The Nation's River Part 8

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The scope of the job to be done is becoming clear. A far-reaching and well-financed Federal pollution control program is getting under way, even if some elements of policy and procedure need refinement and a great deal of research toward the best answers to certain technical problems remains to be done. The four Potomac Basin States and the District of Columbia are poised for action at the level where it will count the most, with new water quality standards to guide them and Federal money and technical a.s.sistance for fuel. At the local level, incentive to do things right has never been stronger than at present, and it ought to grow still stronger as the sticks and carrots of the Federal and State programs come into use and pressure from citizens disgusted with dirty water builds up.

Things are moving. The chances are that they will move quite fast during the next few years, as new technology and new understandings ease the way toward solution of stubborn pollution problems. They are going to have to move fast, for threats are proliferating fast as well. And if things are going to move not only fast but right in the Potomac Basin, they are going to need the guidance of a continuing and authoritative body that concerns itself with them specifically like INCOPOT, focused on Basin matters and dedicated to their study, but with a wider realm of interest and stronger powers of coordination and enforcement to make certain that the things that are done are the right things, in the right order and the right places for the whole good of the Basin and the river.

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IV A GOOD PLACE TO BE

Stream water comes from the surface of the land or out of its porous underlayers, then flows seaward through its creases and folds, affecting the land and the land's creatures along the way and being affected by them. Thus, as we have already noted in more than one way, the management of land and the management of water are closely intertwined, from the way human use of a flood plain may demand structural interference with a river's old habits, to the way erosive farming in some West Virginia valley may help to make it harder to navigate Swedish newsprint into Alexandria by ship.

In a like way, "practical" and "esthetic" considerations as to how both land and water are treated are not easily disentangled from each other.

How much of the rising tide of public concern over American rivers and lakes, for instance, comes from an awareness of what dirtied water costs the economy, and how much is rooted in simple disgust over a monstrous ugliness that should not be? Gullied and abandoned land grown up to scrub and weeds is not only useless as it stands but also a sadness on the landscape, a reminder of how far from the naive, often sentimental, but lastingly powerful 18th century ideal of oneness with nature men have wandered in their progress. A belching factory in the wrong place can perform such multiple functions as blighting a countryside, polluting a stream, lowering subdivision property values, and increasing the local rate of emphysema.

Only lately has it begun to grow clear that in the traditional concern with market exploitation of resources, moderns have not even evolved a language or a scale to evaluate the loss to them inherent in a wrecked landscape, a spoiled stream, and such things, or the positive worth of an unspoiled section of countryside. But it is becoming obvious enough that objections to environmental destruction are not necessarily sentimental, naive, or impractical. A bit late, realization is growing that the world has a certain longstanding wholeness with which people interfere ma.s.sively at their own peril. Landscape in the widest sense--the sense of the integrity of a place to look at, to be in, to use and to know and to know about--matters to human beings, and the terms in which it matters involve incentive, fulfillment, and sanity.

And while human beings are soaking in this fact, the American landscape is being rapidly gutted by human activity.

A stately avenue rots to slums before everyone's eyes. A pastoral valley fills with houses gable on gable in six months' time; its stream runs red with mud, floods wildly out of banks with every heavy shower, shrinks to a foul dribble in time of drought, and finally is concreted over into a storm sewer to subdue it and get it out of sight. The stone cottage that a town's founder built with his own hands two hundred years ago gets in the path of a new highway and is pushed down, and its rubble used for fill beneath an exit ramp. What was once, when someone was fifteen, a secret clearing in the woods beyond a city's edge, may hold a hamburger stand or several dozen stacked car bodies when he comes back to seek it out at the age of twenty. A secluded section of estuarial sh.o.r.eline, where eagles nest and Colonial patriarchs once brooded over the rights of man and a few families now make a living from oysters and crabs, is sold off to a development corporation headquartered in Chicago or Houston or somewhere, which, in accordance with certain current rights of man, divides it into 25-foot vacation lots with 250-gallon septic tanks, and within four years anyone who wades out of his boat there stirs up blue clouds of mellow sludge, and where did the oysters and the eagles go? We Americans are inevitably progress-minded, practically all of us, but we are beginning to wonder if progress needs to cost so much.

