CHAPTER 8
The Deeper the River, the Greater the Pain
He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.
—Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Augusta, Georgia — John Muir dried himself off, pocketed his money, and returned the leaves and flowers to the plant press before heading east from the Chattahoochee River. The low-slung hills and well-trodden paths of the Piedmont whisked the intrepid explorer toward Athens. The cotton harvest was newly under way and the “picking is now going on merrily,” Muir wrote.
He reached “remarkably beautiful and aristocratic” Athens the following afternoon and was smitten by the college town’s outward grace and civility. It reminded him of Madison, Wisconsin. “This is the most beautiful town I have seen on the journey so far, and the only one in the South that I would like to revisit,” he said.
Yet Muir ignored, or failed to realize, the sinister undercurrents coursing through Athens and the Deep South. Athens, a hotbed of Confederate support, had been occupied by Federal troops until early 1866. Only then did Georgia’s flagship university, which lost one hundred students and alumni to the War of Northern Aggression, reopen. Klansmen were numerous and prominent and they burned the home of an African American legislator who was set to testify against them to Congress.
Muir ascribed to the usual racist rhetoric. In Athens, he noted that “the negroes here have been well trained and are extremely polite.” Why, they even removed their hats if a White man approached within fifty yards! “Robber negroes,” ex-slaves looking for work or long-lost families, were to be avoided. In A Thousand-Mile Walk, Muir wrote that “one energetic white man, working with a will, would easily pick as much cotton as half a dozen Sambos and Sallies.”
Pretty harsh, and inane, commentary for such an otherwise enlightened young man. His more forgiving critics chalk up the racist talk to his Midwestern upbringing and the ignorant groupthink pervasive across the lily-white region. Whatever. He should’ve stuck to his knitting.
Yet there’s a sense that Muir was changing, that the heretofore happy chronicler of God’s great outdoors was divining something wicked and dangerous about humanity. He was no dummy. He’d seen the abandoned homes, stoved-in barns, and overgrown fields of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. He’d broken bread with the rail-thin mothers and corn-likkered fathers who looked twice their age. He’d experienced the desperation of the highwayman and the bitterness of the landowner brought low by the Civil War. And he survived it all with characteristic pep and unbridled optimism.
Until he reached Georgia.
Georgia was hot, humid, tropical, and full of mysterious species that Muir had never before seen.
“Strange plants are crowding about me now,” he wrote. “Scarce a familiar face appears among all the flowers of the day’s walk.”
His money was running out and he was often hungry, tired, and lonely. “The winds are full of strange sounds, making one feel far from the people and plants and fruitful fields of home,” Muir said. “Night is coming on and I am filled with indescribable loneliness.”
The cypress swamps were “impenetrable” and unwelcoming, their waters murky and filled with fearsome alligators.
“Increasingly, Muir felt that he was in a strange and unfamiliar world—a theme he repeated several times in his journal in southern Georgia and Florida,” wrote James B. Hunt in Restless Fires. “In Georgia, Muir felt an undefined threat from the tropical character of nature.”
The rivers with lyrical Indian names—Chattooga, Keowee, Tallulah, Tugaloo—flow from the southern Appalachians into what eventually becomes the Savannah River. The Savannah is born in northeast Georgia and, over the next three hundred miles, serves as the boundary between the Peach State and the Palmetto State. It passes through reservoirs and dams, Augusta and North Augusta, cotton fields and pine plantations, before slowing and spreading amoeba-like across the swampy coastal plain and into the Atlantic Ocean. A gauge above Savannah puts the river’s average flow at twelve thousand cubic feet per second, one of the greatest freshwater discharges in the Southeast. The river’s force carries nutrient-rich sediments downstream to mix with the fresh, salt, and brackish waters near the coast. The mash of food, minerals, and liquids makes the Savannah River the most biologically rich in native fish species (108) of any Atlantic-draining river, according to The Nature Conservancy. Three-fourths of the fish are at risk, threatened, or endangered, including the prehistoric-looking shortnose sturgeon. Other rare species abound: wild cocoa trees, rocky shoals spider lilies, and false rue anemones; flatwoods salamanders, striped newts, and Carolina heel splitters (clams). Charles Seabrook, in The World of the Salt Marsh, writes that the “rich bottomland hardwood forests (offer) haunting beauty and amazing wildlife diversity.” The river also cuts through the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge—“one of the last great sanctuaries of tidal freshwater marshes in the eastern United States,” Seabrook says—with its old rice plantation levees and dikes welcoming millions of migratory birds each spring and fall.
