To get to the river required a long walk, considerable trespassing and, if I remember correctly, wading through a tick haven of tall grass. But finally we stood on the bank, just above Bosher Dam, west of the city. We plunged in. It was wonderful.
When my friend’s mother found out about our adventure, I believe she may have blanched. She seemed astonished and horrified in equal measure. Did we have any idea what was in that river?
We didn’t. I knew that longtime Richmonders spoke of the river with a sort of hushed horror, as though it were a neighbor’s daughter fallen into ruination and sin. I’d always put that down to some kind of irrational, citified dread of the river’s untamed wilderness of rocks and currents. I didn’t know that the James we’d been swimming in was contaminated at that time by a witch’s brew of industrial toxins, pesticides, chemical fertilizers and raw sewage. I didn’t know that Kepone had recently made the river a national byword for environmental disaster.
Had we known all that, it might have given us pause. Or it might not. As we didn’t fall ill or grow any extra limbs, we didn’t stop going down to the river—and, in fact, our subsequent expeditions were fueled by the illicit thrill of adventures your parents don’t approve of.
Today I am a parent, and I still swim in the river, and so does my child. Today, though, the James is a far healthier river. That is not to say that it is entirely healthy, or that the gains that have been made in the past decades can’t be lost without careful stewardship in the future—increasing development is now the major threat to many of America’s waterways. However, the signs of a river’s renaissance are everywhere on the James. Thanks in large part to the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, there has been a steady and substantial reduction of what are known as “point-source” pollutants, such as sewage and contaminated industrial discharges, that once turned parts of the river into veritable dead zones. Bald eagles, which had vanished from the James by the mid-1970s, decimated by DDT and possibly Kepone as well, have made an inspiring comeback; in fact, east of Hopewell, the James River National Wildlife Refuge alone boasts a roosting population of some 230 eagles. Where 45 years ago the editors of the Richmond News Leader described a stinking cesspool below Richmond, where “no aquatic life of any sort survives,” today recreational fishing thrives.
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