In the Spotlight:

Learning on the River

By Samantha Heyman, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater

The Hudson River, formerly called Muheakuntuck (meaning “the river that flows both ways”) by its native inhabitants, is a tidal estuary and home to over 200 different species of fish.  It is a major artery of maritime commerce with no less than seven tug companies working the waves, and many other shipping operations carrying all kinds of goods up and down the river—gravel, scrap metal, heating oil, sugar, garbage and sludge from sewage treatment plants.  A daily destination for thousands of people walking, jogging and bicycling in the parks located on its banks, from Riverside Park in Manhattan to Lighthouse Park in Saugerties, the Hudson also stars as part of an incredible panorama, viewed from the multi-million residences atop Battery Park to those tucked in the hills around Hyde Park and well beyond.

For me, the Hudson River is my workplace and my home from April to November.  As a full-time employee of Clearwater, the environmental organization based in Poughkeepsie, NY, I live and work aboard the 106-foot long, 108-foot tall sloop Clearwater, and sail up and down the Hudson River daily, in sun and rain, storm and calm, with an ever-changing variety of passengers.  My tools, instead of a computer or chalkboard, are the sloop’s sails and rigging, a thirty-foot trawl net, her 190-horse power engine and the 8-foot long tiller we use to steer the ship. 

Almost everyday during our sailing season my crew and I welcome a new group of students on board the Clearwater and we turn the Hudson River into their classroom using the tides and currents, the fish and plankton, and the deck of our ship to get them excited about ecology, stewardship, chemistry, physics, and even math. 

These students, many who have never been out on a boat before, help us cast our net and retrieve it, work together to raise our 3000-lb mainsail, test the water for characteristics like salinity and pH, and, of course, get to grasp the tiller and steer the boat.

This year over 15,000 kids will get their first look at a river ecosystem on the Clearwater, a seaworthy replica of the 18th and 19th century sloops that once populated the Hudson like taxis in midtown. It was Pete Seeger’s vision back in 1969 that building and launching this sloop would inspire people to make a difference and help clean up the river. And he was right.

So many lessons spring from this unique platform on the river, and education becomes a tangible and truly awesome thing: You can see the moment a student figures out how the river currents flow when she realizes that, though we seem to be sailing north, we are actually moving south, or when he understands that the greenish-brown color of the river is a good thing, due not to pollution, but to the plankton that live there and photosynthesize carbon dioxide the same way that trees do. 

In just a few hours, we see the students onboard the Clearwatergain a sense of ownership and respect as they learn about the watershed as a whole and their place in it.  It is hard work, but worth every stormy day to spend my time with these young people, tacking back and forth across the sometimes capricious, sometimes calm, yet always mighty Hudson River.  

For forty years the Clearwater has brought people of all ages back down to a river that had been cut off to them, reconnecting them to the waterway they now care for as their own.  We’ve created a generation of environmental leaders and will keep up the work. But as we sail into this momentous year, commemorating the history of the renowned explorers who called this river their workplace for a time, let us not forget to celebrate the Hudson itself, a river that has given so much to so many, and continues to do so through a past of terrible abuse and a future of splendid rebirth, offering a myriad of lessons to all

Samantha Heyman is captain of the sloop Clearwater, www.clearwater.org

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