I teetered on the edge of the dock, eying the brown water and mucky shore dubiously. I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, and held it behind sealed lips. I hesitated for a long moment, then dived in and flailed blindly for the raft, 20 yards away.
It took me 20 years to take that plunge into the Potomac. Like many longtime residents, I had turned away from it in disgust long ago, when it was most conspicuous as a sewer. In the back of my mind, the river is still the foul thing it was. But I've been getting reacquainted with it. In exploring its rapids and islands and tributaries, I've capsized my canoe a few times. Swimming deliberately was a breakthrough. Even as I stood there on that raft, I wondered if I had the guts to swim back to shore.
The Potomac that I first knew was 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. Keith Fry of the Interstate Commission on the Potomac Basin described the Tidal Basin graphically in 1966: "Debris, from many sources, floats back and forth on tidal waters, which are further sabotaged by silt and sludge beds that bubble on hot summer days. Low dissolved-oxygen limits aquatic life and high bacterial levels restrict use of water for water recreation."
Fry's descriptive powers apparently failed when it came to the smell, which on hot days blanketed the city's waterfront with a thick, dead stench. As a teenager, I fell out of a rented canoe one hot day at Three Sisters--I can't explain what I was doing out there among the fish kills and floating curds of sewage‑-and shuddered with nausea until I got home to bathe and check my inoculation records. I survived, with only a bad earache, but avoided the Potomac for many years afterwards.
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-tall 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 into a 36-mile-long lake, edged by smelly mudflats in the dry season. But the Corps pushed it doggedly from 1946 until the early 1960s. It came within a whisker of being carried out, before heavy lobbying by local and national conservation organizations, with independent studies of the economic and environmental costs, quashed it. (Opposition by bigwig conservationists like Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Kennedy's Interior Secretary Stewart Udall helped, too.)
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. By the 1990s I was ready--but not eager--for a swim.
This was a river that astounded its first European explorers with its wealth. When Captain John Smith sailed up the river in June 1608, fish were so thick in the shallows that his crew tried to catch them in skillets. Henry Fleet, an English fur trader taken captive as a boy by the Necostin Indians (whose name, latinized. became Anacostia), wrote of this stretch of the river as "the most pleasant and healthful place in all this country, and most convenient for habitation. It aboundeth in all manner of fish.... As for deer, buffaloes, bears, turkeys, the woods do swarm with them."
Ever since, farmers, loggers, miners, and manufacturers have burdened the Potomac with wastes and silt, dammed and diverted it, and used its tributaries as sources of power. But somehow those centuries of use have left the Potomac unruined, a stunning intrusion of nature into the sprawlopolis.
The stretch below Great Falls, where the river is forced between the twisted rock walls of Mather Gorge and surges down toward tidewater in a series of rapids and falls, is one of the spectacular natural wonders of the continent. Enter the gorge by foot or canoe, and civilization falls quickly away. Rushing water masks the sounds of passing airliners. Herons hunt in the shallows, fish jump, ducks dabble, beaver and muskrat swim. Farther downstream low islands of silt, lashed together by the roots of willows and maples and giant sycamores, lie along the banks, sheltering shady, twisting channels and backwaters. One might almost be back on Fleet's Potomac.
But human history is unavoidable. Scuff a toe on an island and you'll find an ancient piece of canal ironwork or a refrigerator door tossed down a western Maryland stream bank 20 years ago. And you'll find plastic in all its forms. I suspect that the islands are held together as much by six-pack rings and old tires as by roots.
The waters remain far from pristine, too. Acid drainage from coal mines on the North Branch has pretty much sterilized that part of the river. Farms and factories in four states contribute their effluents. Lawns and gardens, streets and building sites pour fertilizers, heavy metals, oil, mud, pesticides into the river through streams and storm sewers. At the Anacostia River, oil and toxic runoff from city streets and leakage from worn-out sewer pipes give the estuary a dose of pollution that dwarfs anything upstream.
I've gone back into the Potomac again and again since that first swim. The next frontier, I suppose, is to eat the fish. Friends do. Just give me another couple decades.
