The River and Me

A Sight to Behold

On Thursday, Gran E swings by to pick up Bud and Evette after school, promising to take them somewhere special. In the car, she reveals a picnic basket packed with red velvet cake. As they drive over the bridge to Anacostia, Evette looks out the window at the restless waves of the big river. Bud asks how Gran E found her special swimming hole. Gran E explains that her older brother, Robert, showed it to her the same day the mean girls chased her away from the public pool. He told her not to bother with that pool again and led her to a spot just a few miles from their house, at the end of a quiet dead-end street, down a path, in front of a peaceful river full of birds.

Gran E parks near the dead-end street, and the three of them follow a gravel path into the woods, past ferns and brambles, the air smelling of pine. Birds sing overhead. Gran E says it brings back happy memories and calls it a sight to behold. None of them brought swimsuits, but they can still wade. They keep walking, catching flashes of silvery water through the branches.

But as they step out of the trees, the scene changes. The swimming hole Gran E remembers is gone. Plastic bags, bottles, and chunks of Styrofoam litter the shoreline and float on the water. A waterlogged armchair and a half-sunk lawn mower sit tangled among old tires along the muddy bank. Gran E’s shoulders sink. She can barely look at it and insists they leave right away.

Evette lingers behind, aching for Gran E and the river itself. She pictures years of people dumping trash here, piece by piece, until a beautiful, private place turned into this. She can’t understand how anyone could do that and not care. She knows the Anacostia River is polluted and the city is trying to clean it up, but she’d never looked closely enough to wonder what lay beneath its surface. It had been easy to forget about pollution. Seeing it now makes it feel real. People did this, dumping trash and damaging nature.

Walking back up the path, Evette decides this is a problem worth fixing, even if she doesn’t yet know how.