Look What They Found

“Ninety-one gross diapers,” Riverkeeper Peter Davis announced. Add to that four rugs, 27 tires, umpteen bags of household garbage, several mattresses, and a nice beige corner chair that someone had rolled down the hill to the margin of Beaver Creek.

Davis and assistant David Burgess collected all that in a single week’s cleanup of riverine trash.

Davis has been cleaning up New Haven’s woods and waters for a quarter century. On Wednesday at 5 p.m. at the library’s main branch, the Connecticut Fund for the Environment will be honoring them for a quarter century of dedicated patrolling and removing debris from New Haven’s rivers and streams.

“He’s pulled six autos, literally hundreds of major appliances, a Dumpster, hundreds of shopping carts, and well over 500 or a thousand gallons of hazardous stuff like motor oil, solvents he’s found floating in the rivers,” said Curt Johnson, senior attorney and program director for Connecticut Fund for the Environment and Save the Sound. ​“It’s phenomenal. He’s the guy who protects the river system for us all.”

“Reclaiming the natural world.” That’s his mission, Davis said as he and Burgess clambered down a declivity above Beaver Creek, just off Crescent Street where it faces SCSU, on Thursday.

Davis was wearing his riverkeeper cap, a parks department slicker, and an impressive set of waders.

The forest floor below them was strewn with litter. The garish colors of chip bags and detergent bottles competed with the dark brown of the fallen leaves.

The riverkeeper and his assistant, aided on special service days by volunteers from local colleges, have been on their daily rounds for only about 15 years as parks department employees.

Before that they were clean-up volunteers from Benhaven, the local organization on Oliver Road that works with autistic people. Burgess, an autistic man, lives in one of Benhaven’s residences. Two and half decades ago Davis was his teaching assistant, accompanying him when he went out volunteering with the park rangers.

The patrolling and the cleaning up of the Quinnipiac, the Mill, the West River, and Long Wharf — the riverkeeper’s beat — got started when Davis and Burgess began working with Park Ranger Vinnie Lavorgna.

“David and I were hiking and we saw a lot of trash near West River,” Davis recalled. ​“It grew from there.”

Lavorgna began coordinating a parks department pick-up of trash the duo collected.

“They were so impressed with David’s work, they hired him. Before me,” said Davis.

Ed Hamilton, Burgess’s current support person who accompanies him 20 hours a week with Davis, explained why: ​“Being autistic, he doesn’t need a break. He’s single-focused, and at the end of the day he outworks the average guy.”

“I couldn’t have done this without David. He’s been the best co-worker,” Davis concurred.

They had been at work at Beaver Creek for a week by Thursday morning. In removing the chair, which over time had lodged itself deep in the dirt, the two men worked as a team.

“Are you OK?” was a regular refrain as they trudged, negotiated the steep terrain and the prickers, and pulled up heavily laden bags of junk towards the road, where Davis would call in a parks department truck for a pickup.

Mostly the duo comes across ​“junk,” not treasures. They pick up the trash midnight construction dumpers and fast-food-wrapper-flinging drivers inflict on New Haven.

A dozen years ago, when they were cleaning up along Long Wharf, the duo found a woman slumped out the door of her car. It turned out she was dead. ​“But that,” said Davis matter-of-factly, ​“was in the parking lot.” Not down by the river.

Recently the duo cleaned up a homeless encampment in West River in the woods behind Yale’s baseball stadium. Davis and Burgess worked that site from May through Christmas of last year.

Ed Hamilton, who accompanied them, estimated that the duo of riverkeepers had hauled out at least 40 shopping carts along with plenty of mattresses. For a homeless site, it was state of the art, with TVs and power sources, said Hamilton. ​“It was 30 full parks department dump trucks [worth],” he added.

At another occasion a dozen years before but back along the West River, Davis said, he cleared out three cars that had been abandoned so far down toward the water, tow trucks couldn’t reach them.

“We had to take them apart with sledge hammers and hacksaws,” he said.

Thursday morning, the focus was on Beaver Creek. About a dozen heavily laden bags of garbage, which the men had prepared the previous day, were piled near the creek. Davis determined they were too heavy to haul up the hill.

The plan? ​“David will hand them to me,” Davis said, ​“and I’ll wade with them across the river.”