ing what they are today. Names of Indian
tribes--Seneca, Piscataway, Dogue, Tuscarora, Anacostia--and Indian
objects and activities by the hundreds. Names tied to men and events
that carved history--old Saint Mary's where Calvert's Catholics came,
Stratford of the Lees, Wakefield and Mount Vernon of the Washingtons,
Braddock Heights, the Shenandoah, Harpers Ferry where John Brown lit a
fuse, Manassas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and a multitude of others.

As time goes in the United States, the Potomac Basin has been populated
by our restless people for a long while, and very little of it has not
been affected as a result--the deep exhaustion of the Tidewater when the
tobacco bonanza ran out, the lumbering off of the mountains, the grubby
continuing reign of coal along the North Branch, and now the explosive
growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry
and people. But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island,
swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save
even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much
of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles
instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still
mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, humid North America
with a resident population of only about 3.5 million people, some
two-thirds of whom live in a relatively few square miles around
Washington. It has had and still has many ardent protectors, ranging
from small-town ladies' garden clubs to Presidents.

In consequence of these grateful facts, it has been able to recover from
most of the damage done in the past, and much of what it has always been
and always possessed still exists. There is enough natural harmony
combined with diversity, enough forward human movement combined with a
sense of what has gone before, to make the Basin's residents and those
who visit glad to be alive in such a world, insofar as the times, their
temperaments, their bank accounts, and their view of the human dilemma
may permit. In general it is still a beautiful and satisfying piece of
country, a good place to be.

But not all parts of it, and not for everyone, and most certainly not
with any guarantee that it is going to stay a good place to be of its
own accord, without any help. It is no privileged wonderland removed
from the dissonance and change of a crowded technological age.

The Basin's amenities