To the Potomac—A Love Letter
By Laura Forrest Hopfauf
I’m not going to lie to you and say the river doesn’t change. I’ve heard that. I’ve heard people say it all my life. I disagree. In my lifetime, I think the river will change probably just as much as I will, if not more. I might not see it easily with my own eye, but I know over my 35 years the curves have dug themselves deeper and wider; the islands that dot the center here and there have eroded along their edges; the eel population has gone down and the snakehead population has changed its ecology. I know when I look at pictures of the river from the 1800s, it’s similar, but it’s not the same.
The Potomac is not the same in all seasons either. I’ve seen it frozen solid as smooth as a skating rink. I’ve seen it jammed with ice like an accident on the Beltway. The summer of ’99 it was low enough that I almost walked across the whole thing from Maryland to West Virginia and back again right above the confluence at Harpers Ferry. I only had to swim a stretch that couldn’t have been more than 10 feet where my toes couldn’t touch the bottom. In ’96 I saw it angry enough to shake the bridge that runs from Sharpsburg to Shepherdstown when it flooded so high it covered the canal whole, painted it right over with such ferocity I would have believed you if you told me the towpath had never even been there. I’ve seen it still as a mirror, like a sleeping giant.
I’ve gone to the river at different times and thought it looked mad, peaceful, sad, full, and everything in between.
To me that’s the thing that’s special about the Potomac. Whatever iteration of itself it is in, whatever form the water takes that day, that hour, that moment, whatever its mood, it’s there. The Potomac is there for what sometimes feels like just me. Like all day, all week, all year, it was waiting for me to walk down and stand along its banks and see it. Just be there and see it.
There’s something really special about that. I’m part of a population that throws trash into the river. I’m part of the sewage that sometimes leaks in from upstream. I’ve lost fishing line, fishing lures. Shoot, I’ve even lost shoes in the river. For all it’s done for me, I’ve mostly abused it, taken advantage of it, missed what it was telling me, and it’s still there. It’s still there for me every single time I walk down the path I wore my footsteps into when I was a kid, a teenager, a young adult, a woman. It’s not the same. The river never is. It changes every flood, every drought, every single season. But it keeps on being the river. It keeps on flowing. It never turns away or stops no matter what comes its way, what we do to it, what the weather inflicts on it. There’s not a lot of places like that, not a lot of people like that either.
And maybe I sound like a hippie. But I think if I could learn a little something from the river, if I could find a way to be a little more like the Potomac every day, I might just turn into the person I’ve always wanted to be.
So this is my love letter to the Potomac. Egypt can keep the Nile. The Midwest can hold onto the Mississippi. Peru can twist the Amazon right on through its forests. But me? Give me the Potomac—tidal water to skinny water and every little bit in between. Give me my favorite spot—where I’ve stood over so many years and learned so many things—a couple miles upstream from Dargan boat ramp at a turn in the current, a downed log, a long broken-off fishing line that hangs high from a tree to the north, and a rock I like to stand on in the water that’s usually just out of reach until the dog days of summer. There, that’s the grandest river in the world to me.