The Nation's River Part 10

This natal section of the river system cannot be walled away from the rest of the Basin, written off to coal and industry, and disregarded. It is integral with the rest; its troubles are Basin troubles. And if the ingrained landscape sickness compounded there by the old consumptive way of doing things, blight begetting blight, cannot be healed, scant hope glimmers through of healing the same sickness in other parts of the nation where it is even worse.

Other Basin landscape problems

New roads and highways, regardless of what traffic they carry and where they carry it, are too often planned and constructed as gashes of destruction across the landscape and across the "scenery of a.s.sociation," and frequently fertilize subsidiary ugliness in the form of billboards and commercial clutter. Attempts to mitigate the worst aspects of this have had some effect, but have not been widespread or strong enough to keep up with the growing numbers of cars and the growing demand for facilities on which to operate them.

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Much could be done at the local level to erase roadside ugliness--Loudoun County, Virginia, is again a shining and rare example of a place where the right thing has been done. But more of the trouble comes from higher up, for it involves the routing and design of the super-roads, and stubborn considerations of strict engineering efficiency have usually tended to prevail over esthetics and such things, despite growing objections. Regardless of their beauty as roads, the sheer quant.i.ty of strip concrete Americans require nowadays is a basic problem. It has been said that an extraplanetary observer at first glance might well conclude that this continent was populated primarily by large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains. Certainly in many places nowadays the earth is beginning to look as if it were arranged for the bugs rather than for the brains, if that is what we humans are.

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When the bugs die they go to junkyards. These many-colored necropolises occupy wide acres of land near every center of population in the region, occurring quite commonly along the main entrance highways to neat and historic towns. Their stark and extensive ugliness has made them the subject of much high-level investigation, most of which has sought to make their conversion into usable sc.r.a.p metal a profitable process.

Undoubtedly this will be achieved sooner or later, but in the meantime the old cars, together with a wealth of other discarded items in roadside fields and along fencelines and stream channels throughout the Basin, form a scabby legacy from the recent past, and a less esthetic "scenery of a.s.sociation."

Major electric powerlines and other utilities routed arrogantly with only straight-line distances in mind, up hill and down dale and with their cleared rights-of-way kept brownly dead with herbicides, can intrude starkly on the beauty and mood of historic or pleasantly natural landscapes. In the name of public service, private utility companies in all the Basin States have wide powers of condemnation as emerged to view recently when the Potomac Edison Company proposed to hack out a strip for a new line along a route that included country a.s.sociated with the campaigning around Antietam Battlefield in the Civil War, without an adequate attempt to find alternative routes.

In this instance, public protest shaped up a fight against the line, in which the Interior Department has become involved because of the Federally owned battlefield and the nearby C. & O. Ca.n.a.l. But often elsewhere, the great skeletal towers linked by thick transmission cables march where they please, indifferent to local objections. What is certain is that modern America needs the electricity transported thus, and the gases and liquids that run through great pipelines. Hope for the long run is offered by research that may open the possibility of putting high-voltage transmission lines underground, but in the meantime what is needed is an awareness on the part of utilities planners that scenic and historic values have to be given full weight in their computations.

The kind of agriculture that has so much to do with the Basin's scenic appeal is not entirely healthy these days. We have mentioned the difficulty created near Washington--and around other Basin centers of population and in many places where vacation colonies are burgeoning--by skyrocketing speculation and a general absence of strongly based and well-defended plans of preservation. As the development value of land rises in such places, local systems of taxation based on that value rather than on actual use may drive farmers out of business whether they want to stay in or not. Since 1945 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for instance, the number of commercial farms has dropped from 1788 to about 200, and it is still going down.

