’ll try for one day a week out in the blue kayak with www.ottawariverkeeper.ca on the sides. Rivers are best patrolled from the middle, and vigilance is best practiced there too; if she’s lucky she’ll get into one of her favourite spots, just down from Portage du Fort or off Deep River.
Today, though, does not take her far from the desk, and in twilight she crosses the Champlain Bridge, the one with the best city views of the river. As usual, she ponders why in detrimental comparison with many, no let’s say all of the other towns on the riverbanks, Ottawa seems to be doing its best to ignore the fact that a river actually runs through it. It’s as though when the steamers went, we forgot the river was there, In the future. Meredith would actually welcome enlightened development on the river, which would serve to keep it in mind.
And yes, as is often the case, tonight she will not be going straight home. There is something requiring her attendance, an urgent meeting in Wakefield about the roaming uranium prospecting companies and their potential for pollution. Then home to her children who, like all children are, so to speak, downstream from us, and have a well-kept river to look forward to.
Phil Jenkins’s latest book is Beneath My Feet: The memoirs of George Mercer Dawson.© The Ottawa Citizen 2008