A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 20

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20th of a series

“I saw the stars last night. We don’t have stars in Brooklyn. We have streetlights.”

- From the journal of Sean Soto, New York Harbor School, age 14

Mountaintop ➡ Tap

A 3-week Trek Across the New York City Water Supply System

July 7-28, 2007

As I wrote earlier, 90% of New York City’s drinking water comes from streams that feed into large reservoirs in the Catskill  mountains. To protect its water the city has asserted broad powers over those distant watersheds, including fencing off the reservoirs and having the New York Police Department patrol the area. Once-thriving villages lie beneath these huge reservoirs, and upstate animosities remain strong. On the other hand, most New Yorkers have no idea where their water comes from. Many think it comes from the Hudson River; one of the Brooklyn trek students told me, looking at me as if I were some kind of bumpkin, “from the tap”.

Part of the Stroud Center’s six-year New York mandate was to educate people up and down the watershed to understand: (1) the sources of their water; (2) the importance of protecting those sources; and (3) the critical connection between the upstream watersheds and the city. And so, in the summer of 2007, we brought together six students from the New York Harbor School in inner-city Brooklyn and six from Sidney High School in rural Delaware County for a three-week trek, dubbed “Mountaintop ➡ Tap.”

Part Outward Bound course, part scientific laboratory, and part community outreach, the trek was physically, intellectually, and emotionally challenging. “It was,” said one of the students, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But they did it. Perhaps their greatest accomplishment was learning to trust each other, as one group of students had grown up in an upstate farming community, while each of the urban kids had been born on a different island in the Caribbean. The oldest was 17, the youngest 13.

At the most basic level, the students had a unique wilderness and educational experience. They traveled the length of the water system on foot, by canoe and inner tube, and in rowboats, carrying their belongings on their backs. Along the way, they assessed the quality of the water in streams, rivers, and reservoirs; documented their findings with photographs and journal entries; talked to public officials, scientists, conservationists, and park rangers; and hosted press conferences to share with the public what they were learning in the woods and waters.

Rowing on the Hudson River in a boat built by students at the New York Harbor School. The city’s drinking water actually travels to the city in pipes beneath the river.

In the end they became the representatives of all the people who live and work in the 2,000-square-mile watershed. They also became friends, highlighting in their own differences both the diversity and the community of the watershed’s nine million people, people who don’t know each other, trust each other, or understand their dependence on each other.

Bob Caputo, a long-time photographer, writer, and filmmaker for National Geographic, taught the students how to take pictures and turn them into a coherent story, and then helped them organize their photos for the exhibits. Kent Garrett and d. b. Roderick, who between them have won five Emmys and a Peabody award, produced a film of the trek for public television.

Stroud Water Research Center was the lead partner on the project. Other organizations included New York Harbor School (a public high school founded in 2003 by my friend Murray Fisher), Riverkeeper, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, and Catskill Mountainkeeper.

For more on the trek, visit: https://www.stroudcenter.org/education/nytrek2007/index.shtm

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com