Open plunge tries to open a few eyes

When Jeff Salt, the aptly named head of a nonprofit save-the-waterways organization called Great Salt Lakekeeper, organized a community swim to help draw attention to the abused Jordan River yesterday, here's what he got:

• Jeff's staff.

• Specially invited guest Akiko Busch, an author and noted river-loving activist and swimmer from New York.

• The media.

• And, representing the community, Jerry and Karen Ith of West Jordan, who read about the event in their morning paper and decided, as Karen put it, "Why not take a look?"

But they didn't bring their swimming suits.

"Oh, heaven's no," said Karen.

It wasn't like Salt was offering free Jazz tickets.

What he was offering was a dip in a river that people routinely associate as part of the E. coli family. Its logo is a half-submerged shopping cart. Its nickname is the Jordan Sewer. Imagine swimming in a landfill.

Salt himself was none too thrilled about the prospect. Until yesterday, he confessed, he had spent 25 years trying to protect and improve the Jordan River but had never purposely put so much as a toe in.

"Being in the water-quality game, I know too much to want to be in this water," he said. "I've been in it four times, all accidents."

But yesterday would be no accident because, for one thing, Salt had personally invited Busch to fly all the way from New York, and he couldn't expect her to swim the Jordan alone. And for another, there was a point to prove.

"This river is supposed to be swimmable. All of our waterways are supposed to, by law, be swimmable," he said. "Up to now we've begged (the powers that be), we've asked, we've been polite about it, but now it's time to step it up and put everything on the line ... "

The river protector let that sentence hang as he took a deep breath and prepared to take his voluntary — and, given the circumstances, quite courageous — plunge into the unknown.

Busch, on the other hand, wasn't nearly as apprehensive. In researching her book, "Nine Ways to Cross a River," published this past July, she swam some notoriously filthy (but getting cleaner) rivers, including the Hudson near her New York home, the Susquehanna, the Mississippi, the Monongahela, the Cheat, the Current, the Connecticut and the Delaware.