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by Janisse Ray
 In a boat at the mouth of the river you sit, around you the sea boiling,
eight-foot tide meeting 100,000 gallons of fresh water minute by minute.
The air is diaphanous with salty mist, like a veil. A finger of white
sand reaches out from Little St. Simons as if to calm the waters, and
on that arm of firmament crowd ruddy turnstones, yellowlegs, oystercatchers,
willets.
Below, in the calmness and silence of the gray depths, a male blue
crab is carrying his girl. She has molted and they have mated and for
48 hours he will carry her, rightside and forward, and when her shell
has hardened the blue crab will release her, and she will begin her
migration back into the salt, beautiful swimmer, with a cargo of two
million eggs.
Many of which, for some reason, will not survive.
The boat carries you, like the river water carries nutriets to feed
the plankton. Like the ocean carries salt. You are working these waters,
motoring in your old boat from float to float you recognize so well,
every trip is a connect-the-dots, you haul up the trap and take from
it the crabs you’re allowed to take, returning the rest to forage
through the delta mud. Your shy wife, Sumako, is with you. Hard-working
and able, a beautiful companion, she is always with you.
The numbers in the coolers speak, they are down, 300 pounds, 225,
175, every year they fall, you remember 1500 pounds easily from 100
traps in a day.
When you both get hungry, you cut the engine and rest on the waters,
dolphins in the foreground, pelicans diving headfirst, waves tapping
your craft, a kind of SOS they have come to be -- do you see what is
happening? -- they are saying in their insistent language. The sky
ever changes, the estuary stretches from the river, its bed a channel
coming out of Georgia, a tablet upon which the water records what is
happening to Georgia, from the first bubbles of springwater in the
Piedmont, to the confluence, to the braided delta. On the other side
of you the wide and faltering ocean.
Like the spark of life the female blue crab carries in her orange
sponge, an idea begins in you. The voice of the voiceless speaks, and
sitting in your rocking boat, eating a tuna sandwich, drinking warm
coffee, you begin to listen. Willet, willet, willet, the voice
says. To watch it simply vanish is a sin against God.
Get up, James, the voice says. Stand up.
You are a big man, you are strong, you have two hands capable
of doing anything. You have a great mind. I have given you eyes to
see and ears to hear. But I have given you something more, James,
something special. What I have given you, James, is a heart big enough
to care, with room enough to love even the blue crab, which every
day you hold in your big hands and admire.
When you reached land and stood up, the ground trembled.
In the 1940s, a little boy who did not understand much of what was
happening in his world retreated to a creek near Cochran, Georgia to
sail leaf-boats, to build dams, to swim, and to fish. That was you.
You will not talk much about what happened to this little boy, because
some of it you would rather forget. You were at the start of this river.
Years later, after a career in the Marines and another in food services,
after a family was mostly raised and gone, after 25 years in a boat
in the hot sun, healing from all that had happened, laboring to forget,
drawing up traps, worrying some about money, you came home to the river
that knew you when you were a boy, lost and found. The river found
you and then you returned and found it.
First there was a language to learn that had not been your own. It
was not "sook," not "gas line," not "Doboy
Sound," not "robust redhorse." This new language had
long, scientific, technical, academic, political words, and lots of
initials. DNR, EPD, PSP, OVC, SMZ, MOA, BMP. You had to learn it all,
you who never had a chance to go to college, who had known nothing
except hard work all your life.
By God, you would understand what the people who had the river by
the throat were saying. You learned more than you ever thought you
could. You could have been a biologist. You could have been a lawyer.
You could have been a writer. You could have been a public official.
But we needed you on the ground, on the water. We needed you in public
meetings, standing in front of the people. We needed you to be Our
River’s Keeper.
Poor people live up and down this river. We work for years to buy
a johnboat. Some of us are badly educated, even ignorant. We throw
their car tires and deer carcasses in the creeks. We dump trash and
other bad stuff in. We cut down trees. If we could understand a car
engine, we could understand a river system, and for it to run it needs
all its parts, and the parts have to be clean, in good working order
and they need fuel.
We need to know how to translate all this.
Industry takes advantage of our ignorance, our silence, our consuming
worries. It takes the fish, it takes the forests, it dumps copper and
arsenic into the water, it builds coal plants that fill the air with
mercury that drifts down into the river. It tries to build poultry
processing plants, it tries to build waste incinerators and biomass
plants.
You travel up and down the river talking to people. You speak our
language, you talk to garden & rotary & lions & hunt clubs & chambers
of commerce; college & high school & elementary classes, you
talk to city councils and county commissions. You go to Atlanta, to
Athens, to Dublin, to Brunswick, to Jesup. You go to Hazlehurst, Ludowici,
Macon, Lumber City, Everett City. To Savannah, Baxley, Odum, Gardi.
Up and down the river, in and out of the watershed you go.
As you go, you watch over the river, like the angels fly over, watching.
