All DC-area residents should be issued canoes at puberty. Great, full-body aerobic exercise and serious doses of adrenaline! Learning to handle a canoe in turbulent water so that it goes where you point it, upstream or down, is gratifying like nobody’s business. And you can do it in some of the world’s best year-round whitewater (where the U.S. Olympic team practices), without going beyond the Beltway. How excellent is that?
Or, like me most of the time, you can paddle around lazily in the backwaters of the Potomac’s many islands, sneaking up on herons and ospreys and basking turtles, then stop on a nice island with your cooler for a civilized lunch and a smoke.
You make your choice. Canoes give access to thousands of miles of streams large and small, and to the marshes and beaches. And you can take your friends and/or family along, and a cooler.
Mine is 16 feet of red ABS plastic, a nice, versatile canoe for the rocky whitewater streams of the Potomac and Shenandoah basins. I bought it used 10 years ago, for a few hundred dollars. It was pristine them, but I’ve abused it quite a bit, so the bottom is worn about halfway through, and the white ash rails have been replaced. (More about that later.) One drawback is the deluxe wooden rails and cane seats, which are not that practical if you leave it outside in winter they way we do. Every spring I need to spend an hour sanding the rails and painting on linseed oil cut with turpentine, to avoid splinters and rot. I’d go with plastic rails next time.
And this in a river that in my youth—the1960s—was a stinking, putrid thing, lined with health notices warning against contact with the water. Georgetown's ancient sewers -some were hollow logs -poured 15 to 25 million gallons of raw sewage into the river every day. More than 100 towns and villages, upstream and down, followed suit. The Army Corps of Engineers' solution, appropriate enough, was to flush the river periodically, like a big toilet. A $500-million system of reservoirs, with a 120-foot dam at River Bend, above Great Falls, would do the trick, they said. The project would have turned a beautiful island-studded stretch of river (today nearly continuous parkland on the Virginia and Maryland sides) into a 36-mile-long lake, edged by smelly mudflats in the dry season.
The project—proposed each year from 1946 to the early 1960s—never got built, thanks to big-shot conservationists like Stewart Udall and William O. Douglas. But the river continued dying. Not until the mid-1970s—after the federal Water Quality Act had paid for sewage treatment improvements on every stream in the watershed--did fecal coliform bacteria in the river fall to levels less than scary. And only in the 1980s did aquatic weeds and fish populations begin to return to reasonable health. It was the 1990s before I was willing to swim in it.
The most pleasant stretch of rapids in the DC area is the Virginia Canal/Seneca Rapids section, about 5 miles upstream from Potomac, Maryland. Park in a gravel lot at Violette’s Lock on the C&O Canal. The ruins of an old rubble dam—part of George Washington’s disastrous investment, the Potowmack Canal—stretch straight across the river at this point. upstream—to your right— is an area of impounded water luxuriant with underwater grasses, home to lots of bass and catfish, and the occasional whining jet-ski. Downstream, for nearly a mile, the surface is broken by thousands of rocks of all descriptions and sizes, splashing over rapids, as the river makes a big left-hand bend around Blockhouse Point.
If you paddle across the river (a few hundred yards), you can enter the ruins of the canal itself. A vigorous flow carries you downstream through a curving entry channel, shaded by huge sycamores and swamp maples, and into an aquatic paradise of intricate braided channels, jungle-choked islands, and a century or two of fallen trees. There’s about a mile of this stuff, including some little islands with semi-permanent summer camps, with tents, coolers, fisherman, and smoldering campfires.
Mr. Washington was many things, but a wise investor he was not. His Potowmack Canal—visible here and in the amazing ruins on the Virginia side of Great Falls National Park—was completed in 1802 (three years after his death), with goal of reaching the growing markets of the Ohio Valley. It was a great engineering achievement but had huge costs and nearly zero revenues; it operated at a huge loss until 1828. The federal government stepped in to charter a new and better canal on the Maryland side, with both private and federal investments. On the same day (July 4), work began on America's first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O). Railroads would prove the superior technology. The canal struggled with never made it past Cumberland. The railroad was a very sad development for canal investors, but for us in DC it was a great gift, because the canal and towpath are priceless.
The B&O railroad bought up the canal’s debt and in 1938 sold the entire thing to the U.S. government for $2 million.) .I guess we would all agree it was a good investment
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