Like virtually every major American river, though, the Savannah’s beauty can’t hide its industrialized decay. The postwar South offered Northern industrialists cheap land, labor, and river-generated electricity. In descending order, the Lake Hartwell, Richard B. Russell, and J. Strom Thurmond dams emasculated the Savannah, all in the name of economic development, flood control, and recreation. The huge dams and miles-long reservoirs altered the river’s natural flow, harming the fish, salamanders, and mollusks that depend upon seasonal bursts of water. The maximum peak flows near Augusta are less than one-third what they were before the dams were built, according to the University of Georgia. Lower flows move less sediment, scour less of the river bottom, and deliver less water to the floodplain. Even the US Army Corps of Engineers, which built the dams, acknowledges that its “operation of dams on the Savannah for the last fifty years has caused notable degradation of ecosystem integrity.”
Below Augusta, the Savannah takes on all the municipal and industrial characteristics of the Ohio and other heavily polluted rivers—with some unique twists. While it provides the drinking water for Augusta and Savannah, as well as for Beaufort, Hilton Head, and Hardeeville, the river also accepts their treated sewage. “Chemical Alley” runs along the river just below Augusta, its fertilizer, resin, and paper factories spewing a witch’s brew of treated wastes into the water (and air). So nasty was the water that Augusta placed its water-intake pipe ten miles upstream to avoid the concentrated stew of chemicals on its doorstep. The sprawling Savannah River Site, famed for its past production of plutonium and tritium for nuclear bombs, sits a short boat ride downriver on the South Carolina side. Massive amounts of river water are still required to decontaminate the radioactive debris left behind from the Cold War. So, too, does Plant Vogtle, the nuclear power plant conveniently located across the river from SRS, with its four whitewashed cooling towers looming over the countryside. It sucks up millions of gallons of water daily and returns it, considerably warmer, to the Savannah—to the detriment of cooler-water-loving animals.
The Nature Conservancy labeled the Savannah “among the most highly stressed Southeastern rivers.” Environment Georgia, another nonprofit, once called the river the nation’s third-most toxic, with more than five million pounds of chemicals discharged into it annually.
A lively barge trade used to ply the river from Augusta to Savannah, hauling cotton, timber, chemicals, and kaolin to the port of Savannah. As the sediment piled up, dredges could no longer ensure deep enough passage. So the Army Corps, in the 1950s, slashed a navigation channel nine feet deep and ninety feet wide. As a bonus, the engineers decided the trip would go even faster by cutting right through forty bends in the river, thereby shortening the Savannah by twenty-six miles. Not long after the Army Corps completed its hydrological wizardry, barge traffic all but stopped, as did dredging between the two cities.
In the summer of 1970, the river below Augusta was closed to fishing due to the Olin Mathieson Company’s discharge of methyl mercury. Blue crabs, in the estuary 180 miles below the chemical factory, were also declared unfit for human consumption.
Just then, Nader’s Raiders descended upon the still-sleepy, terribly polluted city of Savannah. A dozen college students, recent grads, and a lawyer set about to expose “the environmental tragedy that has encompassed the city and its friendly people for decades.” They worked for crusading consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader and his Center for Study of Responsive Law. Nader sicced the Center and a bunch of smart, idealistic twenty-somethings on a variety of powerful, unresponsive agencies and corporations—the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, segregated nursing homes, air and water polluters—to unmask unethical and oft-times illegal practices. In Savannah, the target was the Union Camp paper bag factory and fellow environmental malefactors who turned the river into their industrial trashcan, all the while promising Progress and pocketing tax breaks.
“The pale flow of Savannah River water is not adequate or suitable for human use because of what Union Camp and its corporate brethren have done to pollute those waters,” James Fallows and his fellow Raiders wrote in The Water Lords. “These Savannah-based companies are outlaws.”
The river served as the city’s direct-pipe sewer during its first two hundred years of municipal existence. The Union Camp mill was notoriously foul, dumping lignin, fungicides, and chlorinated resin acids into the river. But the real problem with the coffee-colored effluent was eutrophication, or the overloading of the river with nutrients, which led to excessive amounts of algae and oxygen depletion. It didn’t help that an awful, sulfuric, rotten-egg stench from the mill’s smokestacks wafted for miles, depending on which way the wind was blowing.
