River Flowing

Nobody knows exactly where the river begins, but sentiment and tradition favor a tiny lake on the shoulder of Mount Marcy called Tear of the Clouds. This is the Hudson as the hiker knows it - - a newborn stream chattering down the valleys of the Adirondacks. This is where Hope's and Perron's voyage of discovery begins.

The river they discover is a presence that binds together a series of brilliant verbal and pictorial vignettes. In the foreground are the multifarious folk who use the Hudson; in the background lies the river, linking them as it has linked New Yorkers for three centuries.

Steve Dickinson and Neil Green, Whitewater addicts, compete year after year in the fierce canoe derbies of the upper river. Downstream in Corinth, George Holland worries about environmentalist pressure on the paper mill he works for, while Everett Nack, who can almost make a living from the shad fishery, tries to cope with the effects of the effluent that George's mill and others like it pump into the stream. Clark Leichting and his tugboat crew ease eight traprock scows down to a rendezvous in New York harbor; up in Beacon Pete Seeger inspirits the serio-comic activities of the Beacon Sloop Club; driver Bud patiently negotiates his sleepy car pool down Palisades Parkway and over the Bridge; Fred and Arnold chat about their welfare checks as they cast their bait into the sewage off Riverside Park.

Hope's vividly detailed prose captures the river's people; Perron's somber photographs display the background of loveliness or blight against which these lives are lived. The interplay between text and photos is rich and suggestive: Perron's pictures move us back a step from the men and women we meet in Hope's essays, showing us the sordid or magnificent environments that help to shape their lives.

Conservation means holding on to what you value, not letting it get destroyed by the wanton and foolish. Before you can begin to conserve, you have to know what you've got: you need to be introduced and reintroduced to your own resources. What Hope and Perron bring to life is a human resource, a network of occupations and recreations, a community of varied lives interacting with the great river on which they all depend. It is, as this moving book makes clear, something commonplace, fragile, and precious. It is what the conservation movement is all about.

A RIVER FOR THE LIVING:THE HUDSON AND ITSPEOPLE. By Jack Hope.Photographs by Robert Perron '59.Barrel Crown, 1975. 224 pp. $14.95.

Currently president of the Hanover Conservation Council, Mr. Cornell admits to being anative New Yorker with strong emotional ties tothe Hudson.