in time of drought, and finally is concreted
over into a storm sewer to subdue it and get it out of sight. The stone
cottage that a town's founder built with his own hands two hundred years
ago gets in the path of a new highway and is pushed down, and its rubble
used for fill beneath an exit ramp. What was once, when someone was
fifteen, a secret clearing in the woods beyond a city's edge, may hold a
hamburger stand or several dozen stacked car bodies when he comes back
to seek it out at the age of twenty. A secluded section of estuarial
shoreline, where eagles nest and Colonial patriarchs once brooded over
the rights of man and a few families now make a living from oysters and
crabs, is sold off to a development corporation headquartered in Chicago
or Houston or somewhere, which, in accordance with certain current
rights of man, divides it into 25-foot vacation lots with 250-gallon
septic tanks, and within four years anyone who wades out of his boat
there stirs up blue clouds of mellow sludge, and where did the oysters
and the eagles go? We Americans are inevitably progress-minded,
practically all of us, but we are beginning to wonder if progress needs
to cost so much.

[Illustration]

The Potomac landscape matters particularly, for certain reasons. One is
that we hope to make a model of it, commencing here processes of
preservation and restoration to show the rest of the country that modern
ways of being need not eat up everything whole and green and old and
meaningful and right. Another--not really separate, for it justifies
that model status--is that the Basin's landscape, not only around the
capital but far down the estuary and up along the flowing main river and
its tributaries, is both physically and spiritually a national
landscape, filled with national memories and meanings.

In the diverse kinds of country it holds and the ways of life they have
fostered--Tidewater, Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Great Valley, and rugged
Appalachia--it sums up much of the old Eastern, pre-Revolutionary
America that people left behind when they shoved off toward the Ohio and
the cotton South and the plains and the Rockies and the Pacific. A
reasonably conscious Oregonian or Iowan or Texan seeing it for the first
time knows that a part of what he is was sculptured there. Its map is
textured with a richness of names that call up remembrance of what
Americans used to be like and what they did, and how all of that led
toward their becom