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 bass, 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 spawning 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 shoreline 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 Bas