Of all the region's pleasant features, none exceeds the river system
itself, for it ties the others together and shares and adds to their
meanings. We have glanced at some of its "practical" aspects in
preceding chapters, though even there intangibles came into
consideration. It is the river's power to evoke human response and its
relationship to the wholeness of the Basin landscape that most
powerfully make it worth cleaning up, and also impose on planners a duty
to make certain that their proposals for making it serve human ends are
apt and needful ones.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A river system draining the basin it has carved out over geological eons
of time is one of the more meaningful units in nature, but within it
there may be great variety. The Potomac starts as a multitude of diverse
trickles and oozes in the high green places of Appalachia, where spruce
forests and berry meadows and bogs know the tread of bear and deer,
beaver and bobcat, hunter and hiker and logger. The clear cold
streamlets formed there join together in their downward rush and form
strong whitewater creeks and rivers slicing down through canyons and
out into the troughs of the strikingly corrugated Ridge and Valley
Province, growing ever larger by the process of union and addition.
[Illustration]
The two main rivers formed thus are the North Branch, which collects a
plenitude of troubles in its progress as we have seen, and the South
Branch, which is treated more gently by the farmers and small townsmen
who live along it, has no developed coal resources, and is a delightful
fishing stream in a fine rural valley. Coming together at Old Town where
Thomas Cresap took over a Shawnee site and set up a fortified
headquarters in the upper Basin's legendary days, these two form the
main stem of the river, which works across the Ridge and Valley
washboard by intricate slicings and loopings that shape great bends
among the forested hills. Deer and turkey outnumber people in most
places there, and always alongside the river or not far away lie the
towpath and the dry channel and the occasional stone locks and
aqueducts of the old C. & O. Canal. Despite railroad competition and
floods and all the other troubles, its barge traffic in coal and flour
and whiskey and iron and limestone and other things was the focus of a
whole roistering way of life from Washington to Cumberland in the 19th
and early 20th centuries.
Collecting the water of pristine mountain tributaries like the Cacapon
and growing as it goes, cleansing itself of the North Branch's load of
trouble, the river finds its way at last out of the washboard and
meanders among silver maples and great sycamores across the productive
populated expanse of the Great Valley that runs athwart the whole Basin
from north to south. The Potomac is in thickly historic country now as
it flows under the contemplative eyes of fishermen and past old villages
and the relics of generations of human activity going back before
written records, for here and there the funnel shapes of stone Indian
fishing weirs can still be seen at shallow places and the durable
fragments of their way of life can be scratched up along high shores. Of
many Civil War clashes in the valley, Antietam was the most crucial; the
Potomac shaped Lee's strategy there, and still ripples across fords by
which his troops came to that violent place and afterward escaped it.
At Harpers Ferry on the Valley's eastern edge, the river is reinforced
by the waters of its greatest tributary, the Shenandoah, rolling north
out of the limestone country that fed the gray armies till Sheridan put
a stop to that. Then it rams through the high wall of the Blue Ridge
and out of the Valley into the Piedmont, and still gathering strength
from tributaries like the Monocacy, dotted with big islands and
frequented by waterfowl and good fish, moves powerfully downcountry past
further mists and layers of history to Great Falls and the rushing,
crashing descent through the gorge to tidewater at the capital.
From there down it is, as we have seen, a different thing, an arm of the
sea and a sluggish extension of the river, shading from fresh to salt,
called a river still but neither river nor sea in its ways, affected
rhythmically and obscurely by both of them and subject to its own
complex laws as well. In Indian and Colonial times this estuary was the
part of the river that counted most for men, because of the bounty that
came from its waters, the fitness of its shores for farming, and its
navigability for boats and ships in a region where land travel was
laborious and whose colonists depended on commerce with a European
homeland. Its shores and those of the big tributary embayments--"drowned
rivers," they have been called--are thickly sprinkled with traces and
remembrances of three and a half centuries' people and events. Mount
Vernon, old Fort Washington, Gunston Hall on Mason Neck where quiet
George Mason lived and thought ... Aquia Creek where George Brent took
his Piscataway bride to live apart from the Marylanders, Potomac Creek
where John Smith found the river's namesakes living and another wily
captain later tricked Pocahontas into captivity, Port Tobacco and
Nanjemoy with memories of brokenlegged Booth, Chotank that gave its
name to a whole forgotten way of life, Nomini of the Carters, the
Machodocs and the Wicomico and the Saint Mary's and the historic
rest.... Some of the big creeks are silted in now with mud washed down
off the land in the old days, but in the flatter country toward the Bay
most of the larger ones are still pretty and useful harbors for pleasure
boats and for the fleets of varied commercial craft that go out to
gather the estuary's crabs, oysters, clams, perch, striped bass, shad,
and other edible creatures, including even eels for the European market.
