19th of a series

Sing me the legends of the river.

Tell me a story of the sky.

Because I want to grow.

Because I want to know.

Because I want to understand.

- Author Unknown

I answered the ringing phone.

“Is this Jamie Blaine,” a voice asked?

“Yes, it is,” I replied.

“My name is Kent Garrett. I’m a dairy farmer up in Delhi, New York, and I read in our local newspaper about the trek you are organizing.”

After discussing the project for a while, he said, “Sounds interesting. I’d like to film it.”

I scraped my face off the desk. I had spent well over a year putting together a three-week expedition that would bring together six students from inner-city Brooklyn and six from very rural Delaware County, of which Delhi is the county seat. Together, if they made it, they would follow the course of New York City’s water supply, from its source in Catskill mountain streams to its arrival in the city. They would travel on foot, by canoe, and in rowboats. They would carry their supplies on their backs, camp out along the way, and interview local officials, residents, and reporters. The idea was that these 12 high-school kids, from incredibly different backgrounds, would come to understand and embody the interconnectedness of the whole watershed.

Putting this project together had been way harder than I had anticipated. I’m not much for details, and this was all about details. When Kent called I was trying to resolve what I hoped was the last issue – one so complicated and so essential that I was astounded I hadn’t thought of it till just before go time: Insurance, all kinds of insurance. Insurance to protect the kids and insurance to protect people and places from the kids. Medical insurance, accident insurance, liability insurance, insurance on insurance, and on and on and on.

And now, a dairy farmer wants to tag along and film the project. This was a distraction I didn’t need.

We agreed to meet the next morning at the Bellayre Mountain resort in the Catskills. When I arrived, the only other people there were two Black men talking quietly. Fewer than 200 African Americans then lived in Delhi, and it seemed improbable that one of them was an organic dairy farmer. After a while, the taller of the men approached me and asked if I was Jamie Blaine. I said I was. He said he was Kent Garrett.

It turns out that Kent Garrett was no ordinary dairy farmer . . . or filmmaker, for that matter. Born in the Brooklyn housing projects, he had made his way to Harvard, a story he tells in The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever: “In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented 18 ‘Negro’ boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later, they would graduate as African Americans.” From Harvard he had gone on to a career in film and television, first as a producer of the pioneering public television program, “Black Journal”, and later as a documentary filmmaker at NBC and CBS, where he won two Emmy Awards. In 1997, he left what he called “the rat race” to become a dairy farmer in upstate New York.

He was getting out of farming (“It’s a young man’s game”). He wanted to film our project . . . for free. He had called me out of the blue.

Some guys have all the luck.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com