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Dude Over Troubled Water The strangest stuff litters the flood-sloshed banks of the Mississippi River and her tributaries—tires by the hundred, refrigerators, automobiles, messages in a bottle, urine in a bottle, and (yikes!) the occasional ice chest containing a severed horse head. When the going gets gross, the man to call is Chad Pregracke, a crusading voyager in the war against trash. By John Galvin
"Big day today, dudes!" he hollers at his four-man crew as he steps outside into a crisp blue-sky morning. "Big day! Huge! We're going to get four boatloads of trash, OK? At least four boatloads! Arrrgh! Arrrrrgh!" Lashed to the boat, which Pregracke (say "pruh-GRAK-ee") salvaged from the bottom of the Illinois River three summers ago, are a pair of large river barges soon to be piled high with junk, and a small tug with sponsors' logos plastered on the side.
Pregracke and the boys are the heart and soul of Living Lands and Waters, a nonprofit operation that Chad founded in 1997 to pursue a straightforward goal: to collect any and all of the visible crapola that litters the Mississippi River and major tributaries like the Ohio and Illinois. There's a lot to choose from on waterways that are both terribly littered and seriously polluted. Though it's impossible to tally exactly how much trash finds its way to the rivers, Pregracke and his crews remove more than 200,000 pounds a year—recycling what they can, taking the rest to a landfill. A lot of it comes from illegal dumping, but the main source is the huge floods that scour the Mississippi every two or three years and pick up anything on the floodplain that isn't chained down, plopping it on islands and muddy riverbanks. Pregracke's trash-picking season begins on the Ohio. He has a multiyear plan to work upstream from Cairo, Illinois, to Pittsburgh, where the river is formed by the merger of the Monongahela and Allegheny. So far, he's covered 180 miles of that waterway, making it almost to Evansville. In June the group switches to the main event: the Mississippi, where Pregracke's teams have policed 900 miles of shoreline up and back between St. Louis and Gutenberg, Iowa. In October the guys return to the Ohio to pick up where they left off. In the winter they all go do something else. Chad holes up at his parents' house on the banks of the Mississippi in Hampton, Illinois, where he raises money and does repairs for the next season. On this bright spring morning, with the trees not yet leafing out, the riverscape is drab. French explorers called the Ohio "La Belle Riviere," but it's not very belle today. The water is a murky brown, and the banks are cluttered with cement plants, freight terminals, and tons and tons of trash. But trash is what these boys came for, so they happily descend on Henderson Island and scurry off in all directions, returning with armfuls of refuse, piling it on the bank, and going back for more. After a few hours their impressive bounty includes 36 tires, a yellow plastic Little Tykes truck with blue wheels, 20 antifreeze jugs, five 55-gallon oil and chemical drums, two propane tanks, and at least one sniff-certified bottle of captain's piss. "They're named for the tug captains who urinate in them and then toss them overboard because they can't leave the deck," says Maasberg, suspiciously eyeing one of the half-full bottles of foamy yellow liquid. Havlis, whose right work glove reads LOVE and whose left glove reads HATE, returns with a basketball and a plastic goose decoy. Pregracke pops into view dragging two tires and a coppery race-car helmet, number 44, balanced on top of his cap. "That's tight, dawg," Pregracke says, admiring the goose. He and Havlis start wrestling a refrigerator onto one of the boats. "Mike," he suggests, "you pull from inside the boat." "Yes, sir." "Dude, don't call me sir." "Oh, sorry. Yes, dude." "That's tight, dawg," Pregracke says, nodding and smiling.
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