Even where the tax trouble has been recognized, as in Maryland, and taxation adjusted to reality for people who want to go on farming, few tillers of the soil are devoted enough to their acres to hold onto them in the face of the kind of cash that is often dangled before their eyes, for the flat and fertile tracts that make the best farms are also the easiest to subdivide and build on in standard fashion. For that matter, the usual form of tax relief on agricultural land can be used as a tax loophole by speculators. Thus, whenever tract values rise and development impends, good productive land, which the country may well miss later as populations grow and food supplies for them thin out, goes permanently under pavements and construction. Even though it is just in such places that protected, scenic, connotative rural landscapes might have the most meaning for the most people in the long run, their preservation presents some tough questions. Patterns of growth that would spare them could easily be worked out and would fit in well with watershed protection and open s.p.a.ce needs, but the economics of compensating farm owners for the loss of the big money they might have received for them is another thing.

In some other parts of the Basin, the implications of a modern unified economy are a threat to traditional farms and farming methods. Labor costs, the need for expensive machinery, superior methods of storage of foodstuffs and easy transport over long distances have put Potomac farmers into compet.i.tion with other regions, even other countries, where the same products they supply can be raised on an industrial scale of investment and profit. Thus the worth of a field of tomatoes in the Northern Neck of Virginia is affected by ma.s.sive irrigated production in the Central Valley of California, and thus a Shenandoah farmer may barely break even or suffer a loss on a rather good crop of wheat in the old "bread basket of the Confederacy."

Such influences, even though dulled a bit by protective State and Federal farm programs, are putting a premium on specialization, ever larger farms, and an "agribusiness" approach, with high capital and operating expenses. Their effect on many family farms in the Basin's mountain regions, places with limited acreage of marginally productive land, is severe. These may have supported the clans that own them reasonably well for a century or more, but they cannot compete with Ohio. Unless their owners are willing to keep on farming while holding down a job in town for supplementary cash, they often move away and the places go out of cultivation. Some are consolidated into grazing or forestry units or bigger farms, some stand abandoned, some go on the market as vacation retreats and "hobby farms" for wide-ranging metropolitans.

Richer regions share the troubles. In the cla.s.sic valley of the Monocacy, some of whose dairy farmers have to import feed now from the Midwest because they cannot raise it cheaply enough themselves, the size of the optimum farm, one that can compete effectively in today's market, has swelled in the past few years from about 150 acres to about 600, according to a study by the State of Maryland. The problem is compounded by rising land prices influenced not by productive value but by the presence of Megalopolis just over toward the Bay. Sprawl throws a long shadow.

Eyeing this array of difficulties, many farmers' sons are p.r.o.ne to seek another livelihood, and the average age of the men who do the farming grows higher all the time. Tiring, many sell out, and thus the family farms that make up the greater part of the Potomac's much-loved rural landscape dwindle in number and change in use. It is not necessary to be mawkish to see this as a loss. In part it is inevitable, but in part too it may be rooted in policies that can be altered and adjusted to keep the farms productive.

Wildlife, along the Potomac as elsewhere, is dependent on whatever habitat it occupies--that is to say on the state of the landscape. If the rivers are cleaned up and kept flowing even during times of drought and heavy use of water, they will support better populations of fish and a greater variety of species. If the subtle interrelationships and the immense value of the estuary's varied nooks and crannies are recognized, studied out to full understanding, and protected--and in time--not only fish and sh.e.l.lfish but ducks and eagles and herons and all the other wild users of the sh.o.r.es and wetlands will benefit. Government refuges and other devices are badly needed for these purposes in that region, now that it is no longer remote and the kind of protection many private owners have traditionally furnished wildlife is diminishing.

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Upland populations of deer, turkey, grouse, quail, racc.o.o.n, fox, and other sporting and non-sporting species thrive in parts of the Basin suited to their habits and still in good condition, and shrink elsewhere. Many stretches of private forest land could support much higher densities of game and other wildlife, if they were put in better shape by practices that are available and feasible. Of the more than three million acres of such land scattered throughout the Basin in small holdings, much is in poor condition. It is therefore but spottily productive of game or timber or anything else, and often causes high runoff and erosion in critical watersheds.

