The Water Is Wide (My Political Landscape)

The joint is jumping at the Clearwater Great Hudson River Revival Festival. It’s the Summer Solstice, Clearwater weekend at the riverside park in Croton-on-Hudson, the small town one county and 30-odd miles north of Manhattan that’s been home to the festival on and off since 1978. The Bluerunners zydeco band is rocking the dance tent, the wood floor packed with dancers of all ages, toddlers to graybeards (though of few colors, being almost all white), and I’m sitting on the grass, watching the dancing and beyond it the wide and mighty Hudson, at once keeping time and traveling through it, because, in more than one sense, this is where I’m from.

My answers to the question, “Where do you come from?” depend on context. “Brooklyn,” I often say, because I was born there. Or, “the Lower East Side,” because my first home was in Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing complex just south of the Manhattan Bridge. The first home I remember, though, was in Westchester County, on Radnor Avenue in Croton, about a mile from where I’m sitting at Clearwater, the festival.

Clearwater is a ship, a cause, a nonprofit corporation, and a “music and environmental festival.” The ship is the sloop Clearwater, conceived in 1966 as “a boat to save the Hudson” by veteran activist-folksinger Pete Seeger, who lived on the shores of the great but dying river. Then in his 40s, Seeger had been blacklisted during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s; unlike many, he had remained committed to activism and the socialist ideal. When he realized that his beloved Hudson was in danger of irreversible degradation, he began singing for the money to build a ship that would sail up and down the river, helping to clean it up and raising consciousness about the environment. He called the ship the Clearwater, and it succeeded. Today, the Hudson is clean enough to eat from, and each summer, Hudson Sloop Clearwater, Inc., and Westchester County co-host Clearwater, the festival.

It’s a festival of many kinds of music—folk, jazz, blues, and dance music—and also of storytelling, children’s activities, environmental education and food and crafts. If, as noted above, the thousands who come are mostly white, they’re also almost all left-of-center, many of them activists in a wide range of good causes, most prominently peace and the environment. They come as families; many came in their youth and come now with their own children.

Me, too. As I said, this is where I’m from, in more than one sense. I was brought to hear Pete Seeger sing in my own childhood. The first time my son Adam heard him was just before Adam’s second birthday, at a Hiroshima Day protest. Today Adam and his family, are here, visiting from Maryland. My eight- and three-year-old granddaughters, too, have heard Seeger’s songs for children—

And this evening they'll hear him in person for the first time. Now 89, Pete doesn’t perform often anymore. He’s not scheduled to sing today, only to be interviewed live at 6:30 in the Children’s Tent.

It’s getting late. The girls are tired, and we have to get back to the city. But there’s a big crowd at the Children’s Tent, and as we pass it, we hear a familiar voice, and then a lot of voices, raised in song.

Pete is leading the audience in “Amazing Grace.” We sing along, of course. I take a blurry picture for the girls to have when they’re older, and we head home.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak