Dude Over Troubled Water

It's early morning on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, 20 miles downstream from Evansville, Indiana, and the walls of a rickety white houseboat called The Miracle are pulsating to the sound of the Beastie Boys song “Girls.” Tied up across from Dead Man's Island, a narrow, sandy stretch thick with skeletal cottonwoods, the boat is stocked with Little Debbie P.B. & J. Oatmeal Pies—Girls, all I really want is girls—a half-eaten package of Oscar Mayer salami—and in the morning it's girls—and a jar of Folgers instant coffee. Inside, wearing a blue baseball cap that he will take off only once, briefly, during seven straight working days is Chad Pregracke, the wiry, five-foot-six, 27-year-old trash zealot of the mighty Mississippi and her major tributaries—'cause in the evening it's girls.

Then, as if to remind himself that today is the first day of his nine-month trash-picking season—something that makes him sooo happy after a winter going stir-crazy on land—Pregracke strikes an Incredible Hulk pose and lets loose: “Arrrrrrgh!”

“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.

On the back barge, Pregracke's childhood friend Dave Sparks, 28, is busy modifying a manually operated crane, rigging it so that two mountain bikes can power its shaft—Pregracke having decided that cranking the thing by hand takes too long. While Sparks works away, Pregracke and the rest of the crew—Mike Havlis, 34, Eric “Yam” Louck, 24, and David Maasberg, 30—pile into a pair of 30-foot flat- bottomed boats, aiming the bows for nearby Henderson Island and all the trash that adorns it.

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.

WHEN YOU ADD IT UP, Pregracke's teams have pulled more than a million pounds of trash out of riverbank muck, including 5,000 truck, tractor, and car tires, 1,133 steel drums, 527 plastic drums, one sunken barge, one houseboat, 128 pesticide containers, 287 refrigerators, enough Styrofoam to cover a football field two feet deep, a sex doll named Lulu, a message in a bottle that said “Whoever opens this bottle sucks,” and a cooler with a horse's head stuffed inside. (“Dude,” Pregracke says, “that smelled horrible.”) There's been much more, including an entire 1970 Ford Econoline Van, 348 antifreeze bottles, 350 propane tanks, 49 barbecue grills, and yes, 49 kitchen sinks.

Despite its unglamorous preoccupation with trash, Living Lands and Waters is a well-run, well-funded outfit. In certain circles Pregracke is even rather famous. In 1997 the Davenport, IowaÐbased Quad-City Times ran a local-boy-makes-good story on his trash-picking crusade. It was picked up by the wires, got some national play, and generated a brief segment on CNN.

This year, five summers after that splash of fame, Pregracke is on course to raise $420,000 for the project, out of which he pays himself $25,000 a year. His crew members—usually young people on their way to other things, who tend to come and go fast owing to the work's rigors, messiness, and poison ivy—earn $1,500 to $1,800 a month, with a $1,000 bonus if they stay through the season. (Soon after my visit, Maasberg leaves and a guy named Larry Williams comes aboard.) They get health benefits, a boat floor to sleep on, and all the junk food they can eat.
How does a 27-year-old who says “dude” all the time raise that kind of money? Tom Harper, a 52-year-old Moline, Illinois, lawyer who once hired a teenage Chad Pregracke to help remodel his home—and who now sits on the project's ten-member board of directors—puts it this way: “He just asks. He doesn't know that he shouldn't ask, and it turns out people want to help. He's got so much energy it's hard to turn him down.”

Pregracke's seemingly infinite zeal grew out of his love of the Mississippi, a love spawned, oddly enough, on a summer day 12 years ago when he almost killed his older brother, Brent. Then 15, Chad was spending his first day helping 20-year-old Brent catch freshwater clams on the Big Muddy. Chad's job was to sort clams on the skiff while Brent dove and worked the river bottom. Chad was supposed to watch Brent's air hose and bubbles, but Chad claims Brent never told him that part.

While Chad sorted, strong currents knocked Brent around until the hose knotted and cut off his air. Another diver who was working with the boys popped out of the water and yelled at Chad to bring Brent up. Laid out in the boat like a stunned fish, Brent was ash white, his lips blue, and he remained immobile for a full ten minutes. Then he lamely motioned Chad over and whispered in his ear, “I'm going to kill you.”

Things got better. Over the next three summers, Chad and Brent lived out of sleeping bags on the Mississippi's many islands and clammed professionally. It was during the second summer that Pregracke became obsessed with how trashy the river was, and particularly with a huge pile of plastic barrels about 15 miles from his parents' house. That winter he called the Illinois Department of Natural Resources several times, bugging them to clean up the mess.

“I got nowhere,” Pregracke recalls. “They were really defensive. They kept saying things like, 'Where's the garbage?' 'That's not our responsibility.' 'There's no money for that.' And then they'd ask, 'Who are you, anyway?'

“So I started thinking about that,” he says. “Who am I? Well, I've been on every island on the Mississippi from Fort Madison, Iowa, to Dubuque, and I've clammed on the bottom of most of it, or my brother has. Then I realized that's who I am, and these people on the phone are in some office in Springfield, and what do they know about the river?”.

One weekend in the spring of 1997, while watching NASCAR on TV, Pregracke experienced an epiphany. “I started noticing all those logos on the cars,” he says. He grabbed the yellow pages and looked up the aluminum company Alcoa, an outfit that, he sort of knew, employs a couple thousand people in the Quad Cities area of Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa.

“Dude! I didn't even know what Alcoa did,” he says. “But I called and got this man on the phone, and I told him that I want to go pick up the trash on the Mississippi River, and would they sponsor me? He started asking me all sorts of things, like, Did I have a budget? Was I a 501c? I didn't even know what a budget was, but I told him I'd get one. I just wanted to clean the river.”

A week later, after Pregracke's mom taught him how to create a budget, he showed up at the office of Alcoa vice-president Tim Wilkinson, asking for $77,000 to clean 440 miles of the Mississippi and pay for boat insurance and five employees. Wilkinson gave Pregracke $8,400 for a more modest effort: picking up Mississippi River trash, by himself, in the Quad Cities area.

Which is exactly what Pregracke did. “I worked from the start of the summer until the ice froze me off the river,” he says. Then 21, he single-handedly dug 45,000 pounds of trash out of the riverbanks, dumping the load in his parents' yard until he could sort it, recycle it, or haul it off to a landfill. In the fall he started taking courses at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois, and returned home on weekends to finish the job.

The next summer Alcoa kicked in $20,000 and Pregracke raised $100,000 piecemeal from other companies. Suddenly, picking up garbage was a full-time thing. He left school, though he did finish his associate's degree in 2001. Today, the logos on his various boats testify to the success of his original NASCAR inspiration. Among his current sponsors are Alcoa, agribusiness giant Cargill, Honda Marine, Caterpillar, and the makers of O'Doul's, the nonalcoholic brew.

“Dude!” says Pregracke. “My middle name is O'Doul's. They gave me $50,000 this year!”