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Recreation

Many of the things we have called amenities here are subject to full-fledged economic uses necessary to the region's wellbeing and not usually in great conflict with scenic and ecological values if they are carried out right. Farming and commercial fishing and logging used to be generally exploitative and hard on the natural scheme of things in this country, for instance, but they no longer need to be and in most cases are not. Using the Potomac's water for towns and factories and power and navigation entails some interference with natural processes, but it does not have to be widely destructive of them. Discharge of treated wastes to streams is still necessary to a degree, and up to that degree not badly harmful, though as we have seen, it is far too often excessive.

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Urban expansion is necessary also with present population pressures. It is an irreversible exploitation of the landscape, but if the type of land-use principles mentioned in this chapter were to get wider employment, urbanization would quite certainly not have to be as destructive of natural and human values as its present usual form is.

The same thing is true of industry in its many manifestations, including mining, and of the woven network of roads and utilities. The public needs them, and the people responsible for them need to be aware of the great value of the natural framework within which all men must exist.

Average people's direct use of the natural world is most often of the kind summed up as "outdoor recreation," an umbrella phrase under which are lumped a diversity of satisfactions found by widely differing persons in many types of more or less natural places. Muscular hunters and elderly birdwatchers, water-skiers and bank-fishermen, Sunday drivers on crowded highways and lean backpackers on dim trails in the South Branch highlands, baseball players and people who take naps on the gra.s.s beside the C. & O. Ca.n.a.l, amateur archaeologists and stock-car racing fans--all these and many other kinds of folk depend somehow on the Potomac outdoors for their pleasure. They use it.

How much they use it and how much pleasure they get out of it are governed by the time on their hands, the availability of their chosen recreation, and whether it is good of its kind. A would-be hunter who cannot escape from the District of Columbia is out of luck unless his mobility improves. An Alexandria water-skier can divert himself on the metropolitan estuary during the summer months, but under ordinary conditions at present it is something less than what is known as a "quality experience," as is fishing there or any other water sport. A West Virginian has to have some time to spare if he wants to enjoy beaches and ocean breezes; so do Tidewater residents with a penchant for mountain trout fishing.

Nevertheless the Basin holds a great deal for almost all tastes, and most of what it holds is of excellent quality. The main recreational needs are fairly clear: to protect and restore the Potomac outdoors from the deterioration noted in this and earlier chapters, to spread the chance at different kinds of pleasure around as much as possible, to guard against clashes between different kinds of use and against the destruction of the quality of quiet and natural places that occurs when too many people are jammed together in them, to make the Basin's pleasant corners and sh.o.r.es and byways easier to get at, and--not least important--to encourage uses that contribute to appreciation and preservation, helping to make sure that in the long run outdoor recreation in this region will be possible.

People's need for outdoor activity in their spare time varies a good deal. An oysterman-crabber working out of the Yeocomico through the progression of seasons and weathers, a Shenandoah plowman turning earth his great-great-grandfather turned at the foot of the blue-green mountains, a timber cruiser in the high forests--such individuals are not as likely to need to go looking for added outdoor satisfactions as most other kinds of people, for whom ordinary life tends to be more separate from pleasure in the open air. Maybe if the cities can be brought back to health and their growth shaped to fit in better with human needs, this will change. But with more and more people coming on, more and more leisurely and affluent as technology cuts down on work, more and more urban, outdoor recreation as a specific goal is going to be an ever more important consideration in planning. It is already important--and already, as we are reminded with statistics, big business.

City recreational needs

Recreation in and around the central city of Washington has to be a primary aim. The most people are in this area, many of them through poverty or habits of life not given to farflung pleasures but constrained to seek them where they live, or near at hand. The worst environmental threats are here as well, despite the foresight and pride that have saved much more open s.p.a.ce and pleasant park land than most other American cities can show.

