Duwamish Alive! Earth Day 2007 with the Mud Monster

For us MudUppers, every day is Earth Day. So when the actual Earth Day comes along, we have to raise the bar a bit. This year, we spent some time at Seattle’s largest Earth Day cleanup event, Duwamish Alive!, where 400 volunteers gathered along the banks of the Duwamish river to remove invasive weeds and plant native trees. And we invited the Mud Monster to join us, in his public debut.

The Mud Monster worked the Earth Day crowd with aplomb. He was shy at first, crawling out from a muddy cove and skulking behind shrubs like a latter-day Sasquatch. But he quickly warmed to the crowd, and his energy was infectious. Children flocked to his side for hugs and photo ops and autographs, and even adults were momentarily tempted away from their digging by this wacky creature with starfish on his shoulders and eelgrass for hair.

It was a deeply inspiring day. People For Puget Sound ran a well-planned event, providing tools and food and instruction, and the volunteers were a diverse and enthusiastic group. Seattle City Council was well-represented in Richard Conlin, Sally Clark, and Tom Rasmussen, and the requisite speeches were made by EPA, the Port of Seattle’s new Chief Executive, Tay Yoshitani, and PPS’s Kathy Fletcher. It’s a wonderful thing to see hundreds of people gathered in the drizzly chill of a spring Seattle morning to bring a polluted waterway back to life. Volunteers were getting deep into the mud and scratched by blackberry brambles, but they continued undaunted for hours. We asked one little girl if she knew what Puget Sound was, and she replied, “It’s the biggest ocean in the world.” And this is why we all came out to the banks of the Duwamish on this wet cold Saturday morning, Mud Monster and shovels in tow.

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