Penobscot River Revival packs information, fun into celebration
7/18/09 | 6 comments
Festivals

Penobscot River Revival packs information, fun into celebration


By Nok-Noi Ricker
BDN Staff
BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY BRIDGET BROWN
Penobscot River Keepers volunteer Tom Curtis (left) of Verona Island pushes off in a 28-foot voyager canoe with passengers (from second row) Shaniqua Holcombe, Ismail Warsame, Bucky Owen, Khalid Said, Danielle Colson and Art Taylor from the Bangor Waterfront at the second annual Penobscot River Revival on Saturday. The event featured demonstrations, displays and arts centered on the river and its restoration. Buy Photo
BANGOR, Maine — Resonating drumbeats mixed with traditional Wabanaki songs and dancing as the Burnurwurbskek singers, a Penobscot Indian Nation drum circle led by Ron Bear, welcomed people Saturday morning to the second annual Penobscot River Revival.

The first song the group performed at the waterfront festival “was a Micmac honor song, in honor of the river,” Bear said.

The usually six-member drum group was pared down to just three — Bear, his son Cree Bear and John Neptune — and the dancers included his daughter, Selena Bear, and Neptune’s daughter, Shantel Neptune.

The Penobscot River Revival, a celebration of the return of health to the river, was put on by the Lower Penobscot Watershed Coalition and several other organizations.

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Cheryl Daigle, community outreach coordinator with the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, told the drumming group that “it was really an honor to have you here celebrating the past, present and future of the river.”

Daigle said the celebration was planned to “raise awareness of all the natural resources the Penobscot River offers.”

As part of Saturday’s event, locals donned life vests and kayaked or canoed the river between Bangor and Brewer, while others made crafts or learned about how to keep the river clean. In addition to the music stage, more than 38 vendors set up booths, including local artists and crafters, guides, conservation groups, schools and local and federal agencies.

For decades, Maine’s largest waterway was polluted by residents, businesses and industries along the river, and it has taken many years of cleanup to improve water quality, Daigle said.

Many local children don’t realize that the river, which looks clean today, was polluted beyond belief just a few decades ago, said Glenburn resident Tree Heckler, a fiber artist and instructor.

“When I was a kid, I remember how filthy this river was,” she said. “You couldn’t even see the water because of the sludge. And the smell. You didn’t have to worry about kids drowning, because no kids in their right mind would go in it.

“My kids have no memory of that at all,” she added. “If we don’t take care of it, it could go back to that. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. It’s a worthy cause.”

At Heckler’s booth, children could sew together fuzzy rocks or bugs made out of felt.

Steve Coghlan, a University of Maine freshwater fisheries ecology professor, said the river’s history “is a sad, sad story.” He added that removal of some of the dams and planned removal of others along the Penobscot is a positive step.

“Once you tear down the dams, the river will begin to repair itself,” he said while tying flies for fly fishing at his booth. “Removal of the dams really set a whole string of events into motion.”

The Penobscot River restoration project is an unprecedented collaboration among hydropower company PPL Corp., the Penobscot Indian Nation, seven conservation groups and state and federal agencies to restore 11 species of sea-run fish to the Penobscot River while maintaining energy production, the project’s Web site states.

The project includes removing the Veazie and Great Works dams and bypassing the Howland dam to allow salmon and other sea-run fish access to nearly 1,000 miles of watershed.

Great efforts have been made in the last couple of decades to clean up the river, and once the river restoration project is complete, things can only get better, Daigle said.

“I’m a firm believer that there is a bright future here,” she said. “I live along the water with my daughter. I want it to be a place she can enjoy.”

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Comments
6 comments on this item
On 7/18/09 at 4:18 PM, Cre8RoyalPalm wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Nice to see these folks celebrating the Second Annual Penobscot River Festival.

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On 7/18/09 at 11:37 PM, Cre8RoyalPalm wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

The Penobscot River was a multitude of filth and refuse during the heyday of the many businesses, private and public wastewater runout into the river, and the many manufacturing companies all contributing to the pollution of the river. I would think that from the start of the river in northern Maine, all the way down through to the Atlantic bay area, the Penobscot brought forth nothing but the worse kind of diseases and pollution imaginable.

How many recall that Bangor had ice deliveries? Ice, mainly from the river. The Penobscot harvested more than fifteen thousand tons of ice from the Penobscot and Kenduskeag stream - both polluted at this time; in and around the 1930's. We drank it. Swam in it. Cooked with it. Played in it. Ships dumped refuse and waste into it. We pulled contaminated fish from it (and this was stopped, eventually, too). Logging companies dumped sawdust, wood chips, slabs and manufacturing chemical waste into it. Shoe factories dumped very toxic pollutants with high PPM's into it.

With Bangor and other areas suffering population, came down with many diseases, the final and most common were the cancer and cholera and TB cases. It was not the Indians' fault; most of them went to the coast to fish and left harvesting back on their reservations and other areas to the younger ones and the women of the tribes. They would return in the fall, in these early days of life near the river. Fishing and harvesting does not create pollution.

It was the advent of recognizing and then acting upon the polluted river and getting rid of the dams. Now, only the sludge remains on the river bottom. Hopefully, the pollutants and harmful bacterias have washed-out by now.

No matter, it is nice to give praise to the One who gave us these beautiful environments for man to survive and appreciate. It's a great thing knowing the Penobscot is (hopefully - nearly) back to its original clean environment. Try to keep it that way. Thanks to all who monitor the river and the wildlife and aquatic life in and around it.

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On 7/19/09 at 12:30 AM, chersully2000 wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

it is great for the many who live and recreation near the Penobscot River to have it brought back to a healthy and clean state. There have been tremendous improvements made to the River and to the waterfronts. Let's hope the pollutants in it are very minimal now. Wow, it must have been something to witness it when it was full of sludge,etc. Ugh! We, today, are fortunate to have it in the condition it is now!

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On 7/19/09 at 2:36 PM, waynee wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

I grew up on that river above the old bangor brewer dam, indeed the river was like a gient sewer, how sad , the salmon stoped comming up I think only a few made it, however the greedy tourest industry still hawked it as perfect. I remember the awful stench in the winter when it was frozen over and down by the dam it smelled of methane comming from the sludge on the bottom, you are very lucky to have it back, your rivers back there are national treasures, you should see the poor colorado out here lots of sewers dump into it and we here in southern calif drink it, and by the time it attemps to cross the border into Mexico you could jump across it if there is any water at all, they say allof our water here has passed through seven humans before it gets to us , not very pretty. So take good care of the river and it will in turn take care of you, our love to Maine.

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On 7/19/09 at 3:45 PM, Cre8RoyalPalm wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

That is right, 'waynee'. The Colorado is nasty. I went to Laughlin, Nevada - only once - to gamble there and we had the chance to cross the Colorado into Arizona on one of those powerful passenger crafts they have. We noticed (last year) the Colorado was smelly enough at this point and the river, as usual, had great flow. Back in Bangor in the 1940's and 1950's, as a kid, I well remember the water in the Penobscot looked like inside my mothers old Amana wringer-clothes washer; soapy water, with clumps and cakes of soap bubbles all inside it. Can you visualize what the entire river looked like south of the dam? We both saw it!

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On 7/19/09 at 7:05 PM, chersully2000 wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

I think we in the eastern part of the country can consider ourselves quite fortunate to have the lakes and rivers we have and the condition they are in. Not perfect by far, but pretty good in comparison to many waterways in this country.

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