If the things are done that need to be done to reverse the environmental
deterioration that has been the subject of so much of this report, the
public's chance to enjoy widespread, high quality outdoor recreation in
the Potomac Basin will be tremendously increased. Recreation and
preservation are not separable subjects. If a river is cleaned up and
its shoreline protected against clutter and ugliness, its use by
fishermen and boatmen and others will be enhanced. If a park is
established to protect a unique natural asset, people's enjoyment of
that asset will be assured. Most preservation leads to more recreational
opportunity; many things that are done to provide outdoor recreation
afford some measure of protection for the environment as well, but the
emphases are sometimes different.
Among specific recreational problems, access is a major one. For those
who can afford cars, getting around the Basin grows easier all the time
as roads proliferate, but getting at the agreeable things to do is hard
in many places. Here and there important parts of the public lands in
the National or State forests, for instance, are cut off from easy use
by private inholdings. But the main amenity that is usually hard to
reach is water, which happens also to be the major magnet for outdoor
recreation of many kinds.
The estuary's 200,000 acres of superb recreational potential are a case
in point. It has a few drawbacks that can and ought to be dealt with,
like the thousands of old sunken pilings and stakes that make boating
dangerous in many places, and some others that may be tougher to
eliminate, like the great annual summertime incursions of stinging
jellyfish in its lowest reaches, the milfoil weed that sometimes clogs
its tributaries, and the erosion of its shores by winter storms. But
even as it stands, it offers fishing and boating and hunting of the
finest sort in its lower part, with excellent swimming higher up where
salinity drops and the jellyfish cannot come--a zone whose useful length
will increase upstream as metropolitan pollution diminishes. Yet along
the estuary's shores, except at certain historic sites like Wakefield
where types of use have to be limited, there are only two major public
parks at present and very few other public areas of any size where
people can launch boats, fish, camp, or merely get at the open water.
Some of the great military bases there are closed to the public, while
others permit limited use.
The main stem of the flowing Potomac is parallelled on the Maryland
shore by the C. & O. Canal in Federal ownership, a unique resource. But
the bulk of the land between the canal and the river--7200 acres out of
10,000--is privately owned. Along most of the 120 miles where the canal
property touches the Potomac it is much too narrow to permit heavy use,
so that public enjoyment of the river except at occasional spots is
limited to hikers, cyclists, and boatmen. Maryland's Fort Frederick
State Park, which joins the canal property and forms a much-frequented
node of public use, is the only such park on any of the main rivers of
the upper Basin.
Federal and state forests, extensive though they are, are mainly
confined to the ridges, as is the Shenandoah National Park. On the two
forks of the Shenandoah and its main stem below their junction, very
little public land exists despite the big segment of National Forest in
the Massanutten range between the forks, and on the Cacapon there is
hardly any. Authorized additions to the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks
National Recreation Area will bring parts of the fine, clean mountain
forks of the South Branch into public ownership and use, but the main
stem of that river farther down is shut off.
Fee-entrance places and State or local fishing access points are sparse,
so that for the most part the Basin's main flowing streams remain a
closed book for people who lack the time, youth, equipment, or
inclination to come at them by canoeing or some other more or less
arduous means. And, as was noted earlier, the shores of most of them
urgently need some sort of reasonable protection against vacation
clutter, so that a certain amount of public ownership or control would
help save the rivers as well as provide recreation.
Imbalances in the kinds of recreation available in various parts of the
Basin are another problem, sometimes rooted in the nature of things,
sometimes remediable. The outstanding one is the shortage in the upper
Basin of what is called "flat water"--lakes and reservoirs suited for
mass recreation of kinds for which a really major demand exists and is
growing: swimming and motorboating and water-skiing, besides fishing of
the type possible only in such water.
It has been said that recreation is potentially Appalachia's most
profitable industry. If so, Potomac Appalachia badly needs more such
water to fill out the resource and to attract the many people who are
interested mainly in flat-water activities. Middle sections of the Basin
want and can use it as well. A clear indication of the demand, as well
as an additional good reason for trying to meet it, is seen on weekends
along the occasional narrow stretches of slack water found in the
Potomac and the Shenandoah and even the slim South Branch, where ski
boats roar up and down among apprehensive swimmers and unhappy anglers,
a classic instance of the kind of destruction of pleasure that occurs
when incompatible recreational pursuits are forced together by a want of
room for both.
The obvious answer is to locate and design the reservoirs needed to meet
Basin water demands in such a way that they can not only fulfill that
purpose but can provide needed recreation too. The major reservoirs
called for to achieve near-future supply purposes are few, but they can
be planned in places where they will get a maximum of these types of use
and where drawdown and other unesthetic effects will be minimal. And the
smaller headwater structures needed for water supply, flood control, and
other purposes throughout the Basin can quite often be designed to
function as first-rate recreational attractions too.
