View from the river

The truth is slightly less glamorous. This isn’t the Amazon, but the Charles – a name that conjures images more fancy and effete, not to mention domesticated and decidedly British, than adventurous and wild – and that the hidden city ahead is known in the native tongue as Bawhston.

What’s more, the dwellings we will soon pass will not be primitive huts but Super Stop & Shops, and the Homo sapiens we’ll encounter downriver will not be headhunters but Harvard students, and, if I am perfectly honest, the fearless leader in the stern isn’t Teddy R., but a state worker named Dan Driscoll, whom I once played some Ultimate Frisbee with and who was known in those days as “Danimal.”

We like to strip down myths, we modern folk, and it’s easy enough to quickly strip this journey of all its mythic qualities – to see it as a pretty modest trip on a pretty modest river with a modest enough guy. But if our adventure has not been a life-or-death journey into a vast, untamed wilderness, the truth is I have been consistently astonished over the last couple of days, not just by the hidden wildness of the river but by Driscoll himself. The man’s own considerable energy, which I had only previously witnessed when he was chasing down Frisbees like a border collie, is equally apparent when he talks about his efforts to revitalize the river we travel down.

“It started back around 1990, when I was working as a planner for the state,” he tells me as we paddle. “Someone in the office said, ‘Why don’t you take a look at the Charles?’ I think they were just trying to give the new kid something to do. Little did they know.”

Dan Driscoll is a man of average height and proportions, fit and compact, thanks in part to his daily bike commute in and out of Boston. There is something of the true believer to Dan, as there has to be in anyone who will take on the sort of fight he has, but that intensity is leavened by a certain regular guy-ness and sense of humor.