You find bad things. People who also care, who have been educated to
understand that assaults against nature are assaults against human
beings, who understand that a river is only as healthy and intact as
its forests -- tell you about other bad things.
Everywhere you go, testing the waters with your kits, testing for
fecal coliform and worse -- you see these bad things, and you take
pictures. A blackwater creek ruined by logging, a slough being filled
with construction and demolition material. A town’s sewage pipe,
stringy stuff hanging from vegetation downstream. You send the pictures
to us. “Y’all be the judge and the jury,” you say.
You had two good feet, you had a truck, you had a boat. Only private
property would stop you, you learned after an overnight in a Cochran
jail.
You send pictures of the Rayonier paper mill discharge pipe, images
of foam and purple water. A year later you send more pictures. You
meet with Rayonier. After many years you send more pictures – “Still
nasty as all hell,” you say.
You visit another discharge point. “It smells like soap around
this pipe,” you say. “Maybe they call soapy water clean
water?”
You test a creek where a dairy farm runs off. The fecal coliform count
is 24,000 colonies per 100 millileters (safe contact for humans is
200).
The pictures keep coming: clearcutting, illegal boat ramps, a beheaded
alligator floating belly up, a deer carcass in the water, improper
stream crossing during timber operations, deep rutting, illegal ditching,
a stream destroyed by a road. “Shame on the person who did this” and “How
to ruin a perfect day.” And, “He needs to be in jail along
with his cohorts and if I can help him get there I will sleep good
at night.”
No polluter or destroyer could hide from you, and when they tried,
with beauty strips and backwoods abominations and No Trespassing signs,
you took to the air.
You began to litigate, and to win. The river began to win. A people
began to reconcile themselves with their landscape, their home, and
with each other. A river joined us. A people began to reconcile themselves
with God.
In the end, the travesty was too much even for your calm and rational
mind, too much for your immensely capacious heart. You couldn’t
keep focusing on tragedies. Now you send pictures of beautiful things,
wild things, rare things, endangered things. Tiger swallowtail butterflies,
wood storks constructing nests, raccoons washing food, water hyacinth,
gulf frittillaries, roseate spoonbills, sunning alligators, four wood
ducklings on a log.
“Even when I was seeing the degradation, I saw that beauty was
still there,” you said. “I found out that the most beautiful
flowers on God’s earth are around wetlands.”
And yet, yesterday morning, on your last official day on the job,
you called to tell me that the City of Jesup is dumping raw sewage
again, the mess visible around the pipe, stringing in the trees. There
were more condoms that you can believe, you said. Every year
they do it, you said. We talk to them and talk to them and
they keep doing it.
We have a story to tell. The story is about a river that is stunning
in its magnitude and in its biodiversity. It is about a man who turned
his tenacious mind and undistracted gaze upon that body of water and
decided that he would clean it up, and who, in the process, became
a stellar photographer. The story is about the creation of a group
of advocates in a part of the United States that had not known environmental
advocacy, and a litany of successes that built an environmental ethic
and caused this deeply beloved sedimentary river to run cleaner out
of Georgia, into the sea.
The story is the story of the transformation that is possible if one
wakes up to the beauty and wonder of the earth, if one fears not, if
one follows the path of his heart. The story of the transformation
possible if people join together and decide to protect something they
love. With love, all things are possible.
James, we have come from up and down the river, from within the watershed
and without, to honor you today, and to thank you. We have come from
Tattnall County, Appling County, Wayne County, Toombs, Jeff Davis,
McIntosh, Telfair. We have come from Atlanta, Savannah, Macon, Athens.
We stand before you to thank you for listening to the call of the wild.
You, champion of rivers, conqueror of polluters and destroyers, defender
of wild things, campaigner for justice.
What you give us is hope. You make us want to fight. You are a warrior
and you are fighting and we fall in step beside you. You inspire us.
You perform miracles in front of our eyes.
From you we know that transformation is possible. Watching you is
watching the monarch emerge from her cocoon and take off over the tips
of the milkweed.
You’ve given this place a fighting chance. You gave it and you
gave us the greatest gift a person could give, life itself, eleven
years of ceaseless labor and unflinching dedication to this grand corner
of Creation that is the Altamaha watershed. We are humbled by your
service. We are honored. The words are woefully inadequate, but they
are all we have to say: Thank you.
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Initiative to Protect
Jekyll Island creates slides in honor of James' work
Interview with James Holland - Part One
Interview with James Holland - Part Two
News Stories on James Holland's upcoming retirement
Altamaha Riverkeeper founder to retire
By S. HEATHER DUNCAN | Macon.com | 2-19-10
Altamaha Riverkeeper retiring 10-year post
But James Holland will still be involved with the river, photographing
its beauty.
By Teresa Stepzinski | Jacksonville.com |
2-21-10
Tribute to James Holland, Altamaha Riverkeeper
on his retirement
by Pierre Howard | The Georgia Conservancy
2-22-10
Founder of Altamaha Riverkeeper
Retires.
(pdf) The Darien News | 2-19-10
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