Contemplating Our Relationships with Water

When Naoe asked me if the Waltham Land Trust would consider partnering with her to do an art exhibit and public programming about water and one’s relationship with it, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. I’ve known Naoe for a few years—she became a Land Trust member in 2021 shortly after she began volunteering to restore the woodlands of the Charles River as a WLT trail steward—and we’ve had conversations about the need for more platforms to showcase local artists. I was happy to collaborate with her on a grant application to the Waltham Cultural Council to support Flow: A River Walk and Participatory Art Installation about Water and am thrilled it has been funded in part by the WCC and the Puffin Foundation.

 

The importance of water in our world cannot be understated. We all know that water comprises 71% of the Earth’s surface. Oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, and temporary waterbodies such as vernal pools contain countless numbers of critters essential to our web of life. In the northwest corner of Waltham, Hardy Pond, the Watch City’s only Great Pond (any pond or lake that contains more than 10 acres in its natural state) is home to a wide variety of ducks, birds of prey, fish, and turtles, as well as muskrats, otters, and the iconic Great Blue Heron. People of all ages and backgrounds enjoy admiring the pond’s wildlife, along with kayaking, canoeing, and fishing in its waters.

 

The mighty Charles River courses through our city and similarly provides ample opportunities for wildlife observation and water-based recreation. American Bald eagles have been seen fishing its waters from treetops in Mount Feake Cemetery on its edge and an endless number of other birds have been observed by Waltham Land Trust supporters throughout the years. The events the Land Trust offers along the river are some of my favorites, and many of our most popular. But what I enjoy seeing the most when I’m passing by on the Moody Street bridge is multi-generational families of various ethnicities promenading along the paved pathway, mom pushing a baby carriage and grandma strolling with a walker.

 

My relationship with water is extensive. Some of my earliest memories are of me as an infant with my family at the bow of my dad’s boat, licking salt off my lips as we cruised the Westport River into the ocean and alongside the shoreline of Horseneck Beach each summer. As a child, I learned to swim in Walden Pond, taking beginner’s swimming lessons several years in a row because I kept failing the final test—the Crawl was my nemesis. Growing up, I spent a great deal of time playing by the Sudbury River, which ran along my neighborhood in the southeast corner of Sudbury, and fishing with my dad at Westport and in local ponds, lakes, and rivers.

 

After college in my second year of AmeriCorps, I worked in San Francisco’s East Bay restoring culverted creeks in the Berkeley area and teaching students of all ages about the importance of clean, flowing streams with healthy ecosystems and connected pathways. In 1996, I founded Friends of Five Creeks, now one of the largest citizens’ group in the East Bay focused on creek and watershed restoration, maintenance, understanding, and enjoyment. I regularly white-water rafted in California and Oregon, that is until I had a near-death experience on the Rogue River one El Nino February when the river was particularly surging.

 

As an environmental and public engagement consultant in Sacramento, most of our firm’s projects were focused on water—it was California, after all. I worked on dam removal proposals and water conveyance studies at the local, state, and Federal level. I witnessed firsthand and was challenged to moderate the struggle between those wanting to control California’s rivers, bays, and estuaries, and others advocating to let them flow freely.

 

In my interview for the job with the Waltham Land Trust in 2010, I recalled other memories from my childhood—feeding the ducks on the Charles River with my grandmother across from the Newton Marriott (a practice I now know is bad for wildlife). I explained how the Charles River was important to both sets of my grandparents, who raised my folks in Auburndale south of the Pike, blocks away from the river (where coincidentally, I now live with my partner). I told the Land Trust that an adult, when I’d come home for visits from California throughout the year, my family frequently took long walks along the Charles River in Waltham.

 

I’m very much looking forward to seeing how our participants describe their relationship with water, especially the children. Which each passing year, climate change and the stresses it puts on natural water resources plus man-made infrastructure throughout the world grab headlines and forces us to think about the future. We must do all that we can to protect and respect this vital, life giving and nurturing aspect of our Earth’s composition.