Linda Davidson/THE WASHINGTON POST - Lavette Spears, 21, with Mr. Hoots, a Eurasian eagle-owl, gained a new appreciation for the Anacostia while working with the Earth Conservation Corp.
On a steamy day along the garbage-strewn banks of the Anacostia River, in a part of the capital that used to be dismissed as crime-ridden and useless, LaVette Spears, 21, perches a majestic four-pound Eurasian Eagle-owl named Mr. Hoots on her tattooed arm.
His spiky talons grip her protective glove. His giant yellow eyes glow. His limber neck rotates. LaVette holds steady.
(Linda Davidson/ THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Lavette Spears worked with raptors during her time with the Earth Conservation Corp. Now she has an internship with DC Water.
“Where have you been my whole life?” she jokes with the 13-year-old owl.
She follows Mr. Hoots’s eyes to a jigsaw puzzle of water bottles, soda cans and plastic bags floating above brown water. It smells sharp and hot, like a garbage can upended in the steamy heat.
“Oh, that’s bad; that’s just sad,” says Spears. “It’s crazy that I used to care less, throw my own trash here. Now, we have to get on it, clean it up for Mr. Hoots. Clean it up for the neighborhood.”
Parts of the Anacostia River may be ugly, but not to Spears. Last year, she had a job working for Earth Conservation Corps (ECC), a nonprofit group that trains endangered young people to help an endangered river.
The corps members — unemployed youths who live in some of the poorest communities along the river — have collected more than 600 bags of trash in the past year, educated hundreds of students and adults about the river, and planted 54 trees.
For Spears, who had been adrift since dropping out of high school, the work provided a much-needed sense of purpose. She learned to carry Mr. Hoots into classrooms around the Washington region, where students looked on in awe. She was surprised at first, then proud when she was able to speak to audiences with confidence about the giant owl on her arm and about the tributary that helps sustain him.
It also changed her perception of the Anacostia, giving her a profound connection to the beleaguered river.
What was once an eyesore filled with “needles and old TVs” became a treasure: “Everything changed,” she says. “It was like a shot in the head. I realized I needed that river.”
Just over a decade ago, it was a different body of water that pushed Spears to grow.
There was a family reunion. It was held under the trees and alongside a pool in rural Virginia, far from the rowhouses and bulletproof carryouts of Spears’s Southeast Washington neighborhood.
That day, the sun’s strong heat made Spears’s skin feel hot, like she was “microwaved.” Her teenage cousins were all jumping into the water. Spears, just 10, followed. But she didn’t know how to swim. And while her relatives splashed around, the deep end swept her under.
“My family was looking for me for 10 minutes, until they realized I was drowning,” she recalls. They rushed Spears to the hospital.
When she awoke, she remembered the cold water flowing up her nose. She became determined to learn how to swim, turning her fear into an achievement. “I never wanted to feel so scared again,” she says.
But as she grew older, she somehow lost her belief in herself. At 19, she dropped out of Friendship Collegiate Academy in Northeast. She sat home watching television a lot. Some of her friends were getting arrested for drugs or loitering.
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