The Nashua River flows into Fitchburg, Mass., with one of the biggest amounts of trout in the East. Above Fitchburg, it is Grade "A" and people pipe it to their houses to drink. In Fitchburg, half a dozen paper mills run the length of the river inside the city limits. They dump everything from acid to corrugated box refuse into the river. As the Nashua leaves Fitchburg, you can almost walk across it. It is grade "E."

The Nashua then flows into the Merrimack. In September, 1839, the two Thoreau brothers floated down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Only a hundred years ago, Henry David thought that the Merrimack was the river of his dreams.

The Merrimack then flows into the sea. There is a cubic inch of oil inside every cubic yard of sea water. Only four or five hundred years after we end all pollution will the ocean be clean.

ANADER'S Raider called the CRIMSON from Washington last summer and announced that they had discovered a number of scandals in the Agriculture Department bigger than Billy Sol Estes. He said that half of the Ag Dept. was so corrupt that they'd have to be fired.

In his research on chemical disinfectants, he found that the crop sprays used by large Midwestern land owners caused cancer in chickens. It turns out that about half of the chickens we eat have cancer in their bodies, or maybe it's a third in Massachusetts. Cancerous chicken tissue is supposed to cause brain lesions in dogs and cats.

He also found that the Ag Dept. had covered up a trichinosis epidemic in St. Louis that had been caused by poor meat inspection. In fact, the Ag Dept. had information showing that meat inspection standards were far too liberal, yet they were preparing to liberalize the standards even more.

The day after the revolution, eight million people will be in the streets tearing down New York City with sledge hammers. What America has given to the continent is the colorgrey. Grey streets, grey buildings, grey skies, grey smoke, grey cement, even grey snow. The weight of all of the buildings of New York is on your shoulders as you walk down the street. New York has boxes where people work, boxes under the ground where people travel, and boxes where people live. The isolation and atomization continues out on to the street. In a small Western town, you can say hello to anyone. In New York, people are still encased in glass when they touch the sidewalks.

In 1580, Montaigne took a trip through the ravines along the Sioule River near Clermont-Ferand. He stopped his carriage at one point and looked down hundreds of feet at the river and hundreds of feet to the rocks that dominated the horizon. As a Renaissance man, he was horrified. Everything should be built to the measure of man, and les Gorges de la Sioule certainly were not. He would have died if he had seen New York.

A FRIEND picked me up at the San Diego airport last Christmas and drove me fifteen miles to where I live. As I got out of the car, I saw my little brother watering the green grass under a blue sky.

My brother is now a freshman at Berkeley. In his last year in high school, he invested the five hundred dollars he had inherited from my grandmother and made a couple thousand dollars in the stock market.

When he saw me, he smiled and chanted, in Chinese, "Long live Mao Tse-tung!" As he chanted, he punched through the sky with his right fist three times.

We talked for a while and then he turned down the garden hose and laid it in a trough he had made around a lemon tree.

"Jesus, Larry, you've become a raving anti-imperialist!"

He looked down as he began to talk. I looked down too. "I saw Felix Greene's 'Inside North Vietnam.' I went to see it every night for a week. There was this one scene where a buffalo boy got machine gunned by American planes as he was trying to push his buffalo to cover."

As I looked up, I saw that he was searching my eyes.