What are you doing to celebrate Earth Day this Wednesday? If your answer is not “swimming 1.8 miles of the Gowanus Canal,” then we don’t want to hear it. You clearly lack commitment. You clearly lack a sense of the true meaning of Earth Day. You clearly… don’t want to grow a third eye like little Blinky from The Simpsons. You, then, are not activist Christopher Swain.
The Brooklyn Paper reports that Swain, “a clean-water activist plans to take the ultimate plunge on Earth Day, swimming 1.8 miles through Brooklyn’s nautical purgatory—the Gowanus Canal.” Swain will start his swim at the “mouth” of the canal (near Butler and Nevins) and swim all the way to New York Harbor. For those of you worried that he won’t make it one city block before his skin starts to peel off and his eyes begin to melt out of their sockets and his genitals will be infected with super-strain gonorrhea that lurks in the canal, never fear! Swain will be “covered from head to toe in protective gear to keep his skin, mouth, eyes, and ears free of the murky waters that famously hides victims of the mob, is covered with oil, laced with heavy metals, flooded with millions of gallons of raw sewage every year, and even has gonorrhea.”
But still! Even covered head-to-toe, we can’t really imagine what it would take to get us to even inhale too deeply in the general vicinity of the stinky waters. So we really applaud Swain and hope that he has better luck in the Gowanus than Sludgie the Whale did. RIP Sludgie. RIP.
