Journey Into Spring

The town of Jersey Shore is screened from the river by a maze of islands through which we came one afternoon. We ended up in the middle of the largest group of people we were to meet on the river, 20 students splashing about with nets. They were members of a freshwater ecology class organized four years ago by William Graff, a biology teacher at the Jersey Shore Area High School. At that moment Graff was hip deep in the West Branch encouraging his students as they measured current velocity, took samples of water and soil for laboratory testing and collected aquatic plants and animals. He says he has been very pleased with the elective course his students are enrolled in; he feels it has better acquainted them and their parents with the river that flows past their community.

Deb Waltz, a junior, had become thoroughly soaked dragging a net through the shallows. "I am collecting organisms," she explained.

"What kind?"

"Whatever organisms I can catch."

Waltz said that eventually she would like to be either a jockey or a veterinarian, but in the meantime freshwater ecology has been her best class. "I like anything alive, and I've found out about all sorts of things living in the river that I didn't know about," she said.

Each year, said Graff, his students are finding that the river has become more wholesome, less polluted and less acid. In consequence, life forms are more numerous and varied. Recently, for the first time in decades, trout rejoined the community of organisms in this stretch of the West Branch.

Since the mid-19th century, Williams-port has been the West Branch metropolis. It is now a city of 38,000. For a time after the Civil War it was the logging capital not only of the Susquehanna but of the nation.

Now Williamsport has turned to other industry and because of repeated flooding it has more or less turned its back on the river. Only marginal enterprises are still located directly on the river. These and the rest of the city are separated from it by high flood walls and levees. From canoe level, the effect is similar to running between canyon walls. It is hard to see much of Williamsport or get into it. Fortunately, we had only one bit of business to transact in the city—filling our water jugs. By and by we came to one of the less precipitous embankments, climbed it, crossed a railbed and descended through the green briers into the backyard of an elderly South Williamsport resident who was watering his garden. When we explained ourselves, he was very cooperative and enthusiastic. "Mother, Mother," he called to his wife. "Come out here. Here's a fellow and his daughter who have paddled a canoe all the way from above Clearfield. They're going to use our water."

"Clearfield," said the lady after she had come out of the house and heard the story for herself. "When we were in Florida we met a lovely couple from Clearfield. Their name was Hadley, or maybe Halsey. Do you know them?"

"Actually we live around Gettysburg ." I said. "We just passed through Clearfield and didn't have a chance to talk to many people."