Although Rick Dickson currently lives in Leominster, he boasts a long term residency in Harvard. Dickson spends his summers in a cottage on Sheep Island in Bare Hill Pond that he claims to have been going to since before he could swim.

“The town beach used to be called Dickson’s Landing,” Rick reveals, “because my great-great grandfather owned all the land from Mass. Ave. down Pond Road to the pond.” It was at the beach where Rick’s ancestors, including his great uncle, co-owner of the General Store, then called Gale & Dickson’s, would keep the rowboats that they used to travel to their various island cottages on the pond.

The town’s weed harvester helps to fight the growth of milfoil and water chestnuts in Bare Hill Pond.  (Courtesy photo)

Despite his long family history in Harvard, Dickson did not live in town his whole early life. In fact, he was born in Panama. “My Dad was in the Navy, so we traveled around a lot. I lived various places in New York, Long Island, Virginia, Massachusetts, and even Hawaii before my family moved to Harvard when I was entering seventh grade.”

“We lived in the center of town, right behind where the Fiber Loft and the dry cleaners are now,” Dickson explains. He lived here from seventh grade until he graduated from Bromfield, and then went on to major in engineering at Lowell Tech. “And after that I went off to solve all the problems of the world,” Rick jokes. “And I’d say I was fairly successful.”

After 30 years of work as an engineer, Rick decided it was time for him to try something new. Around four years ago he moved from Exeter, New Hampshire to his current home in Leominster, where he started his business, Powder House Realty.

A few years prior to his move Rick had inherited his family’s cottage on Sheep Island, and when he moved closer, he began spending summers in Harvard again. For the past few years Rick has spent his entire summer living in the same cottage from his childhood days, a cottage without electricity or running water.

“We carry up fresh water—it’s definitely more of a camping environment than a living environment, but you’d be surprised what you don’t need,” Dickson reflects. “It’s a different perspective, and it’s gorgeous; it’s where I grew up and where I feel most comfortable.”

When Rick first started coming down to the pond more regularly, he would see signs advertising weed-pulls, and he and his son often participated. “We were pulling water chestnuts by hand, and if we could make it, then we’d go, and we’d do what people asked us to, but we weren’t really any more involved than that.”

Rick joined the email group of residents dedicated to the regular water chestnut pulls, and that was his level of involvement until around 2003. “John Frothingham had been running the weed-pulls for the past five years or so, and he’d been doing a great job getting people involved,” credits Dickson. “He had a conflict on one of the weed-pull dates, so I stepped forward to run it that day, and I’ve been in charge of it ever since.”

On Rick’s first weed-pull he realized the extent to which Bare Hill Pond had become infested with water chestnuts, a foreign species that had been introduced a decade or so earlier. “What had happened over a period of time was that the water chestnuts had spread from where they had previously been concentrated, mainly behind Minister’s Island, to really all over the pond,” explains Dickson.

“So, three years ago, after my first weed-pull, I realized there weren’t enough volunteers, that there really were more weeds than the volunteers could handle.” Rick figured that twelve years of weed-pulls had not been enough to control the problem, and in fact, even with all the volunteer efforts, the problem was getting worse. There were far more weeds at that time than there had been five years before, and he worried about what the pond would look like five years later if no action was taken.

“I convinced myself that the number of volunteers we were getting through the signs, through the letters to the editor weren’t going to be enough, and there weren’t any funds allocated to tackle the problem any other way, so I started spending an hour to an hour and a half in my kayak every morning pulling weeds.”

So in 2005, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Dickson pulled weeds near the town beach every morning, spending a total of 40 hours to completely clear that area. A year later, he was delighted to discover that his previous efforts had been successful, and only eight hours had to be spent on the same area near the beach in 2006, and less than four hours this past summer. But that was by no means the end of Dickson’s efforts; he simply devoted more time to pulling weeds in other areas of the pond. “If you let one water chestnut seed bear its plant, it can generate 100 seeds the next year, so we really can’t afford to let even one plant remain untouched,” explains Rick.

“When I came down to the far end of the pond (past Spectacle Island and near the peninsula) I was blown away—I never knew there were so many weeds. So I started going back and forth across the pond, working my way to the shore where Bower’s Brook enters the pond. However, there really were so many that there was no way I’d be able to finish the area by Labor Day.”

Dickson had the idea of putting a floating platform for weed collection in the middle of the area to reduce kayak trips, and during the first year, 2005, he and various other volunteers managed to fill the platform twice over the summer. Although Rick had thought there was no way they’d finish the area that year, they did make a significant impact because in 2006 there were only enough weeds in that area to fill the same platform once. Last summer, weeds in the same area were so sparse that Dickson didn’t even put the platform out.

During these strenuous kayak trips Dickson began to question whether he was going about his weed-pulling in the most effective manner. “Over the course of the summer you really have to go over each area for weeds at least three times to make sure none suddenly reappear. The pond is big, and it was getting to the point where it was just too much water to cover by kayak.”

In 2006 Dickson brought some pictures of the pond weeds to an invasive water plant seminar given by the Nashua River Watershed Association and was informed that the problem was far too extensive to be pulling chestnuts by hand in a kayak. This prompted Rick to inquire about the town’s old weed harvester, purchased years ago to deal with milfoil. Later that year Rick was trained to operate the harvester. “It ran pretty well, but the conveyor belt didn’t work, and when I tried to use it for the first time in 2006, it got jammed and broke,” recalls Dickson. “Unfortunately, by the time the town got around to fixing it, the summer was over.”

This summer, however, Dickson had much more success with the harvester. He credits the new mechanic hired by the town for taking the time to find a long-term fix for the machine, and this helped Rick make progress like never before. “With one hour on the mechanical harvester I was able to collect more weeds than I had gathered in the 100 hours I spent the previous summer.”

With this newly acquired efficiency, Dickson was finally able to tackle the most infested area, the cove behind Minister’s Island, where it is thought the water chestnut infestation started. Rick used the harvester to clear out most of the cove, and volunteers at an annual weed-pull this summer helped clear areas closer to the shore. The area now is almost clear of weeds and is truly unrecognizable from a few years ago.

Dickson has made huge strides toward eradicating water chestnuts in the pond, yet he acknowledges that the problem requires continual monitoring. “In order to be certain that the specimens are gone for good, we have to monitor the pond even 10 years after it is deemed ‘free’ of chestnuts,” he says.

However, Dickson is not discouraged by how long it has taken him to come to this point. “When I look back on three years ago when I started and said that someone’s got to do something about this, I wasn’t thinking I was going to solve it overnight. There are people who say a long journey starts with a first step, and that’s what happened here.”