Bill Hezlep

Following the Shore from Boston to Brownsville Bill Hezlep

A coastal journey from Boston to Brownsville following the route of the United States' Intracoastal Waterway, one of the world's great navigable waterways, is a trip through the geography and history of the east and gulf coasts. As the waterway winds along the coast from the deep, cold waters and rocky shores of New England to the flat, hot, brown and seemingly endless Texas coast, it passes or runs directly through the United States': largest city, its most densely populated areas, all five of its largest seaports, its colonial dawn, battle fields from the earliest colonial conflicts through the Civil War, and through the haunts of fisherman, merchant seaman, pirates, slaves (and slavers), developers, engineers, politicians and wildcatters. It is also a journey into the natural, less then natural and changing environments of the coast. Although two of the waterway's segments are major big ship canals, deep and broad, their banks stabilized with granite and flood lite at night, and another is a lake and some canals originally built for and still primarily used for drainage and flood control, much of the waterway is composed of natural features-creeks, rivers, bays and sounds-linked by man-made canals and cuts. The natural and almost natural sections are often remote, wild and lovely places teeming with coastal wildlife. But where the waterway passes through urbanized, developed areas the shore is often scarred by unplanned, environmentally heedless development, ageing sometimes derelict buildings and abandoned coastal infrastructure, and the water is too often a field of fast food containers, plastic bottles, grocery bags, cigarette butts and other detritus painted in the rainbow hues of a petrochemical sheen.