Union Camp, known affectionately as “the Bag,” opened in 1935 in the depths of the Great Depression. It was touted as the world’s largest paper mill and considered an economic godsend. Within a year, though, a local civic committee labeled the mill “a potential menace.” The river in front of the gold-domed city hall “literally boils as pockets of hydrogen sulfide and methane gas rise from the wastes on the river bed,” Fallows wrote, adding that a sugar refinery, the port, and other industrial polluters shared the blame.
But the Bag wasn’t too worried about water quality or its reputation. Glenn Kimble, evidently in charge of the mill’s air- and water-pollution control efforts, decried the enviro crowd’s “hysterical ‘Doom’s Day’ predictions.” “People get extremely emotional about losing a species,” Kimble said, “but animals have been dying out every year clear back to the dinosaur, and in most cases man had nothing to do with it. For that matter, it probably won’t hurt mankind a whole hell of a lot in the long run if the whooping crane doesn’t quite make it.”
To reach Carol Claxton, and her unique view of the world, I ride a two-man elevator into the sky before clambering onto a steel catwalk for the heart-thumping, open-air dash to the cramped cockpit where Carol works. She’s a ship-to-shore crane operator, spending eight hours each day in yellow hardhat and leather chair ten stories above the Savannah river, fiddling two joysticks that magically load and unload steel shipping boxes off massive container ships far, far below. It’s a daunting, critical, adrenalin-inducing job where winds sway the crane, clouds envelop the cockpit, and bathroom breaks are adventures. Carol, though, handles the high-wire job with aplomb, deftly maneuvering a forty-foot container from a ship’s deck onto the chassis of a flat-bed truck. Container after container, truck after truck, one every two minutes, hundreds each day.
Her job comes with one of the industry’s best perks: a corner office to die for. Carol, in between toggles, can see the cobblestoned streets of Savannah, the beaches of Tybee, Daufuskie, and Hilton Head, and the indiscriminate horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. She also gets the full sweep of the port of Savannah, a two-mile-long whirl of trains, trucks, warehouses, and massive cargo ships whose decks are stacked ten high with steel boxes. I’ve twice ridden upriver on the bridge of a container ship and never tired of looking down on the ant-sized pedestrians on River Street. Savannah is the nation’s fourth-busiest container port—second only to New York–New Jersey on the East Coast—handling five million containers each year.
Carol, though, has little time to play tourist. Not with fifteen tons of steel dangling at her fingertips. Her eyes rarely wander beyond the busy world below her cabin in the sky. One morning, after loading the CMA CGM Matisse bound for New York and Rotterdam, Carol watches as the freighter eases away from the dock and into the middle of the river. A cloud of brown mud billows in the Matisse’s wake.
“You can tell that the river’s not deep enough there,” she says.
Which is why the port, the Army Corps, and taxpayers are in the midst of a billion-dollar deepening of the river from the Garden City Terminal into the open Atlantic forty miles away. Dredges the world over dig deeper and deeper channels to handle the ever-larger ships with ever-heavier loads. Ports in nearby Charleston, Jacksonville, and Norfolk are all going deeper in a maritime arms race without end. Savannah, for example, is dredging its river from forty-two to forty-seven feet, which will still require friendly tides to allow the most heavily laden ships to reach its terminals. Even that won’t be enough: the Georgia Ports Authority, along with its archrival in South Carolina, is planning to build yet another major port terminal downriver in the future.
Politicians glom onto pork—I mean port—projects like piglets on a teat. And the Army Corps has never met a construction project it didn’t like. Theirs is a marriage made in Hell if you’re a manatee, a sturgeon, or a crustacean. The port, and its deepening, represents the final environmental indignity suffered by the Savannah River on its long, tortured path to the ocean. Scouring the river bottom disrupts entire ecosystems, home to fish, crabs, mussels, clams, and plankton. The animals either flee or die. Dredging also increases a river’s turbidity, which reduces the amount of light that aquatic plants need to grow. The floating particles of clay, silt, and algae absorb heat and increase water temperatures. Dredging also kicks up all sorts of nasty contaminants that were once locked into place on the river’s bottom. Lead, mercury, chlorinated acids, and other toxic chemicals get disturbed and flow farther downriver where they harm other habitats. Or they get dredged and deposited on riverbanks to await birds. A lawsuit was filed against the Savannah River’s deepening, claiming toxic cadmium would be dumped on the South Carolina side of the river.
The health hazards increase every time a scow drops a shovel into the Savannah. Each scoop allows salt water to move farther upriver. A US Geological Service study shows “salinity intrusion” at high tide near Hardeeville, South Carolina—fifty miles from the ocean.
