THE CAPITAL: Solitary Dissent

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Twenty years before the American Revolution, George Washington saw the need for East-West water transport up the Potomac Valley; after the war he became president of the Potomac Company, which built canals and locks to bypass falls and shoals in the Potomac River itself. The waterway eventually became the famed Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, and by the mid 1800s, its mule-drawn canal boats hauled great tonnages of freight between Washington and Cumberland, Md. But over the next 100 years, the railroads forced it into disuse.

Since 1924, when floods washed out one section of the waterway, no freight at all has moved on the canal, and the placid ditch, its tree-grown canal path, its long strip of riverside woodland, are frequented only by occasional hikers, naturalists or canoeists. Recently the Government began planning construction of a modern, two-lane automobile highway to open the area and its delightful vistas to the general public. But last week, when the Washington Post ran an editorial commending the parkway scheme, it received a sharp and moving dissent. Its author: woods-wise, mountain-loving Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

[This] stretch ... of country ... is one of the most fascinating and picturesque in the nation," the Justice wrote. "It is a refuge, a place of retreat, a long stretch of quiet and peace at the Capitol's back door—a wilderness area where man can be alone with his thoughts, a sanctuary where he can commune with God and with nature ... I wish the man who wrote your editorial would take time off and come with me. We would go with packs on our backs and walk the 185 miles to Cumberland. I feel [;that].... he would return a new man and use the power of your great editorial page to help keep this sanctuary untouched . . ."

The Post was quick to accept the challenge—not only the editorial's author, bald, scholarly Pulitzer Prize Biographer Merlo Pusey, 51, but the Post's editorial-page director, Robert Estabrook, 35, agreed to make the hike. Both warned their readers that they still believed in the highway.

But at week's end, Missionary Douglas was still hopeful that the long walk (tentatively scheduled for March) would convert the two newsmen into parkway haters of the first order.