How the Potomac Imparts the Capital’s Story

 

BookShelf: How the Potomac Imparts the Capital’s Story

“Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River”
By Charlotte Taylor Fryar
Bellevue Literary Press, $17.99

Reviewed by Jennifer Weeks

From London to Cairo and New York to Shanghai, many of the world’s great cities are built on rivers.

It’s easy to see why: Rivers are food and water sources, and enable transportation and trade. They’ve also been used for centuries to dispose of human waste and trash, although that’s changing as city dwellers learn to value and care for their waterways.

The Potomac River is the defining geographical feature of Washington, D.C., and is intertwined with the city’s political, ecological and social history.

I grew up a few blocks from the Potomac in Washington, and have run, biked and hiked hundreds of miles along it, so I was interested to see Charlotte Taylor Fryar tackle this story in “Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River.”

Fryar is a writer, historian, educator and herbalist, and draws on all of these perspectives.

Two agendas intertwine and jostle in this book: chronicling the ecology of the Potomac and plumbing Washington’s history of racial inequality and disenfranchisement.

Weaving these two themes together is an ambitious goal.

Fryar recounts many expeditions along stretches of the Potomac, often to forage for edible plants like ramps, knotweed and purple dead nettle.

Her herbalist expertise shines in these passages. Readers may be surprised to learn how many kinds of plants grow in the tangles along the Potomac’s banks, and how they can be used — as they were for centuries by tribes who populated the area before white settlement.

 

Illuminating river ecology and race

The slave economy was central from the start in Washington, which was an important domestic slave-trading center.

Slaves were shipped via the Potomac to and from markets in Alexandria, Va., and Georgetown.

 

The river continued to be

both a connector and a divider.

It brought people together, but also

enforced racial separation and exclusion.

 

As Washington grew, the river continued to be both a connector and a divider. It brought people together, but also enforced racial separation and exclusion.

Consider the history of river swimming.

Locals have always taken dips in the Potomac and its tributaries, and still do, but public swimming was especially popular through the 1920s.

The site where the Jefferson Memorial stands today was once the Tidal Basin Bathing Beach, a human-made stretch of sand with bathhouses and vending stands that served thousands of residents during the district’s hot, muggy summers.

Of course, this beach and several others like it were segregated. And when Black residents lobbied for a separate beach for their children, Congress responded by making it illegal for anyone to swim in the Tidal Basin.

Another white-only beach across the river in Arlington was also closed, ostensibly for health reasons but likely to avoid having to integrate.

Then the city built a network of public pools, which were segregated until 1950. Access to swimming and relief from summer heat thus mirrored Washington’s racial divisions and power imbalances.

“Potomac Fever” works best in chapters like this, where ecology and race developments illuminate each other.

 

Insightful history of the Anacostia

Elsewhere, Fryar’s efforts to interweave them can feel forced.

As one example, Fryar bikes the route of Tiber Creek, a Potomac tributary that was free-flowing until 1815, and then was channeled into tunnels underneath the city.

Then she segues into a history of Congress denying residents of Washington self-government for decades, thanks to white fear of Black political control in the nation’s first majority-Black city.

To bring these themes together, she draws an analogy between restoring Tiber Creek to free flow — right through downtown Washington — and restoring full citizenship to residents of Washington.

To me, this felt like a shotgun marriage between politics and infrastructure.

Fryar also undercuts her narrative at times by overstating her themes instead of trusting readers to grasp them.

For example, she offers an insightful history of the Anacostia River, once known as the West Branch of the Potomac, which runs through some of the lowest-income areas of Washington.

The Anacostia has been heavily polluted for centuries from sources including deforestation, industry and sewage releases.

 

Fryar details how white elites

abandoned the Anacostia and the

areas around it, seemingly indifferent

to the human and ecological damage.

 

Fryar details how white elites abandoned the Anacostia and the areas around it, seemingly indifferent to the human and ecological damage. She also hammers repeatedly on the role of race.

“Centuries after emancipation, death is still the current of this river because slavery made its bed,” she writes. And again, a few pages later: “The white-capped [Potomac] river of George Washington and his white nation is made, in part, by a river [the Anacostia] ciphered Black by racist policy.”

The point could be made with more showing and less telling.

Still, as a Washington native, I hope Fryar will keep writing about the city’s ecology and its history. It would be interesting for her to engage with Black residents of the “DMV,” as the metro region of the District, Maryland and Virginia is locally known, and with district-based groups like Diversify Outdoors, Soul Trak Outdoors and We BE Walkin' that are working to improve outdoor experiences for people of color.

Much of Potomac Fever has a strong personal essay flavor — it’s 100% Fryar’s perspective, which yields a lot of focus on white privilege in nature. By tapping a wider range of voices, she could paint a more nuanced and complete picture of this complex topic.

Jennifer Weeks, contributing editor to SEJournal, is a freelance editor and writer and a former board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. She was senior environment and energy editor at The Conversation US from 2015 to 2024.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 14. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.