It’s not just the salinity that’s worrying. Salt water contains chlorides that, by themselves, aren’t necessarily dangerous to health. But chlorides corrode lead and copper pipes, which, upon leaching, is indeed dangerous to kidneys and brains. Savannah’s main drinking water intake sits a few miles below Hardeeville on the river. The Army Corps, as part of the ongoing deepening project, built a hundred-million-gallon raw water reservoir to supplement the city’s intake when chloride levels get too high.
If she crooks her neck, Carol can see the forty-four-million-dollar reservoir. She doesn’t have to twitch a muscle, though, to eyeball the damage done by the inexorable upstream surge of salty water. The Savannah wildlife refuge, across the river from the port, is one of the East Coast’s most critical wildlife preserves and a key stop along the Atlantic Flyway. Twelve thousand acres of nourishing tidal freshwater marsh lined the river before the repeated deepenings. Today, three thousand acres remain, all in the refuge.
The preserve was cobbled together from old rice plantations whose latticed freshwater impoundments attract hundreds of thousands of ducks, gallinules, coots, and mergansers each fall. Warblers, tanagers, vireos, and other neotropical songbirds pass through in the winter en route to Mexico and points south. Great blue herons, snowy egrets, and bald eagles live year-round in the marsh amidst the cattails, pickerelweed, and wild rice. Salt water, though, kills the life-sustaining vegetation and messes with the marsh’s ecological balance. The Audubon Society said the saline intrusion was “representative of a habitat in serious decline.” The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, said that deepening the river could wipe out 40 percent of the remaining freshwater marsh. The conservation agency pushed, unsuccessfully, for a depth no greater than forty-five feet.
Salt water poses yet another danger to the river’s denizens. The saltier the water, the less oxygen it contains. If oxygen levels drop too low, fish die. Just ask the striped bass, if you can find one. Before 1977, the Savannah River supported Georgia’s most important striper population. After repeated deepenings, the number of striper eggs dropped 95 percent. Sturgeon face a similar fate. Shortnose sturgeon are smaller than their lake brethren, topping out at sixty pounds and five feet in length. But their roe was equally prized by caviar lovers, who almost destroyed the species in the late nineteenth century. The next century’s dams, pollution, and dredging didn’t help. The bewhiskered shortnose attained endangered status in 1967. Nobody knows how many sturgeon run the Savannah between the estuary and the spawning grounds near Augusta. An estimated three thousand of the armored, big-mouthed fish prowled the river’s depths at the turn of the most recent century. It seems that only the annual stocking of shortnose into the river keeps the fish from disappearing. Fish and Wildlife predicted the deepening will reduce the sturgeon’s habitat as much as 20 percent.
“Low oxygen was not supposed to be a problem in the Southeast’s estuaries, especially those of Georgia and South Carolina,” Seabrook wrote. “Scientists assumed that the region’s vigorous twice-a-day tides efficiently churned the water, mixing in enough oxygen from the atmosphere to supply marine life—from aerobic bacteria to fish—with all they needed.”
Ah, but the Army Corps has just the technology to save the now-beleaguered sturgeon—“bubblers.” The engineers are spending one hundred million dollars on sketchy machines that pump oxygen into the Savannah to mitigate the impact of saltwater intrusion. The so-called Speece cones look like rocket ships. They suck in river water, mix it with oxygen, and inject the concoction back into the river. The Savannah, in essence, will be on mechanical life support in perpetuity.
Even the Army Corps admitted that the cones “could have lethal impacts to fish species.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center sued the Corps in 2012, claiming the depletion of dissolved oxygen, and the dredging of toxic cadmium, pollute the river and kill sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad.
The SELC eventually settled the suit after millions in additional mitigation dollars were added to restore the river’s health. In all, half the cost of the billion-dollar deepening project goes to fix environmental problems caused by the deepening.
“The exorbitant cost of the mitigation suggests that you think twice about doing this project in this location,” Chris DeScherer, a law center attorney, told me.
Tonya Bonitatibus grew up on the river, learning to swim before she could walk. Her mom was a lifeguard, and the backyard pond in South Augusta doubled as a swimming pool. Tonya lives in the same house today. It’s no surprise, then, that her kids also took to swimming before walking. Water, and the Savannah River, dictate the rhythms of Tonya’s life. She is, after all, the Savannah’s riverkeeper, the waterway’s official protector and advocate, as well as executive director of the Savannah Riverkeeper organization. I needed to hear her take on the river’s health and prospects. Plus, another controversy was brewing. Tonya invited me to join her for a boat ride up the river. I jumped at the chance.