From hillsides, mellow mansions look down on the water that used to be
their highway to the outside world, some crumbling, others proudly
maintained.
Aquatic life in the upper freshwater stretches has been somewhat
diminished and changed by pollution and silt, by dredging and filling,
and by other activity. Runs of spawning shad and herring and perch still
arrive there in spring, fortunately a season when heavy river flow keeps
oxygen levels high. Along the whole estuary there is an abundance of
air-breathing creatures, most noticeably birds, that reflect the wealth
in its waters. They are strikingly numerous in the marshes that occur
here and there next to the open river but more commonly up the
tributaries, perhaps the richest biological areas in the whole river.
Herons and egrets, ducks and geese, coots and grebes, hawks and ospreys
and even a few bald eagles--a stirring sight so near to Megalopolis--are
among the larger birds that congregate to live directly or indirectly
off the life in the water, dependent on it.
Productive, healthy in its lower reaches even if under the shadow of
change, its fishery intelligently and effectively regulated after the
destructive and bitter "oyster wars" that persisted up into the 1950's,
the Potomac estuary offers over 230,000 acres of water and some 750
miles of shoreline for human use and enjoyment and for the sustenance of
a complex and valuable segment of the natural world. It is a fitting
culmination of the river system that feeds down into it.
Of the Basin's remaining scenic and natural and historic wealth, nearly
all of it associated to some degree with a part of the river system,
much has stayed intact or has come back to good condition, accidentally
or by someone's forethought. Well over a million acres are in public
ownership of some kind, about a fifth of this being dedicated primarily
to scenic preservation and public enjoyment as parks and recreation
areas. These range from the great recently authorized Spruce Knob-Seneca
Rocks National Recreation Area in the Basin's western highlands and the
spectacular narrow Shenandoah National Park along the Blue Ridge, to
local and county parks of smaller size and special function. In and
around metropolitan Washington, good sense and good will on the part of
many people in years past has resulted in a fine assortment of parks in
an area where they are most needed and used, though with urban expansion
more are needed all the time.
They are also harder to come by all the time. A recent and instructive
example of this growing difficulty in creating public areas occurred at
Mason Neck, a richly scenic and natural bootshaped peninsula projecting
into the estuary not far below Mount Vernon, where George Mason's old
home and a part of his estate are immaculately preserved by the National
Society of the Colonial Dames of America and the Commonwealth of
Virginia. The Neck has twelve miles of riverfront and 6500 acres of
undeveloped land only eighteen miles from the center of Washington, and
though the river here is part of the eutrophic upper estuary, often
thick with algae in summer, the place is a wildlife paradise, with
forests of mature and stately trees and a Great Marsh of around 1000
acres. Incredibly, bald eagles still roost and even nest there, a fact
which provided the initial spark for heavy public opposition to recent
proposals for residential development of the Neck.
[Illustration]
Supported by the Potomac Task Force whenever possible, the defenders of
the peninsula organized as the Conservation Committee for Mason Neck
and fought its cause almost inch by inch, with many setbacks and much
expense of time and energy and money, through referendum elections and
political hanky-panky and high levels of government. They won;
development was forestalled and the nearly certain prospect is for a
large composite public holding for park and wildlife refuge use, made up
of Federal, state, and regional acquisitions.
[Illustration]
In many parts of the Basin, old human excesses that in their time were
not at all beneficial or protective have contributed paradoxically to
the present good condition of the landscape. After boom had lifted her
skirts and moved on elsewhere from the weary Tidewater, for instance,
the region's long subsequent drowse on the fringes of action and history
meant that it escaped many modern troubles, at least until recently. Not
very long ago, many parts of it were more easily reached by slow boat
than by car or train. Partly as a result, big tracts of military land
there acquired mainly when acreage was cheap--57,000 acres around the
Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, are one example--form a
valuable public asset for potential future use. And throughout Tidewater
here and there, old estates in private hands guard their woods and
fields and shores against increasing development, though more and more
each year crumple before pressure and the temptation of speculators' and
developers' cash.
