POTOMAC FEVER

Singing the praises of the Potomac.

Like Paris, Cairo, and Shanghai, Washington, D.C., boasts a river that runs through it. Fryar describes the nation’s capital as a “place that represents and contains every other place, and therefore has no particular locality or regionality unto itself. Washington, D.C., is the nation’s geographic void.” She adds that to live in Washington is to be in a “constant state of disorientation.” In this, her first book, she offers a bittersweet love letter to a polluted but beautiful river that provides a sense of place. The descendant of enslavers and Klansmen, and with a Ph.D. in American studies, Fryar lives near the banks of the Potomac and considers herself a “citizen of the Potomac River.” For her, the Potomac—named after the Algonquin village of Patawomeck—mirrors “the national mood,” and so her book is about American history and culture as well as a particular body of water. Written with verve and a profound understanding of the contradictions of American democracy, her book explores life in the river, in the subterranean streams that feed it, and along its shores. Divided into 11 lyrical chapters with titles including “Sycamore,” “Honeysuckle,” and “Bones,” it traces topics such as the wilderness, private property, and public lands. It also sings the praises of nature in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. Quotations from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Abigail Adams—who described the “fledgling cityscape” as “the very dirtiest Hole I ever saw”—amplify Fryar’s moral invective and cry for human and environmental justice. Readers might curl up with her book in the comfort of home or, after visiting the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, take it with them on a stroll along a river that, as Fryar points out, is not yet safe enough to swim in and drink from, though it is cleaner than it has been in a hundred years.

A lovely ode to an oft-neglected river.