The coronavirus had me holed up at home with my family, working remotely during the day and writing at night. I escaped to a neighbor’s backyard to plant a huge garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, squash, potatoes, carrots, snap peas, and pollinator bushes. I played baseball with Naveed, took bike rides with Sammy. Bita and I binge-watched Tiger King, The Great, and The Plot Against America. I singlehandedly kept our neighborhood book store, liquor store, and gelateria in business. But I, like virtually everybody else in America fortunate enough to have a job and to work from home, was bored. Besides, I’d run out of stuff to write. I needed to get back on the road. Traveling, though, seemed weird, like I was doing something illicit, a guilty pleasure in a deadly serious time. Not that most Georgians felt that way. Georgia was just about the last state to acknowledge the pandemic’s first-wave nastiness and was one of the first to open back up after the early lockdowns. Prematurely, as it turned out, as the case numbers again rose.
I meet Tonya on a blue-sky June morning at the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam. She’s backing the Tidal Boar, her thirty-foot patrol boat, into the river when a camo-capped angler, fishing for metal with magnets, tells her, “I really appreciate what you do.”
Tonya monitors the river’s water quality, badgers polluters, harangues elected officials, educates school kids, advocates for ecosystems, organizes cleanups, raises money, and manages a staff of six. Social justice and economic opportunity, to her, aren’t incompatible with environmental action. She runs Veterans for Clean Water, a volunteer water-quality operation conducted by ex-servicemen and -women. Fishermen love her. Not everybody else does, though.
“I’m the Antichrist to many people,” Tonya says as we head upriver towards Augusta.
She makes a lot of enemies. Polluters, politicians, and editorial writers mostly—anybody who wants something antithetical to the river’s overall health. She gets death threats. Streams of invective flow her way. A local rag wrote that Tonya “has a special brand of aggressive self-serving cluelessness.” The Augusta Chronicle, in a 2020 editorial, said: “She’s a menace. She’s a rock-weir-sized millstone around the city’s neck.”
Tonya is tough. She was six months pregnant the day we went on the river. Two weeks later, she rafted the Chattooga River in northeast Georgia, whose Class IV rapids were made famous in Deliverance.
Most of the animus spewed Tonya’s way these days revolves around the decrepit lock and dam built in 1937 that the Army Corps, the Riverkeeper, and most environmentalists want torn down. Deep cracks line the spillway. The concrete crumbles in spots. All navigation through the locks was halted in 2014; Tonya was on the last boat through.
The dam’s fate is linked to the harbor deepening. And the sturgeon. The federally endangered fish historically traveled nearly two hundred miles upriver from saltwater estuaries to spawn in the freshwater riffles above Augusta. The lock and dam blocks them from traditional breeding grounds, furthering their slide toward extinction. The Army Corps realized that scooping another five feet of river muck from the Savannah wouldn’t help the sturgeon’s long-term prospects, with or without the bubblers. So they came up with a plan: spend sixty-three million dollars tearing down the dam; lay a massive weir across the river to hold back some water; and build a fish ladder so the sturgeon can reach the egg-laying shoals above Augusta. Tonya, mostly, supports the plan. South Carolina, and the cities of Augusta and North Augusta, do not. They sued the Army Corps to halt the demolition, claiming that a rock weir would unduly lower the river and possibly impact water supply, recreational opportunities, and waterfront development. (Riverside landowners were particularly incensed that a lower river might mean more mud and rocks and less resale value.) They want the Army Corps instead to fix the lock and dam and construct a “modest fish ladder.” Their congressional representatives even consider stripping endangered-species status from the sturgeon.
“People blame me for the fish passage and the dam’s removal, which is pretty fundamentally false,” Tonya says as she eases the Tidal Boar to a stop under a blackjack oak on the South Carolina side of the river. I scan the moss-covered limbs for water moccasins. Tonya looks for hornets.
“But the dam doesn’t serve its purpose anymore,” she continues, “and these people don’t care about the sturgeon. With something like this, you’re never going to get everybody to agree. But my job is to tell them that people in Elberton, Georgia [upriver], and Hilton Head, South Carolina [downriver], are all in the same boat. It’s a big river. We have to manage it as a cohesive unit.”
