Today, I started a 167-mile leg along the C&O canal, which begins in Georgetown and exits Maryland at Oldtown, up on the West Virginia border. I am spending one last night with Julie’s angelic niece and nephew. The first campsite on the C&O was about 27 miles from the starting point, and we didn’t want to push it, so I walked to a logical stopping point today, back to Arlington tonight, and from tomorrow on, campsites will be every five miles along the rest of the trail.
This was a wonderful day on the trail. Another perfect, clear, cool, sunny day. The route is on the towpath of this long canal, opened in 1850 to transport goods and people to and from the west. The heyday of the canal was brief, cut short by the development of railroads. Its short economic life notwithstanding, the canal is an impressive demonstration of human will, ingenuity and engineering. The stone banks and the many sturdy locks (I passed 19 today alone) attest to the durability and scale of the canal-builders’ achievement.
The towpath is an easy-walking gravel path used by horses to pull barges along the canal. Just to the south of the canal flows the Potomac River, and I had wonderful views of the river all day today. I stopped at Great Falls, where the Potomac plunges down a boulder-choked chasm to quiet water and its final run to the Chesapeake Bay. It is a thrilling sight, just a short drive (but a long walk!) outside Washington D.C.
Today was the first day I saw interesting wildlife. Until today I’ve been walking through farms, suburbs, villages and one big city, and animals other than squirrels and songbirds were scarce. Today I saw a bunch of mud turtles, one big snapping turtle, lots of bluegill-type fish, one whitetail doe, a pileated woodpecker, some ducks and geese and lots of great blue heron patiently fishing along the canal. I expect to see many more animals as my trip takes me further toward West Virginia.
One newspaper note: My hosts subscribe to The Washington Post (bless ’em!) so I’ve had a chance to read it carefully for the last few days. I’ve read the Post before, of course, and I am a regular on washingtonpost.com, but this has been the first time I’ve had an extended opportunity to study the paper. It is just a terrific newspaper! Ambitious, entertaining, authoritative, well-written, good-looking, comprehensive. I didn’t see a thing I didn’t like, or any evidence that the Post is chopping away at its news product to save money. And yet the Post is steadily losing subscribers. The Post is doing nothing to drive down its readership. If newspaper quality were the key variable to growing circulation, the Post‘s numbers would grow to the sky. The Post, and the rest of the big-city dailies, are the roadkill of a massive generational shift in media consumption habits. And it is no more able to derail the shift to the Internet than the canal owners could stop their customers from loading their cargo onto boxcars.
