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 shoreline, 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.
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, Manassas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and a multitude 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.