Dude Over Troubled Water (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Dude Over Troubled Water (Cont.)


	Chad on a log jam (Micheal McLaughlin)

BACK ON THE OHIO, Pregracke continues his manic pace, digging up junk, tossing it on the boats. Just now he has stopped in his tracks. Twenty feet in front of him, a rusted-out pickup has been driven off the bank. On top of it is a pile of washers, dryers, and more junk.

"Damn, dude," he says. "Look at that—a hillbilly dump. There's no way we can pick all this up." For the first time in a week Pregracke seems deflated.

We return to the barges. The sun is beginning to set, but Chad wants to make one more run. He steers his boat back toward Henderson Island, where he remembers seeing a fridge. He beaches the boat. Just to the left of him, floating in the water, is a fully unrolled bleach-white condom. "We call that an Ohio River tapeworm," he says.

Isn't he going to pick it up?

"Dude, I'm not touching any condom. My brother almost quit commercial fishing because of an incident with a condom on the Mississippi, but I'm not even going to talk about it, because he'd kill me."

After searching the island for ten minutes, Pregracke finds the fridge he was looking for. He liberates it from the dirt, then starts rolling it end over end in a sprint all the way to the boat.

It's a stirring picture of the trash zealot in his element. But what about two years from now? Or five? "Coming to a river near you," he says. "That's my motto. I might clean the Hudson next. I've got a lot of ideas about restoring these rivers to their natural state. I can't tell you about them, because I don't like talking about things before I do them—let's just see the results, you know what I'm saying?" With that he stands up in the back of the boat, sets the throttle wide open, and—looking like Washington crossing the Delaware—says, "I'm going to do some big shit before I die. I am."

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