In the diverse kinds of country it holds and the ways of life they have fostered--Tidewater, Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Great Valley, and rugged Appalachia--it sums up much of the old Eastern, pre-Revolutionary America that people left behind when they shoved off toward the Ohio and the cotton South and the plains and the Rockies and the Pacific. A reasonably conscious Oregonian or Iowan or Texan seeing it for the first time knows that a part of what he is was sculptured there. Its map is textured with a richness of names that call up remembrance of what Americans used to be like and what they did, and how all of that led toward their becoming what they are today. Names of Indian tribes--Seneca, Piscataway, Dogue, Tuscarora, Anacostia--and Indian objects and activities by the hundreds. Names tied to men and events that carved history--old Saint Mary's where Calvert's Catholics came, Stratford of the Lees, Wakefield and Mount Vernon of the Washingtons, Braddock Heights, the Shenandoah, Harpers Ferry where John Brown lit a fuse, Manassas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and a multitude of others. As time goes in the United States, the Potomac Basin has been populated by our restless people for a long while, and very little of it has not been affected as a result--the deep exhaustion of the Tidewater when the tobacco bonanza ran out, the lumbering off of the mountains, the grubby continuing reign of coal along the North Branch, and now the explosive growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry and people. But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island, swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, humid North America with a resident population of only about 3.5 million people, some two-thirds of whom live in a relatively few square miles around Washington. It has had and still has many ardent protectors, ranging from small-town ladies' garden clubs to Presidents. In consequence of these grateful facts, it has been able to recover from most of the damage done in the past, and much of what it has always been and always possessed still exists. There is enough natural harmony combined with diversity, enough forward human movement combined with a sense of what has gone before, to make the Basin's residents and those who visit glad to be alive in such a world, insofar as the times, their temperaments, their bank accounts, and their view of the human dilemma may permit. In general it is still a beautiful and satisfying piece of country, a good place to be.