The metropolitan river has to be cleaned up and made attractive. It used to be the city's most supremely valuable amenity and potentially it still is. Measures within reach can realize much of the potential inside of a reasonably short time, so that productive and varied fishing and good boating and a beautiful wide body of water will be within strolling distance for people in the central parts of the metropolis on both sides of the Potomac, and the recreational value of the lands already preserved along its sh.o.r.es will be incalculably multiplied. Safe swimming and other water contact sports in the open metropolitan estuary, often mentioned as an aiming point for clean-up programs, may be a somewhat more distant future prospect. Our studies in the past three years have made it clear that pollution here is more complex and diffuse in origins than had ever been supposed, and that sources of dangerous bacteria are probably going to continue to exist for a good while despite all efforts against them. The goal of swimming is a worthy one and will probably be reached, but not quickly. In the meantime, more public pools in the City and easy transportation to public areas farther down the estuary may be required.

Some recreation areas within the city, like Rock Creek Park, presently get too much use for their own good and for people's full pleasure in them because they are superior to anything else accessible to many of the city's people. This is a local manifestation of a national problem, for even sections of the great national parks, like the one at Yosemite, are presently being battered by overuse by a generation of city-dwellers anxious to come in touch with natural and basic things. In such places, people's very numbers shut them off from those basic things and coa.r.s.en the quality of their experience. The only really satisfactory answer will be to put additional, equally attractive places within reach of the same people. In Washington this means developing other pleasant areas within the city and making it easier for the city's people to get to the other parks and natural places farther out. Improvement of the river, development of extensive new parklands along the Anacostia including the Kenilworth Dump site, more neighborhood playgrounds and swimming pools, and other such action will all help to relieve the situation, which is getting much official attention and is a specific subject in the report recently published by the Potomac Planning Task Force, the group formed under auspices of the American Inst.i.tute of Architects.

The array of Federal, State, regional and county parks and other public areas ringing the metropolis will be more accessible as public transit improves. Another means to this end, and an especially organic and appropriate one, will be the urban stretches of the Basinwide network of hiking, bicycling, and horseback trails which will be discussed a little farther along.

If, as prophets reiterate, ever-increasing percentages of the American public in the future will be living in the great cities, a great deal of nature and conservation education is going to be needed if the ma.s.s of people are not to lose all understanding of natural things and all sympathy with their working and their preservation. It cannot be entirely a cla.s.sroom sort of thing, no matter how many films and preserved or caged wildlife specimens may be provided. There is need now, and there will be more need hereafter, for rich nature preserves and study centers within reach of Washington and specifically dedicated to such use.

In general, suburbanites have more freedom of choice regarding the places they play in and the ways in which they play there than do people at the urban center. Many of them live fairly close to outlying parks and open areas, and if good planning gains in strength and effectiveness as the metropolis spreads, this neighborhood availability of outdoor pleasures will increase, with more Rock Creeks and Pohick Creeks to put stream-valley parks and pleasant small lakes and streams and such things within reach of everyone, and more green open s.p.a.ce just outside people's doors. They are going to be needed, for public pressure on the available recreation areas around the metropolis is already heavy.

Suburbanites also, however, are more mobile than almost any non-nomadic civilian population in history. A great variety of things to do are within driving distance of their homes on an afternoon off, or a weekend, or a vacation. Therefore, the question of providing and improving outdoor recreation for them, as well as for more mobile residents of the central city, merges with the wider question of outdoor recreation on a Basinwide scale, for residents and visitors alike.

Basin recreational needs

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 sh.o.r.eline 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 a.s.set, people's enjoyment of that a.s.set will be a.s.sured. 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 sh.o.r.e by the C. & O. Ca.n.a.l in Federal ownership, a unique resource. But the bulk of the land between the ca.n.a.l and the river--7200 acres out of 10,000--is privately owned. Along most of the 120 miles where the ca.n.a.l 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 ca.n.a.l 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 Ma.s.sanutten range between the forks, and on the Cacapon there is hardly any. Authorized additions to the Spruce k.n.o.b-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 spa.r.s.e, 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 sh.o.r.es 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.sic 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.

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