Dude Over Troubled Water (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Dude Over Troubled Water (Cont.)


	Yam in the houseboat (Micheal McLaughlin)

WHEN YOU ADD IT UP, Pregracke's teams have pulled more than a million pounds of trash out of riverbank muck, including 5,000 truck, tractor, and car tires, 1,133 steel drums, 527 plastic drums, one sunken barge, one houseboat, 128 pesticide containers, 287 refrigerators, enough Styrofoam to cover a football field two feet deep, a sex doll named Lulu, a message in a bottle that said "Whoever opens this bottle sucks," and a cooler with a horse's head stuffed inside. ("Dude," Pregracke says, "that smelled horrible.") There's been much more, including an entire 1970 Ford Econoline Van, 348 antifreeze bottles, 350 propane tanks, 49 barbecue grills, and yes, 49 kitchen sinks.



	Weld-Master Dave (Micheal McLaughlin)

Despite its unglamorous preoccupation with trash, Living Lands and Waters is a well-run, well-funded outfit. In certain circles Pregracke is even rather famous. In 1997 the Davenport, IowaÐbased Quad-City Times ran a local-boy-makes-good story on his trash-picking crusade. It was picked up by the wires, got some national play, and generated a brief segment on CNN.

This year, five summers after that splash of fame, Pregracke is on course to raise $420,000 for the project, out of which he pays himself $25,000 a year. His crew members—usually young people on their way to other things, who tend to come and go fast owing to the work's rigors, messiness, and poison ivy—earn $1,500 to $1,800 a month, with a $1,000 bonus if they stay through the season. (Soon after my visit, Maasberg leaves and a guy named Larry Williams comes aboard.) They get health benefits, a boat floor to sleep on, and all the junk food they can eat.

How does a 27-year-old who says "dude" all the time raise that kind of money? Tom Harper, a 52-year-old Moline, Illinois, lawyer who once hired a teenage Chad Pregracke to help remodel his home—and who now sits on the project's ten-member board of directors—puts it this way: "He just asks. He doesn't know that he shouldn't ask, and it turns out people want to help. He's got so much energy it's hard to turn him down."



	Yam & Larry on the Ohio (Micheal McLaughlin)

Pregracke's seemingly infinite zeal grew out of his love of the Mississippi, a love spawned, oddly enough, on a summer day 12 years ago when he almost killed his older brother, Brent. Then 15, Chad was spending his first day helping 20-year-old Brent catch freshwater clams on the Big Muddy. Chad's job was to sort clams on the skiff while Brent dove and worked the river bottom. Chad was supposed to watch Brent's air hose and bubbles, but Chad claims Brent never told him that part.

While Chad sorted, strong currents knocked Brent around until the hose knotted and cut off his air. Another diver who was working with the boys popped out of the water and yelled at Chad to bring Brent up. Laid out in the boat like a stunned fish, Brent was ash white, his lips blue, and he remained immobile for a full ten minutes. Then he lamely motioned Chad over and whispered in his ear, "I'm going to kill you."

Things got better. Over the next three summers, Chad and Brent lived out of sleeping bags on the Mississippi's many islands and clammed professionally. It was during the second summer that Pregracke became obsessed with how trashy the river was, and particularly with a huge pile of plastic barrels about 15 miles from his parents' house. That winter he called the Illinois Department of Natural Resources several times, bugging them to clean up the mess.

"I got nowhere," Pregracke recalls. "They were really defensive. They kept saying things like, 'Where's the garbage?' 'That's not our responsibility.' 'There's no money for that.' And then they'd ask, 'Who are you, anyway?'

"So I started thinking about that," he says. "Who am I? Well, I've been on every island on the Mississippi from Fort Madison, Iowa, to Dubuque, and I've clammed on the bottom of most of it, or my brother has. Then I realized that's who I am, and these people on the phone are in some office in Springfield, and what do they know about the river?".

One weekend in the spring of 1997, while watching NASCAR on TV, Pregracke experienced an epiphany. "I started noticing all those logos on the cars," he says. He grabbed the yellow pages and looked up the aluminum company Alcoa, an outfit that, he sort of knew, employs a couple thousand people in the Quad Cities area of Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa.

"Dude! I didn't even know what Alcoa did," he says. "But I called and got this man on the phone, and I told him that I want to go pick up the trash on the Mississippi River, and would they sponsor me? He started asking me all sorts of things, like, Did I have a budget? Was I a 501c? I didn't even know what a budget was, but I told him I'd get one. I just wanted to clean the river."

A week later, after Pregracke's mom taught him how to create a budget, he showed up at the office of Alcoa vice-president Tim Wilkinson, asking for $77,000 to clean 440 miles of the Mississippi and pay for boat insurance and five employees. Wilkinson gave Pregracke $8,400 for a more modest effort: picking up Mississippi River trash, by himself, in the Quad Cities area.

Which is exactly what Pregracke did. "I worked from the start of the summer until the ice froze me off the river," he says. Then 21, he single-handedly dug 45,000 pounds of trash out of the riverbanks, dumping the load in his parents' yard until he could sort it, recycle it, or haul it off to a landfill. In the fall he started taking courses at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois, and returned home on weekends to finish the job.

The next summer Alcoa kicked in $20,000 and Pregracke raised $100,000 piecemeal from other companies. Suddenly, picking up garbage was a full-time thing. He left school, though he did finish his associate's degree in 2001. Today, the logos on his various boats testify to the success of his original NASCAR inspiration. Among his current sponsors are Alcoa, agribusiness giant Cargill, Honda Marine, Caterpillar, and the makers of O'Doul's, the nonalcoholic brew.

"Dude!" says Pregracke. "My middle name is O'Doul's. They gave me $50,000 this year!"

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