[Illustration]
Anglers vary widely in their tastes. Some like the pursuit of bass and
sunfish in reservoirs, and for them the upper estuary as well will be a
good place to go when it is suitably cleaned up. Some want wide salt
water and the lonely cry of gulls, and these the Basin can provide also.
Others prefer trout in highland streams, or smallmouth and catfish in
the big flowing rivers, and as the state of the waters grows better, so
too will all these kinds of fishing. On certain rivers and streams
particularly, the assured flow that is going to be needed to cope with
diffuse pollution will have a strong good effect on aquatic life and
sport fishing. The Monocacy and the South Fork of the Shenandoah are
examples. And in the Potomac falls and gorge below the metropolitan
water intakes, as was noted in Chapter III, assurance of a certain
minimum flow would be justifiable on esthetic and recreational grounds
alone, even aside from the need for it below in terms of water quality.
Hunters need more room outdoors than most people, because of their guns
and because they move about in search of game. Fortunately, the fall and
winter months when they function are times when relatively fewer other
people are out roaming. The public forests of the upper Basin are a main
resource for hunting now and in the future, and the kinds of public
access that are established on the estuary and the main rivers will have
to take hunters' interests into account. Even so, if they increase in
numbers as much as has been predicted, the added demand for places to go
will require more lease and day hunting on private land in the long run
than exists at present, and improvement of that land's wildlife
potential.
Certain other kinds of recreational facilities, constituting the bulk of
profitable enterprises associated with America's outdoor pleasure, will
have to depend mainly or solely on private development of them.
Amusement parks, marinas, and ski lifts are examples, and so are most of
the lodging places, restaurants, and other service facilities that
thrive wherever increased public recreational activity takes place.
Most Americans do some driving for pleasure, and some of them do a great
deal of it, using their four-wheeled bugs not just as a way of getting
to pleasant places but as an indispensable adjunct to being in them and
enjoying them. In certain respects, the Basin falls short of providing
for their needs. The explosive demand in the past few years for auto
campgrounds where people can stop with their cars, trailers, and pickup
units has caused a shortage of adequately equipped facilities of this
sort, especially within easy reach of Washington, which will have to be
supplied by both public and private effort. Roads specifically designed
for leisurely pleasure driving, in contrast to high-speed throughways,
are another need. The Basin has two such motorways now--the George
Washington Memorial Parkway at the metropolis, a much-used city road in
its present form though still a main amenity, and the Skyline Drive
along the Blue Ridge, with the Blue Ridge Parkway extending southward
through it and out of the Potomac country. This magnificent low-speed
mountain-top route looks out alternately over the Great Valley and the
Piedmont, and the heavy use it receives, increasing year by year, shows
what the right kind of scenic motor routes can mean to people.
[Illustration]
For a multitude of residents and visitors, nothing would contribute more
to appreciation of what the Basin has to offer than a system of
unobtrusive parkways and scenic wandering roads joining together the
region's attractions--history and scenery and sports, rivers and valleys
and mountains. A major element in such a system, being studied, would be
a great loop parkway tying together the existing parkways by an
extension along the river and turning southward into the country along
the historic James, then back to the Blue Ridge. Scenic roads tributary
to the system would utilize existing rural routes for the most part,
enhanced and protected by State and local action.
For the many other people who seek a more active and less mechanized
relationship with natural things, a connected regional network of trails
for walking or riding or cycling is a main need and a main opportunity.
Like the parkways or even more than them, it could be a framework for
open space preservation and an intimate means of using that open space.
Tied in with existing segments like the C. & O. towpath and the
Appalachian Trail, linking the towns and cities with ridges and
riversides and parks and historic places, it would provide the most
fitting kind of access to the whole Potomac realm of things for anyone
willing to take an afternoon's stroll or a week's hike.
More fundamentally still, it would be a powerful and continuing element
in conservation education of the best kind, the participating kind. For
generation after generation of the young people who would use it most,
it would shape a feeling for rocks and water, creatures and trees, sun
and wind and rain and hills and valleys, old houses and ruins and
bloody fighting grounds, together with a sense of man's natural origins.
And shaping the feeling, it would shape some comprehension.
The Potomac Basin is going to need that kind of comprehension; the whole
country is. Recreation means fun, and it probably ought not be
overweighed with solemnities. But outdoor fun is dependent on the
wellbeing of the outdoors, and increasingly the outdoors depends on the
understanding and sympathy of human beings who possess new great power
of destruction and have been using it widely. So that if any form of
outdoor recreation can furnish, however slightly, some comprehension of
what the natural world is like and how it works, it amounts to quite a
lot more than a bit of needed relaxation from the week's toil at one's
job or in the kitchen and nursery, though it may be that as well. With
the comprehension, it becomes an enlargement of one's grasp of things,
and it adds a little substance to the hope that people will keep on
caring about the integrity of the world around them and defending it as
best they can. And no safeguard this present mortal generation can set
up is more meaningful than that hope.