What's Gotten into Us? by Mckay Jenkins

Author:Mckay Jenkins [Jenkins, McKay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60497-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

The day was getting late. As Kauffman and I pulled our canoe out of the water, a few miles upstream from the city of Wilmington, I noticed a pair of Baltimore orioles zipping through the trees downstream. I tried to decide whether or not this was an omen. Orioles are no longer a common site in the region. Was the fact that a pair had taken up residence here a good sign? The water beneath our boats—the baseline for everything going into the orioles’ systems, and our own—was not exactly pristine, but there was a nice forest buffer, just the way Jerry Kauffman likes it.

Yet even here, by drinking water standards, the Brandywine was already very, very dirty. A few miles downriver, and things would get considerably less hospitable. Just south of where Jerry Kauffman and I got out of our canoe, the Brandywine becomes, officially, a city river, providing millions of gallons of drinking water a day to the people of Wilmington and Chester County, Pennsylvania.

To return our boats to the rental company, we drove back through the miles of strip malls to the giant parking lot and the outfitter where we had rented out boats. The whole way back, I noticed, there was very little soil visible anywhere, let alone trees. All of these acres of pavement, one day soon, would get rained on and—like mall parking lots across the United States—shed their contaminants downhill, straight into the river. And from there, it would not be long before the water came straight through the tap.

Exploring the Brandywine upstream is one thing, Jerry Kauffman told me, but getting to know it downstream is quite another. You’ve seen the river sliding by the horse farms. Now you need to see it in the city’s bowels.

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