blueprints

About River of Words | 99
culture entering the decomposition phase of the carbon cycle. But the river
was beautiful in great stretches, despite the defacements, and the Army
Corps restoration project—thick with nesting water birds when we paddled
into it in the early spring, the river surface fluid and shiny with the
reflection of trees just leafing out—showed what it could be again.
Robert Boone had created the Anacostia Watershed Society to create a
constituency for new storm drains (a congressional committee oversees the
city’s infrastructure), the restoration of the river and its flora and fauna, and
improved access to the river for recreational use. Pamela Michael was anxious
to see—and so was I—that the children of Washington participated in
the contest and that some of them were invited to the ceremony. One
friend went to work making contacts with the private schools where the
children of the Washington elite were educated, and another arranged for
me to meet with Kenneth Carroll, the local director of WritersCorps,
which was teaching poetry in the city’s public schools. Robert Boone
arranged for the Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS) to give an annual
prize to a DC child for the best poem or painting from the city about the
city’s watershed, and he arranged with Pamela Michael to take the children,
their parents, and some of the visiting writers canoeing on the Anacostia
while they were in Washington and to spend one morning during the
weekend picking up garbage on the riverbank. On the morning of the
actual cleanup, a cool sunny spring morning, the visiting writers—Terry
Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez among them—in boots and gloves, the
children in boots and gloves, I knew that it wasn’t an entirely symbolic
action. The AWS was going to continue to recruit people to keep the riverbanks
clear of junk, but the morning did feel like a serviceable metaphor to
me. It connected Robert Boone’s idea that every river in America ought to
be swimmable and fishable, biologically as well as chemically and physically
alive, and that people should have access to these rivers, to my flickering
notion that a healthy culture would be teaching its children to respect the
places where they live. It would nurture the creativity in their history—
their literary and artistic and scientific traditions—and in the kids who are
their future.
I did have reservations about River of Words at the outset. I wasn’t crazy
about the idea of a contest, but I didn’t see how else, any more than I do in
the adult culture, to get people to pay attention. But my deeper reservation
had to do with dictating a subject to poets, even young poets, particularly
this subject. Much instruction in the arts has had to do with giving begin-