Similarly, after the mountains of the upper parts of the Basin were
logged bare and in many places burned off in the late 19th and early
20th centuries--"Cut out and get out" was the slogan--their stripped and
eroded state and their effect on the streams made it possible, and
essential, for the Federal and state governments to buy up wide areas
there as public forest land in the 1930's and to nurse them back to
beauty and usefulness. The Shenandoah National Park dates from that same
time, as do some state parks in the mountain regions. Some private
owners of forest land in that area, though not enough, have taken their
cue from the government agencies and seek a safe sustained yield of
timber and pulpwood rather than a quick cash-in.
In many rural reaches of the Basin, for that matter, the kind of use
private ownership gives the land is still an enhancement of the
landscape rather than a smear on it. The beauty of farm land and
pastures and old structures is as much a part of this country's heritage
as is wilderness, for in its traditional forms farming has shaped a
kind of wholeness and beauty all its own, blending with nature and
working with it. The limestone soils in the huge trough of the
Shenandoah Valley, for example, have been tilled and grazed during about
two and a half centuries' occupation by white men. But for the most part
agriculture there has been devoted to continuing productivity rather
than to exploitation, and the rolling terrain, intersected by stream
valleys and wooded ridges, has prevented much application of the massive
techniques of fence-to-fence cultivation that prevail on the "factory
farms" of the Midwest and West nowadays. The miles on miles of varied,
carefully managed fields and pastures, with fat herds and handsome old
stone houses and barns, nearly always against a backdrop of dark
mountains and with a pleasant river or creek running at hand, among
trees, have a potent storybook appeal that sticks in the memory of
anyone who ever saw them.
The long narrow valley down which the South Branch flows is similar on
its scale, as are many other arable strips and patches of the upper
Basin that remember Shawnee days and Civil War guerillas. Near
Washington, farms are waging a losing rearguard action against
speculation and sprawl, but in the Piedmont to the north and west of the
city lie some of the most pleasant rural landscapes in the United
States. Up the drainages of the Catoctin and the Monocacy north of the
Potomac, these are still functional landscapes, used mainly for dairy
farming. In Virginia they tend to be less so, for this is the hunt
country, where cosmopolitan gentry raise purebred stock on curried
pastures, ride to hounds in red coats on frosty mornings and by great
expenditure of money not garnered from crops or cattle have tastefully
restored and maintained whole neighborhoods of venerable estates, as
well as some superb old towns like Waterford, in traditional dignified
beauty.
As these people have grasped--and others like them scattered throughout
the Basin--most of the pull of farming landscapes and old houses and
towns is nostalgic, rooted in a sense of the past and of the way the
look and feel of a stone fence or a portico or a boxwood hedge can fill
out understanding of people who were there long long before. This is
what has been called "the scenery of association," and it is more deeply
ingrained in the Potomac country than in newer parts of the nation,
where "scenery" is most likely to denote the aspect of wild and natural
places. With a history going back deep into the 1600's and long
occupation by Indians before that, the Basin in many places has
archaeological layers of such meaning. It tugs powerfully at the
imagination of anyone with a sense of human continuity, and is woven in
with the natural framework of things, as for instance the grove of
chestnut oaks in the Bloody Angle at Gettysburg is inextricable from an
awareness of the mighty rebellion that reached that far and no farther.
Most major historic sites and shrines in the Basin have received
protection of one sort or another. The core portions of the great Civil
War battlegrounds are owned and maintained by the National Park
Service, as are Wakefield and Harpers Ferry and the C. & O. Canal and
other such places. States, municipalities, organizations, and
individuals have saved many others from destruction and decay and
sometimes have built them back to what they were--Mount Vernon,
Stratford, Gunston Hall, Fort Frederick and one or two of the smaller
bastions that George Washington helped to set up against the Indians in
the western Basin, and scores of other mansions and cabins and patches
of historic soil.
There is still a wide sense of the past's weight among a population of
whom many were born where they live and intend to die, and whose
ancestors did so too. This sense is shared by many other people who move
to the region, and in a few spots--mainly again in Virginia--it has led
to a degree of protection for the appearance of whole towns or historic
districts, as in Loudoun County with its admirable scenic regulations.
Under the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, states are conducting
surveys of such assets and studying means of encouraging their
preservation. But funds are still short even for the Federal part of the
program, and thus only individuals or accidents are still partially
guarding some fine old places--Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for
instance, or in Maryland the towns of Sharpsburg, Middletown, and
Burkittsville--against adornment with chrome and neon and fake-stone
veneer. Even in these places, some changes for the worse are taking
place.