While Tonya is, ostensibly, responsible for the entire three-hundred-mile river’s health, she’s pragmatic. The upper Savannah’s ecological fate was sealed long ago when the three dams turned one hundred miles of once-quick river into a series of boring reservoirs. And, though she won’t admit it, the lower Savannah is so environmentally compromised by decades of deepening, dredging, and shipping that it’s beyond natural redemption.
“When you’re standing on River Street in Savannah you’re, basically, standing by the ocean,” Tonya says. “When the SELC settled the [2013] lawsuit with the Corps, we realized that, ‘Okay, you’ve destroyed that area,’ so our best bet was to protect the river upstream all the way up to the lock and dam.”
She focuses on “middle earth,” the riverine stretch between Augusta and Savannah. There have been some notable successes since the 1970s, when the mercury flowed freely, the porpoises hightailed it, and Nader’s Raiders wrote that “a house has a garbage can; Savannah has a river.” Water quality has improved and straight-piping sewage and chemicals has all but ceased. Dolphins occasionally frolic north of Interstate 95.
Despite the massive damage wrought by the deepening, the mitigation money will help restore and preserve large swaths of the river. The Savannah refuge, for example, received two thousand acres of hardwood forest in exchange for the freshwater marsh lost to saltwater intrusion. On a recent visit to the Abercorn Island tract, I saw an elegant white ibis skirting the shoreline and a committee of black vultures drying their wings in the sun. Nearby, a largely intact Native American midden exposed layer upon layer of shells.
The Army Corps, expiating its previous ecological sins, will spend more than twelve million dollars “re-bending” the serpentine Savannah. Wildcat Cut, Spanish Cut, Devil’s Elbow, Saucy Boy Point, and more than two dozen other meanders will be restored to their pre-1959 glory.
“The river is in much better condition than in the past,” Tonya says as an anhinga darts downstream. “But the river’s best chance is to be put all back together again so that it functions normally. You need to return to a slower river with all the swamps and oxbows that serve as kidneys and livers to clean up all the junk that’s put into it.”
Her message resonates in some unlikely corners of the Savannah watershed. Upon leaving Tonya, I visit an old cotton plantation near Estill, South Carolina, owned by descendants of John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It’s a beautiful, well-tended piece of property befitting the scions of American royalty, who enjoy hunting quail, deer, turkeys, and hogs. The upland savannah of longleaf pine and wire grass mixes with fields of sorghum and soybean before ambling downhill to the cypress-kneed swamp and oak-filled bends in the river. Bald eagles, red-cockaded woodpeckers, painted buntings, blue herons, and ospreys abound. Groton Plantation’s owners signed a conservation easement—the largest private easement in South Carolina history—ensuring that twenty thousand acres would never be developed and the streams flowing off the property and into the Savannah would remain pristine. What was truly impressive about the deal was who helped pay for it—a water utility fifty miles downstream. The Beaufort-Jasper Water & Sewer Authority, keen to lower water-treatment costs, chipped in more than a half-million dollars to defray the easement’s cost. Walmart, International Paper (which now owns the Bag), and other corporations put up hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
“Whatever you can preserve upstream is going to have beneficial impacts downstream,” Joe Mantua, general manager of the water authority, tells me. “Usually, utilities are focused on spending money on technology and processes that are implemented at the intake. But there’s so much value in protecting the source of the water and what eventually comes to the plant.”
Few utilities act as foresightedly as Beaufort’s to finance the preservation of land that filters pollutants before they reach a stream. New York City invested one and a half billion dollars in a watershed protection plan in the Catskills. Here, in the heavily forested lower Savannah basin, five water utilities have joined together with the goal of protecting nearly two million river-buffering acres.
“One thing that makes the South unique is the way we approach management of a river and our ability to pull people together to solve problems,” Tonya says while pulling away from the riverbank. “You can’t be all about water quality and the fishes. You have to manage the river so that people can also make a living. In Oregon, you’ve got a bunch of lefties that pretty much decide what’s going to happen to a dam. Here, if you’re only working with Democrats, you’re going to fail. You have to incorporate everybody’s interests if you want to succeed.”
I ask her what she’s learned after a decade as the riverkeeper.
“Working on this river has made me a lot more practical because there’s no way to solve every issue at once,” she says. “It’s crazy. And it’s definitely entertaining. But you have to choose your battles.”
We dock and I return to my car to retrace Muir’s route to Savannah. I checked back with Tonya a few months later. The lock and dam’s future was still up in the air. Her enemies weren’t letting up. But she didn’t care. She was the proud mother of a baby girl named Charlotte Elizabeth River.