The Keeper
By Brian K. Mahoney
November 19, 2025
Jon Bowermaster’s Hudson River Documentary “The Keeper” Screens at Upstate Films
Captain John Lipscomb’s decades of Riverkeeper patrols anchor Bowermaster’s new film about vigilance, environmental justice, and the unfinished story of the Hudson.
For 25 years, Captain John Lipscomb has traced the Hudson’s tides in his patrol boat, the steady heartbeat at the center of Bowermaster’s “The Keeper.”
There are a few fixtures of Hudson River life that feel eternal: striped bass runs, fog settling under the Kingston–Rhinecliff Bridge, the ruins of Bannerman Castle, and Captain John Lipscomb in his patrol boat, tracing the river’s spine like a steady pulse. For more than two decades, Lipscomb has been Riverkeeper’s eyes on the water—a gentle-voiced sentinel who has logged some 80,000 miles in the name of public health, environmental stewardship, and something harder to quantify: devotion. On November 30 at 4pm, Upstate Films in Saugerties screens The Keeper, Jon Bowermaster’s new documentary, produced by local film powerhouse Carolyn Marks Blackwood, which turns that devotion into narrative and gives us a portrait of the Hudson not as scenery, but as a protagonist.
Bowermaster, once a globetrotting National Geographic explorer, has spent the last decade or so turning his camera toward home. His Hudson River Stories series mapped out the river’s slow-motion resurrection, documenting everything from community scientists testing tributaries to the fight over crude-oil barges. The Keeper feels like the culmination of that arc—a film that stands still long enough to watch one man watch the river.
Riverkeeper’s work is now so woven into the region’s institutional fabric that it’s easy to forget how improbable it once was. Born out of 1960s outrage—when the Hudson was a national punchline and local shame—the group pioneered the idea that citizens could be “keepers”: legally empowered watchdogs who haul polluters into court and, in a nice bit of poetic justice, onto the evening news. The model has since been replicated worldwide, inspiring a constellation of waterkeepers from Alaska to Bangladesh. But the Hudson is the original text, and Lipscomb is one of its most seasoned interpreters.
Bowermaster climbs aboard Lipscomb’s wooden vessel for four years of filming, capturing scenes that oscillate between the meditative and the alarming. We glide past marsh grass at dawn; we nose into tributaries carrying suspicious plumes; we listen as Lipscomb recounts sewage overflows, PCB stagnation, and the bureaucratic math that decides who gets clean water and who gets excuses. The boat becomes a floating newsroom, lab, and confessional.
One of the film’s quiet achievements is its refusal to declare the river “saved”—a phrase trotted out every few years by well-meaning officials with short memories. Yes, the Hudson is orders of magnitude cleaner than it was in the bad old days, but The Keeper makes clear how fragile that progress is. Aging wastewater plants still crack under heavy rains; algal blooms creep upstream as summers warm; leftover industrial toxins refuse to stay politely buried in sediment. The river’s recovery is ongoing, uneven, and utterly dependent on watchdogs who never look away.
Bowermaster, ever the patient chronicler, frames Lipscomb not as a hero—though he’s earned the mantle—but as a conduit. Through him we meet the larger river community: scientists, advocates, fishers, electeds, and the occasional riverside curmudgeon who’s been keeping informal tabs since the administration of Cuomo the Elder.
The Keeper ultimately asks a simple question that is anything but simple: What does it mean to love a river? Not metaphorically, not nostalgically, but in the day-to-day, tide-to-tide sense that requires vigilance, humility, and a willingness to climb into a boat on cold mornings to see what’s gone wrong overnight.
Lipscomb’s answer—Bowermaster’s too—is that love looks like work. And the work isn’t done.
