Fred Tutman, Patuxent Riverkeeper:
My name is Fred Tutman. And I’m the riverkeeper on the Patuxent River for the last 21 years.
As the riverkeeper, I’m an advocate for clean water on the state’s longest and deepest inside-the-state river. This river doesn’t go anywhere except Maryland.
My main mission as a riverkeeper is to not only protect the resource to the best we can, so we do file lawsuits and lobby for policy change and new laws and better laws, but also to preserve, particularly on the Patuxent, the tradition of community activism.
I kind of stumbled into this work. I was a late life law student after a career in television and radio, and I just thought this was made for me. I grew up next to the Patuxent river, and so this was my home river. I grew up as a boy playing on the river, having little adventures, kind of like Huck Finn or Mark Twain’s novels.
I was a kid who played around building my homemade rafts and trying to catch fish in various ways. So the summer camps are a passion project of myself and the people who work here at Patuxent Riverkeeper. All of us have had mentoring. All of us have had people who have been kind to us and shown us stuff along the way.
Everybody needs mentors. I have seen kids really transformed. I have seen kids come here scared of the water and leave this camp thinking, ah, I got this.
(Laughter)
