Marking 30 years, 'Source to Sea' Connecticut River cleanups continue in western Mass.

Nor’easter or not, hundreds of volunteers gathered up and down the Pioneer Valley over the weekend to clean up the waterways powering ecosystems throughout the Northeast.

Clad in ponchos and umbrellas, some two dozen locals had no problem getting wet before they even set foot in and around Easthampton’s ponds and brooks.

The goal - pick up as much garbage and litter as possible along the waterways.

Volunteers grabbed trash bag after trash bag Saturday morning – and before long, were filling them.

Working with her husband Bryan, Becky Martin paused to share her haul just 20 minutes in.

“Lots of nips, lots of alcohol bottles - plastic food containers, plastic dog waste bags … tennis balls! A lot of tennis balls,” she remarked. “They come down from the Williston [Northampton] School - but I think, by far, it's alcohol containers – nips and thing.”

It’s not too shocking, says Molly Montgomery. She, along with the rest of the Easthampton Beautification Team, have been putting on their own cleanups over the years, including a city-wide effort coming up in May.

Saturday’s efforts, however, were part of the broader “Source to the Sea” campaign organized by the Connecticut River Conservancy.

Now in its 30th year, Saturday marked another region-wide push to clean up as much of the 410-mile river as possible. The effort stretches across four states, with many of the cleanups held a week before - but, the campaign is ongoing.

It’s made up in-part of teams like Montgomery’s – individually small, but together, making a sizable impact.

“Everything starts at the local level. We have to clean and focus on the smaller or larger areas that are right where we live, and that just contributes to everything downstream and helping to keep the broader area clean,” Montgomery told WAMC.

In Easthampton’s case, it meant volunteers spreading out and hitting the banks of Rubber Thread Pond and beyond.

Manning the group’s home base and scale for weighing trash was Owen Zaret. After five or six years of coordinating with the CRC, he says the cleanups turn up all manner of things – though, as Martin noted, miniature bottles of booze known as “nips” seem to take the cake.

“I actually have a guitar capo in my pocket from the last clean up - it's almost usable! I've considered throwing this on my guitar for a song just in honor of the work that we do here,” he said, showing off the musical device. “We’ve found a bunch of bicycles, tires, televisions - we found a really cool leather biker jacket that was discarded. But yeah, lots and lots of nip bottles, which is what started the ‘Nip Bin’ in the first place.”

The so-called “Nip Bin” was Zaret’s own brainchild – a bin just for the tiny, non-redeemable bottles. The former city councilor at-large says, until the state does something like make them eligible for bottle redemption, they’re only going to keep filling up pond banks and trash bags.

On the bright side of an otherwise rainy morning though, he says at least the community’s able to come together to do something about them.

“We only have one Earth and we … have dwindling opportunities to preserve that Earth, whether it be the atmosphere or the ground itself and little efforts like this, cumulatively, can assist in saving the earth we have,” Zaret added. “It’s these small efforts that, I think, bring both awareness and action to improving the world we live in, but also help people think more about what we could do on a broader scale.”

Elsewhere in the valley, the little bottles appeared in Northampton as well, during the “Big River Cleanup” organized in-part by State Representative Lindsay Sabadosa, as well as WRSI and the Kestrel Land Trust.

Taking up the most dumpster space was the sheer amount of illegally dumped materials – ranging from old, rusted tractor parts to, as WRSI’s Stefan Ward and company found – entire stacks of scraps from what appeared to be a home remodeling.

“… it's full of linoleum paneling and bits of hardwood, bits of what looks like [pressure-treated] wood, too… and we're filling several bags of it here.” Ward said as volunteers came walking out of some brush with wood panels in hand. “This wasn't here last year - I captured this very same area, so somebody dropped this off pretty recently.”

It’s part of the reason Sabadosa says volunteers keep coming to the section of Northampton known as “The Meadows,” near the local airfield. Dense crops and a lack of lighting at night make it an ideal area for dumping.

Among other issues though – those materials are a literal stone’s throw away from the Connecticut River, she adds.

“This is a site where there's a lot of activity. We've, unfortunately, found people dumping construction materials, household appliances - it seems like every year, we find part of a car that may have broken off - lots of tires, and it can be a party site or an encampment site, and so we find lots of bottles, broken glass, things like that,” the 1st Hampshire Democrat said. “We want to make sure that it's cleaned up because … this weekend especially, we know rains are coming. If we aren't cleaning up along the river, all of that stuff ends up in the river.”

Legislatively, there are a few efforts worth being optimistic about, she adds. That includes an environmental bond bill that’s been in conference committee, which Sabadosa hopes to see passed around December.

Funds for preserving the Connecticut River was part of the legislation, including a “Historic Connecticut River Water Trail” that would run from Hatfield to Holyoke – a recreational hotspot for in western Mass.

It’s an area more than worth protecting, she says, adding that she and others have been cleaning up the Northampton spot for the past eight years.

It's hard and steady work – especially with the amount of ticks about and nails sticking out of the scraps volunteers pull out. But, it adds up.

There’s also a community-building aspect to the Source to the Sea campaign as well, organizers say.

Probably the best example of that was in Greenfield, home to the CRC’s headquarters. By the early afternoon Saturday. about a hundred volunteers were still at the Green River Swimming and Recreation Area – all while truck and after truck dumped loads of trash gathered from the different sites volunteers had hit.

Helping organize that effort was John David Boles, who’s been helping coordinate the “Franklin/Green River Cleanup” for 23 years.

“It's been going on since about 8:30 this morning,” he said of the volunteers and the 20-30 cleanup sites they hit. “I would say we probably had close to 250 people come here - I think we had 120 school kids cleaning up last week on Friday, as well.”

Swinging a golf club before tossing it into a pile of gathered metal items, Boles recounted how, having grown up in Niagara County in upstate New York, he’s familiar with polluted with waterways.

But, in his corner of western Mass., he says there’s no lack of energy amongst residents who show up in gloves, boots and other cleanup gear.

“There's quite a bit of enthusiasm now to protect our waters and riverways - I'm just highly grateful for the people of Franklin County and the surrounding area that really do care and really show up,” he said. “The weather doesn't scare us - we show up and we take care of business.”

By the early afternoon, there was a miniature mountain range of trash bags, along with furniture and a large amount of camping equipment.

Connecticut River Conservancy Executive Director Rebecca Todd said there were plenty of interesting and sometimes historical items to be found and even recycled – but the sheer amount of debris stemming from the region’s unhoused alludes to other, broader issues besides pollution in area waterways.

“In terms of the whimsical, we've got a great frog hat that somebody found, and in terms of heartbreaking - I was at the Green River Park here in Greenfield today, cleaning up garbage from encampments from the unhoused - and that's just heartbreaking to see, that we don't do a better job of taking care of all the inhabitants in our watershed,” Todd said. “We run the gamut from whimsical to historical to heartbreaking.”

In terms of results, the CRC reports that last year’s Source to Sea campaign featured 2,000 volunteers across four states, with around 71,000 pounds of trash removed from waterways and riverbanks.

And while much of the work may have been done a week before (Sept. 18-19 were the most-advertised Source to Sea days), there was still plenty reason to celebrate the weekend’s results – complete with music from the “Boys of the Landfill” band.