Dude Over Troubled Water (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Dude Over Troubled Water (Cont.)


	Brent Pregracke (left) & Mike (Micheal McLaughlin)

"YOU FEEL AND HEAR WEIRD THINGS when you're underwater clamming," Pregracke says during our drive back to the Ohio from his parents' place. "It's pitch-black down there, and it can get really creepy, like when you're feeling around for clams and you grab a doll's head, and then you start screaming through your dive mask. You know you have to feel your way back to it and make sure it's not a dead baby, or you'll never be able to forget it. Couches feel really weird when you bump into them. The catfish sound like bullfrogs, barge props sound like helicopters. I used to sing that song 'Night Shift' so I wouldn't get creeped out."

Despite his underwater beginnings, Pregracke limits his trash operation to what he can see on the riverbanks and in shallow pools. "There's trash way underwater, but most of it is on the banks," he says, arriving back at the trash flotilla.



	The Haul Journal (Micheal McLaughlin)

After dumping his bags in the houseboat, Pregracke joins Mike Havlis in a boat heading upstream, while David Maasberg and Yam Louck go downstream. Later, when Pregracke and Havlis find them again, Louck and Maasberg are looking glum. Before them are more half-sunken tires than you could count, a baby-blue bowling ball, two refrigerators, a half-dozen 55-gallon drums, a Wilson Sharp Shooter basketball, a depleted 20-ounce bottle of Budweiser, and a can of Liquid Chisel Bilge Cleaner.

There's so much trash that it sometimes makes the whole trash-cleaning endeavor seem overwhelming. And of course, the Mississippi's problems go way beyond garbage.

"The biggest problem on the river is runoff and sewage," says the Sierra Club's Jen Hensley. "Several cities dump raw sewage right into it. There are also industrial hog farms, whose pools of waste flow into the river during floods." That runoff threatens the 18 million people who rely on the river for their drinking water, not to mention the 278 species of fish and mussels that live there. Add to that increased siltation from the lock-and-dam system on the Mississippi, which causes river mud to pile up. This makes it hard for plants to root and reduces habitat for everything from piping plovers to threatened species like the Higgins eye mussel. All of which raises the question: Does Pregracke's litter-removal program really help that much?



	(Micheal McLaughlin)

Hensley thinks so. "It makes a big difference," she says. "For one thing, it's not great for wildlife habitat to have a bunch of trash around—it's hard for mussels to live on refrigerators. And they pull a lot of things out that leak into the river, like vans and chemical barrels. But Chad also draws a whole different group of people to these river issues than what we bring. I speak every year at the Quad Cities River Relief community cleanup, which Chad organizes.

His first year solo, Chad dug 45,000 pounds of trash out of the Mississippi, dumping it in his parents yard until he could sort it, recycle it, or haul it away.

There are a lot of boaters, fishermen, and hunters who would normally see the Sierra Club and say, 'Whoa, I don't know about this.' But we share the same goals when it comes to the river, and those people have a lot of respect for Chad, so it really helps."

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