work along the Potomac similarly have less to do with
boundary lines, drainage limits, or Basin thinking than with human ways
of being. There are a number of kinds of country here, as we have seen,
in various stages of development and with various sorts of people
inhabiting them. Yeoman tillers of the Shenandoah's limestone soils may
find scant occasion to identify their interests with those of the
Washington slums, or even with those of the fox-hunting Piedmont gentry
just across the Blue Ridge. Coalmining Potomac Appalachia has more
common economic and cultural outlook with eastern Kentucky than with the
Potomac Tidewater; southern Maryland and the Northern Neck and the
Monocacy's dairy farmers all have their own ways of interpreting human
existence and defending themselves against its pitfalls. Within the
county governments and the Congressional and State-legislative
districts, these local and regional viewpoints choose political leaders
who joust for them in higher arenas, often aligning there with forces
from outside the Basin. Hence a metropolitan Maryland Congressman may
vote in the House with kindred souls from Long Island and Pasadena, and
his Basin colleagues with agricultural constituencies may oppose him on
some issues in alliance with representatives from Wyoming or Arkansas.

Despite the Basin's special ties to the Federal Government, many rural
Basinites are suspicious of Washington and the metropolis, often out of
a traditional distrust of "big government" and sometimes because they
see the accumulation of city folk at the head of the estuary as a menace
to rural modes of existence. Thus they may oppose water projects
designed to help the metropolis, or recreational development that
threatens to bring down on them large numbers of pleasure-bound
outsiders, though local businessmen's hope for a boom sometimes offsets
such opposition. The reapportionment of legislative districts now in
progress, plus the growing political muscle of metropolitan areas, is
probably going to cut down on the power of rural areas and rural
viewpoints--though just how much and in what way no one is yet sure.
Some prophets claim that these influences are going to erode rural
influence utterly; others that they will merely shape an alliance
between middle-class suburbs and rural areas against the beleaguered
central cities with their slums and other huge specific problems.

Worth noting also is the fact that many erstwhile "rural