The Nations River | Page 8

Potomac has been much studied, it has nevertheless been subjected to only meager "development" over the centuries of its service to civilized men. Most past attempts to alter it significantly for man's use have either failed or have not led to lasting results, though their changing purposes over the years summarize, to a degree, America's shifting attitudes toward the utility of flowing water. Early projects under George Washington and others to assure the navigability of the main river above the Fall Line, which they saw as an artery for eastward and westward currents of trade, left only some quaint ruined locks and flowing bypass canals around falls and rapids. The later C. & O. Canal, which ran alongside the river and was replenished by its water above occasional low dams, required over two decades of toil and death and heavy expense to complete upriver to Cumberland, Maryland, which it reached in 1850. There had been some public opposition to the project and it was never a great success even after completion, for the railroad era had begun and the Canal suffered periodic heavy damage from Potomac floods, being finally abandoned to picturesque decay after a mighty inundation in 1924.
Largely because of a stalemate between public and private power advocates, the early 20th century heyday of small-scale hydroelectric power development of rivers mainly missed the Potomac, though at one time a power company acquired land at Great Falls in anticipation of such development. Other modern water projects in the Basin have been relatively modest or have run afoul of strong opposition. Therefore, today a sprinkling of small channel power dams and water intake structures, some levees and improved creek channels, and a few unimposing reservoirs of various sizes and types high up on small tributaries are the sum total of the development to which the Potomac water resource has been lastingly subjected, if we disregard for the moment its waste disposal function and the maintenance of navigation in its estuary.
In general this is undoubtedly a fortunate thing, for the application of modern technology to rivers in the past half-century of our national growth has not always had happy results. "A river," Justice Holmes once wrote, "is more than an amenity, it is a treasure." His feeling is shared by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who live along the Potomac and its tributaries or who go there to float down them in bass time, to picnic and swim, to hunt, to dig into the region's history, or just to listen to the purl of green water against the rough stonework of a ruined bridge pier. Deteriorated though a few stretches may presently be, these rivers are still treasures.
The lack of development also presents planners with a fairly clean slate on which to write. In terms of water, few massive human mistakes confront them except the pollution of the upper estuary and certain other reaches like the afflicted North Branch. Therefore they can begin more or less from scratch and can usually find various choices for action against the water problems of the Basin--against pollution, against flood damages, and against impending or existing shortages of water for municipal and industrial use.
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Though for clarity in discussion we need to classify these various kinds of problems separately, in practice they do not so neatly divide from one another. Nor do they divide from the way the land in the Basin is used or from the pleasure and fulfillment people find in the outdoors. If a region's use of a stream's water is heavy in a dry August, for instance, whatever pollution the stream gets below towns and factories will be more concentrated and damaging than if the stream were flowing well. Pollution itself can affect the utility of water as well as people's enjoyment of it in a stream. A creek watershed that has been ignorantly farmed or roughly assaulted with bulldozers for urban development is an eyesore of erosive destruction, unproductive of crops, wildlife, or poetic appreciation, and can cause both heavier stream flooding in time of storm and lower flow in time of drought by the way its disruption alters the normal behavior of rainwater. The silt that storms wash off of it is not only a major ugly pollutant of flowing water below that point but can complicate flooding and bank-cutting and navigation and other things by settling out into bars and shoals in still stretches, including reservoirs.
All of these things, and others as well, have to be considered together as parts of a whole problem. And that problem is that men's hugely increasing numbers and their multiplying technological power over their environment have made it necessary to readjust the balances somewhat in great natural units like river basins--to restore, manage, and protect them in such a way as to