The Nations River | Page 4

tribesmen whose villages flourished on
either shore, other vigorous white men came there to stay, on both the
Maryland and Virginia sides. In the century that followed they raced
and leapfrogged one another upriver, elbowing the Indians out, and
with the aid of indentured labor and later of African slaves they helped
to shape the Tidewater tobacco civilization that engendered so many
future leaders of the American republic. Near the head of navigation,
shipping centers grew up--among them Alexandria and Georgetown,
forerunners of the metropolis that bestrides the river at the Fall Line
today. Above there in the upper Piedmont, and then across the Blue
Ridge in the Great Valley, the westering waves of migrant English met
other waves of Scotch-Irish and the Germans coming down from
Pennsylvania, and before the American Revolution the combined
breeds of men had built up enough pressure to push Indians almost
entirely out of the Potomac Basin and to occupy all the good farmland,
even in the Basin's ridged western areas.
Since then their successors have used the land for farming and for other
purposes. In using it they have changed it, and the changes have
registered in the river system that drains it. For land, water, vegetation,
wildlife, minerals, and men's habits are not separable from one another
in the natural frame. So that if the early planters, using methods of hoe
tillage scarcely less primitive than those of the Indians, mined the
Tidewater soils for tobacco production in a way that required new
fields every few years, one result was that those soils tired and thinned
and finally stopped supporting the social magnificence that had grown
up there, for production and prosperity moved inland and west. And
another result was that the Potomac estuary itself grew shallower and
different with the silt that washed down off the land, and many a
tributary bay that once served as harbor for oceangoing ships is now a
rich, reedy marsh with a single narrow gut of shoal water wandering
down across it to the Potomac.

And if later generations of men cut down the forests on the mountains
in the western Basin, and fire followed the cutting, thousands of years
of soil washed down from those slopes too to change both mountains
and river, and elk and panther vanished. And if along the Potomac's
North Branch there was once a fine coal boom, there is now the boom's
legacy in the form of gray dour towns and dark sad streams corrosive
with mine acids.
And if old Alexandria and Georgetown and all the land around them
have burgeoned into one of the nation's great cities, there has been a
price to pay for that also. The stately upper estuary on which they front
is often turbid with silt and sometimes emerald green with algae
nourished on sewage and other septic riches, and the hills stretching
back from the river are spiky with tall buildings linked by urban and
suburban clutter, where life lacks the natural elbow room that the old
Tidewater folk--planters and yeomen and bondsmen and slaves
alike--were able to take for granted.
These are facets of an Age of Problems, of course. They and other
related troubles have been growing apace lately as men have grown in
numbers, in the demands they make on the natural environment that
shaped and nourished their species, and in their technological power to
enforce those demands. The troubles pose a threat to men of
flavorlessness and grayness and the loss of essential meanings, a threat
of diminished humanity. For dependence on that environment, intricate
and deep-rooted, psychological as well as physical, has not grown less
with the human advance toward power and sophistication.
Yet in the Potomac Basin as a whole the threat so far is mainly still a
threat, not a reality. Where men's employment of the land has been
reasonable, as it has in the Great Valley almost from the start, the land
not only remains useful and pleasant but has a specific traditional
beauty dependent on man's presence. Where new comprehension of the
processes of destruction has been attained and shared, as in soil
conservation and forestry and such fields, much damage done in the
past has been repaired.
Most of the Potomac river system's flowing waters are unnaturally

polluted to one degree or another, but only in spots does the pollution
even approach the sort of poisonous hopelessness to be found along
some more heavily populated and industrialized American rivers, and
on the Potomac its spread is already being slowed. Water shortages
loom, but have not yet seriously materialized. Floods threaten, but only
at certain definable spots. Human beings boom outward from the
Washington metropolis and the other centers of population in search of
a fuller life, and the consumptive sprawl and sameness of the