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< May-June 2007
	Lead In
Cleaning Lady It takes a motivated woman to beat something By Christian Knight

By August, the summer sun has scorched northwest Oregon’s city streets, flushing bands of heat refugees to the sandy banks of the Clackamas River. It is the one time of year when feet-flipping, red-chested inner-tubers consistently outnumber geared-up kayakers. This was also the time of year in 2003 when Kristin Dahl, Sam Drevo, and Eric Johnson got mad. But instead of merely commiserating about it, the three eNRG Kayak instructors decided to organize it out of existence.

It, of course, was trash. Cigarette butts (Five years to decomposition, by the way). Leather shoes (45 years). Aluminum cans (200 to 500 years). Styrofoam coolers. (1 million years).

Heaps of it. Pieces of it. Piled here. Scattered there. Everywhere. So later that afternoon, the three of them conspired to organize a conserted river cleanup.

“When we finally cultivated the idea, it was August, and the cleanup was in September,” Dahl says. “Our thought was to send out an e-mail to our students and PDXkayaker (a Portland-based paddlers’ Web forum with 1,700 members) and see who showed up. I figured we’d just run down the river with some garbage bags.”

The garbage problem, however, would demand much more than a few trash bags. A few years before Dahl’s action-demanding paddle session, the Oregon Department of Transportation had closed access to Fishermen’s, one of Portland’s most popular backwoods party spots for underage drinkers. The closure had shifted the burden of underage drinking toward the Clackamas’ beaches and parks.

“There’s a place called Beer Can Island,” says Rich Mura, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s deputy in charge of the parks along the river. “The bottom of the river is covered with thousands of beer cans. There are so many, people take rafts down there and dive to get cans for money.”

Culver Park is also one of the few parks outside of Portland where booze is allowed. Sounds like a daunting task for three paddlers and an Internet connection. For Dahl, the former high school student body president, it was a natural challenge.

“She was the perfect person to take it on,” eNRG owner Drevo says. “She really took the bull by the horns and went with it.”

Dahl, raised by the chief executive officer of a Juneau, Alaska, bank and an accountant, had learned a thing or two about organization. Coordinating and encouraging community collaboration is Dahl’s passion. It’s also her job. After earning her graduate degree in urban and regional planning from Portland State University, Dahl landed a job as a community development coordinator in Portland.

By September 2003, Dahl and Drevo had recruited more than 60 volunteers to the six-mile stretch of the Clackamas. More importantly, they had formed some cooperative relationships with organizations, agencies, and companies, such as Portland State University and the Clackamas River Basin Council.

In its second year, the clean-up effort recruited more than 100 volunteers. Dahl, Drevo, and the Clackamas Basin River Council made the most of them.

“In Year 2, we got smart,” Dahl recalls. “One hundred thirty-six people showed up and we divided them into pods. Each pod had a kayaker for safety, a raft, a diver. We split the river into six sections, one section apiece.”

They pulled 1,720 pounds of garbage from the Clackamas.

“Cigarette butts, cans, couches, you name it,” Dahl says. “At the bottom of the eddies, where divers came up, one of the divers said they could stand in the bottom of an eddy and there would be aluminum cans up to his chest.”

The effort came with some reward. The cleanup wasn’t just a cleanup in Year 2. It also featured a bar-be-cue with live music.

Dahl had momentum heading into the cleanup’s third year and she used it to gather more. With Drevo and the Clackamas River Basin Council, she partnered with 18 organizations, which would provide necessities such as bus shuttles, garbage bags, rafts, and money for the bar-be-cue.

On that September 11, 2005, the 190 “Down the River Cleanup” volunteers hauled 5,000 pounds of garbage from a 12-mile stretch of the Clackamas. Oregon’s governor, Ted Kulongoski, recognized the effort on the state capitol stairs by presenting Dahl and some of her partners with a Best Development of Partnerships Award.

Two hundred eighty volunteers showed up for the 2006 cleanup and hauled 7,580 pounds of garbage from 12 miles of river. As the steering committee considers another ambition—transforming the cleanup into an annual festival for 2007—it is vexed by another more perpetual one: How to make the cleanup last; how to keep a single moment of disregard from undoing months of planning and collaboration. It is the type of question that could, with time, demoralize the effort. It is the kind of motivational parasite that has, at times, infected Dahl.

“I know in my heart of hearts I’m passionate about and care deeply for the health of our environment,” she wrote in an e-mail to some of her closest friends. “But I’ve noticed … I’ve grown somewhat cynical. Cleaning up a river seems so simple and maybe even trivial—it’s not the latest and greatest biofuel concoction or highly energy efficient off-the-grid fuel cell, but I think it has the potential to have broad-reaching impacts that one can never really quantify.”