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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

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 multitude 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.

[Illustration]

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. Canal. Despite railroad competition 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 Cumberland in the 19th
and early 20th centuries.

Collecting the water