Marblehead swimmer crusades for cleaner oceans, education

NAHANT – Christopher Swain has encountered wind, waves, snow, ice and attacks by lamprey eels in his quest to swim some of the country’s most well-known rivers and coastlines.Based in Marblehead, Swain began his mission while doing a charity swim for human rights on the Columbia River in 1996. He is currently in the midst of a multiple-year quest to swim 1,500 miles of coastline between the Canadian border and Washington D.C., breaking up the journey into two-hour swims during the winter and six-hour swims throughout the summer.”I’m not fast by any means,” he said, noting that he has never swum competitively. “The skill I have is an ability to take a beating.”He swam through nuclear waste from the site of a World War II-era testing facility along the Columbia. He’s received rashes from chemicals, been coated with oil, and routinely swims through litter.He is particularly interested in educating people about electronics waste, which contains many heavy metals and toxic materials as well as flame-retardant powders that leach into waterways.In fact, he partially pays for his swims – which require outfitting and staffing an accompanying boat – by running ethical electronics recycling events as well as speaking at schools.As for why he does it, Swain said he felt compelled to demonstrate to his two daughters that he “tried.””There’s a part of me that’s still a little kid who loves to be in the water,” Swain said. “But certainly there’s another part which is me as a father, and I not only want clean water to swim in with my children, I’m hoping to give them a glimpse of what I’m trying to do to reverse the environmental damage we’ve caused.”He takes temperature and pH samples along the way and shares the data with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which doesn’t often have the resources to gather such information on the smaller rivers he sometimes swims, Swain explained.He also shared information with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when he found undocumented discharge pipes – where businesses or municipalities release water and other stuff into rivers – that emptied into the Charles River when he swam that river. He said that the Charles was his grossest river.”The EPA wanted to clean it up, I wanted to light a fire under their butt,” Swain said.During a recent visit to the Johnson School in Nahant, Swain impressed students with his stories.”After rain, I can smell and taste everything that was on the street,” Swain told students. “One time, I swam right into this poop.”The students’ reaction demonstrated that Swain’s mission is not glamorous. That’s why the environmental educator works to blend gross-out humor, science, recycling and activism to highlight the neglect of important waterways.”The swims are a platform to do ocean education,” Swain explains. “The fact that I’m putting myself on the line appeals to kids, it gets me a tiny bit of room with them, and they’re the first generation that can’t walk away from this environmental destruction.”