I met my professional fate early in life along the Millers River in western Massachusetts.  As a young boy, I understood little of the river and the thick, color-changing slurry that ran through town.  Water pollution was not a supper table topic in our deep-blue-collar neighborhoods.  

The factories where our dads worked and the towns where we lived were long the sources of this toxic sludge.  The waste of our industrialized communities flushed from literally thousands of pipes and ditches into this once vibrant cold-water river carved into the Mohawk Trail. 

Many have already forgotten the Millers River of my youth – more than 50 years ago now.  It was a little too thick to swim in, but not thick enough to walk on.  It changed colors with the dye lots coming from the  mills. From my home, nearly a mile away you could smell the river’s acrid smell.  None of us ever fished in the Millers – even as kids we knew nothing lived there.

It would be many years before I would hear of, or begin to understand, the importance of the Clean Water Act.  That law would forever change the Millers and untold other rivers across the U.S.  While it was many years before clean water and aquatic life returned to much of the watershed, this example of our collective power to restore rivers lives again. Recent MassWildlife surveys have found Brown, Rainbow, and Brook Trout, along with Smallmouth Bass, Rock Bass, Bluegill, Pumpkinseed, Redbreast Sunfish, Fallfish, and Common Shiner in the river.

I am grateful to have been witness to the Millers’ resilience and to have watched some of her recovery. And, while my own journeys through life would carry me to every state in the U.S. and to many countries abroad, my professional fate – to build Trout Headwaters with a team focused only on restoration – had long been sealed by the experience of growing up alongside this injured natural resource.  Over the past 28 years now, our firm has been blessed to help repair and heal streams, wetlands and other habitats in more than 36 states over more than 550 projects and for hundreds of clients. 

The successes and challenges for the health of the Millers River are ongoing. Learn more about those working on behalf of this ever-precious resource today  http://millerswatershed.org/