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The Potomac landscape matters particularly, for certain reasons. One is that we hope to make a model of it, commencing here processes of preservation and restoration to show the rest of the country that modern ways of being need not eat up everything whole and green and old and meaningful and right. Another--not really separate, for it justifies that model status--is that the Basin's landscape, not only around the capital but far down the estuary and up along the flowing main river and its tributaries, is both physically and spiritually a national landscape, filled with national memories and meanings.

In the diverse kinds of country it holds and the ways of life they have fostered--Tidewater, Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Great Valley, and rugged Appalachia--it sums up much of the old Eastern, pre-Revolutionary America that people left behind when they shoved off toward the Ohio and the cotton South and the plains and the Rockies and the Pacific. A reasonably conscious Oregonian or Iowan or Texan seeing it for the first time knows that a part of what he is was sculptured there. Its map is textured with a richness of names that call up remembrance of what Americans used to be like and what they did, and how all of that led toward their becoming what they are today. Names of Indian tribes--Seneca, Piscataway, Dogue, Tuscarora, Anacostia--and Indian objects and activities by the hundreds. Names tied to men and events that carved history--old Saint Mary's where Calvert's Catholics came, Stratford of the Lees, Wakefield and Mount Vernon of the Washingtons, Braddock Heights, the Shenandoah, Harpers Ferry where John Brown lit a fuse, Mana.s.sas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and a mult.i.tude of others.

As time goes in the United States, the Potomac Basin has been populated by our restless people for a long while, and very little of it has not been affected as a result--the deep exhaustion of the Tidewater when the tobacco bonanza ran out, the lumbering off of the mountains, the grubby continuing reign of coal along the North Branch, and now the explosive growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry and people. But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island, swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, humid North America with a resident population of only about 3.5 million people, some two-thirds of whom live in a relatively few square miles around Washington. It has had and still has many ardent protectors, ranging from small-town ladies' garden clubs to Presidents.

In consequence of these grateful facts, it has been able to recover from most of the damage done in the past, and much of what it has always been and always possessed still exists. There is enough natural harmony combined with diversity, enough forward human movement combined with a sense of what has gone before, to make the Basin's residents and those who visit glad to be alive in such a world, insofar as the times, their temperaments, their bank accounts, and their view of the human dilemma may permit. In general it is still a beautiful and satisfying piece of country, a good place to be.

But not all parts of it, and not for everyone, and most certainly not with any guarantee that it is going to stay a good place to be of its own accord, without any help. It is no privileged wonderland removed from the dissonance and change of a crowded technological age.

The Basin's amenities

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.

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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 mult.i.tude 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.

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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. Ca.n.a.l. Despite railroad compet.i.tion 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 c.u.mberland 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.es 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 ba.s.s, 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 sp.a.w.ning 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 sh.o.r.eline 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 a.s.sociated 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 k.n.o.b-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 a.s.sortment 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.

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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.

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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 a.s.set for potential future use. And throughout Tidewater here and there, old estates in private hands guard their woods and fields and sh.o.r.es 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 ma.s.sive 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 a.s.sociation," 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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. Ca.n.a.l and other such places. States, munic.i.p.alities, 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 a.s.sets 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.

Troubles and threats

All these things, then, are a part of what the Potomac Basin has to offer in the way of environmental blessings. They form an endowment of national value and importance, and a detailed examination of them would take up more s.p.a.ce than we can give them here, though some will come in for more discussion later in this report and others are examined in the corollary report of the Recreation and Landscape Sub-Task Force.

Some of them are in trouble now, and nearly all are faced with trouble as bad or worse if the forces of change are allowed to move as blindly and hoggishly forward as they have been moving during the decades behind us, ever faster and on ever wider fronts. The role of Jeremiah is not an agreeable one in a traditionally optimistic and forward-thrusting society, but those of us who care about the health of the world around us seem to be forced into it often in these times. Therefore let us look at somber matters.

We have catalogued the pollution of the river system and the ways in which it diminishes this most fundamental and valuable resource. We have seen how it varies through the Basin's streams according to the concentrations of people and the kinds of activities they engage in, and have noted that it is truly bad--deep-rooted, past a point of easy return--on the North Branch where coal and industry prevail, and in the upper estuary where the population is heaviest, with localized serious conditions on the Shenandoah, the Monocacy, and a number of smaller streams. And because land and water depend on each other and reflect each other's condition, these tend to be the places where the general environment is having the most trouble too.

The metropolis