Resumo de Everyday Heroes - ANITA BARTHOLOMEW

EVERYDAY HEROES

Nine years after John Beal returned home to Seattle, USA, from active duty in Viertnam he suffered three heart attacks in seven months. He was only 28 with no history of heart problems.

Memomies of war and horror had taken their toll. The hospital doctors diagnosed the decorated veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and heart disease. He had two options, they said : Undergo open-heart surgery the next morning, or be dead within a year. Certain they were wrong, Beal stomped out, his hospital gown flapping behind him, and walked two and a half kilometers home.

A second opinion was even more grim. His post-traumatic stress would almost certainly precipitate another coronary - and that would be the end of him. "you have got only about four months to live" explained his physician. "get a hobby"

Dazed and dejected, Beal wandered down to Hamm Creek, a tributary of a local river. The authorities had aprayed its shores with weed killer, destroying almost everthing green. A 1957 Ford peeked its nose out from the muddy bottom. Worn tyres, rusted machinery and castoff appliances littered its banks. The stench of chemical wastes wafted up from its currents.

Beal was drawn to this folorn place. This is how we left Vietnam, he thought. And suddenly he knew what he had to do with the time left to him. Clean up Hamm Creek.

Trekking into the much, he began hauling out garbage. Bank and forth, creek to trash heap, he chipped away at the mountain of sodden debris, barely noticing that a larger weight had begun lifting from his heart.

You have got to come down nd get your garbage, Beal said to the stranger on the phone. who the hell are you? the man shouted back. Beal explained he had found the man's name in a bag of trash that had been dumped illegally in Hamm Creek. His message was simple: Take it back, or I will turn you in. And you will have to pay a fine and do it anyway.

Other people he called offered embarrassed apologies. One not only picked up his own trash, he helped Beal haul out a derelict tractor.

A year after he had begun, the creek still reeked, but several tonnes worth of the debris was gone. One streamy day, as he struggled to extricate an old refrigerator, he felt a pain in his chest. He kept working, If it is going to happen, it might as well happen here.

But he did not die. Without really thinking, he blurted out a deal: Lord, if you will let me live long enough to bring fish back to this creek, I guarantee I will get it done.

Beal had no training and no funds - just his pension. But by ingenuity, trial and error, he figured out how to bring the creek back to life.

He seeded the banks with butter, cups, planted bushes and saplings. A fisherman brought him two salmon. They died without spawning. Disappointed but determined, Beal opened the femail, placed her eggs in a hand-dug bed, then opened the male upstream to release his sperm. He didnot know it what he had done made sense. But soon the creek glistened with baby salmon.

Beal formed a nonprofit foundation, I am A Pal, to protect Hamm Creek and the shores along its river. Now he patrolled in a boat, videotaping factories that dumped chemicals. He discovered one factory had poisoned the creek with industrial wastes. So he drove out in his old blue car to check on the now abandoned factory. The door was held shut with a paint can, a sickening odour emanating from inside.

He alerted the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), which discivered an accident waiting to happen; 45,000 kilos of cyanide stored next to 151,400 litres of flammable or potentially explosive liquids. If the deteriorating containers had ruptured, a cyanide plume would have blanketed the community.

A hazardous - waste emergency team begun the $2.4 million cleanup. When Beal and the factory owner crossed paths, the main challenged him to a fight. Beal's reply; Take your best shot.

John Beal can not worry about the enemies he has made. The great-great-greagrandchildren of his first two salmon have come back to Hamm Creek to spawn. Birds nest in the tress he has planted. But factories continue to operate along the river and creek. So Beal still patrols the waters and tends to the banks. He has not going to stop. He promised in 1979 that is he lived, he would make it right. And a deal is a deal.

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