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My Grandmother on the River

  One of my favorite photographs is of my grandmother when she was a young girl, sprawled on her side on a raft in a river on a summer afternoon. Her head is resting on her arm, like she’s floating on a bed. The look on her face is one of contentment – like she wanted to lie there forever, absorbing the sun, feeling the gentle touch of the waves.

I imagine she wanted to float on that river forever – young, beautiful, bonded with the water and the sky. But, of course, that afternoon did end. My grandmother, Mildred Baumrucker, grew up and got married. She remained outwardly as sweet and soft as her voice – although in some ways her life was hard. She became a mother of two – and then a single parent when her cheating, alcoholic husband left her.

Although she was the daughter of doctors, when her husband left, she had to learn to support herself as a fourth-grade public school teacher in a tough neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. I remember her always saving something special – a cookie, her time and attention – for the most picked-on kids. She was a trash-talking card shark in family games of Canasta; a painter, blueberry pie baker; and great-grandmother of 15. "It all went so fast," were her last words to me, as she handed me my daughter, then a baby, and implored me not to end my final visit before she died.

What she left us was a house. Her parents had built a summer home atop a forested bluff over Lake Michigan – red brick, covered in vines, with a long wooden staircase leading down to a wide beach. It was here that our family, over many decades, gathered every year from our diaspora. We drove in from all over the country: a Republican car dealer from Texas; a gay telemarketer from Chicago; a priest, a reporter, a lawyer, an actor. Despite our extreme differences – some of us nearly homeless; one, an investment banker – we came together every summer in Mildred Baumrucker's house to baptize ourselves in the waters of the lake. It was at the Lake House that I learned to love nature and decided to become an environmentalist. When I was a kid, my father and I fixed up an old wooden rowboat and spent endless hours fishing and exploring the maze of marshlands behind the house.

Lives come and go. People move on like driftwood down a river. That is natural. What is not natural is how much the river itself changes – how much the Earth is changing before our eyes because of what we are doing to it. A few years ago, developers built hundreds of condominiums atop what were supposed to be protected wetlands where I used to explore. The woods across the street were bulldozed. Last summer, my niece from Texas asked: "Uncle Tom, how come there are no fish in the lake?"

For nearly 20 years now, I have lived in Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay is my home. Every summer, I take my wife and daughters crabbing. I see my daughter lying on the wooden pier, holding a string trailing into the water, absorbing the sun – content, like my grandmother on the raft. It makes me think: There is so much more life left here that is worth protecting. The wetlands of the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, timeless and pathless as mist rises from them at dawn. The needlefish flashing thorough the shallows of a creek trickling into the Chesapeake. The baby blue crabs swimming sideways to escape my children's bare feet.

In a way, that summer day in the photograph of my grandmother did not end. It’s just me and my children now feeling the sun in different waters. These waters are still so full of life that they are worth fighting for, and saving.

Tom Pelton, a national award-winning environmental journalist, has hosted "The Environment in Focus" since 2007. He also works as director of communications for the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to holding polluters and governments accountable to protect public health. From 1997 until 2008, he was a journalist for The Baltimore Sun, where he was twice named one of the best environmental reporters in America by the Society of Environmental Journalists.