By Victor Greto
Richard Rhodes twirls the double oar of his kayak like a conductor’s baton as he skims through the pristine waters of the Delaware River near Hancock, the northern birth of the Delaware River.
At the top of a tree above him, the profiles of two bald eagles in a nest are sharp against the blue sky. Occasionally, carp swim just below his paddle, and the only sounds are the sweeps of his oar, the chirping of birds and his own breathing.
“It is a peaceful experience,” says Rhodes, who lives in Hockessin.
He has kayaked and canoed different parts of the Delaware River for three decades. Each year he makes a point of driving from Delaware to Hancock and other spots along the river north of Port Jervis, N.Y., to kayak south.
A member of the National Canoe Safety Patrol, Rhodes was here in late June volunteering for the Delaware River Sojourn, an annual seven-day journey of dozens of canoeists and kayakers. This year, the group paddled south from Hancock to the Palmyra Cove in New Jersey, north of Philadelphia.
“Where I live, [the Delaware River] is beautiful in different ways,” he says. But his heart is up north.
“Up here, it’s a wilderness experience,” he says.
The east and west branches of the Delaware converge here in Hancock, making this the beginning of the Delaware River, the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi.
But ask people who live up here to pinpoint the sources of the branches and they’ll say the water comes from here, or there, or just a little further upstream, from the tease of a trickle of a tributary of a creek.
“It just comes out of the rocks, man,” John O’Keeffe says of the east branch as he wades in its shallows near Margaretville, N.Y., a town of 700 inside the 700,000-acre Catskill State Park.
O’Keeffe often hangs out by the river during summer with his girlfriend, Sally “Sunshine” Lamoggio, drinking beer and dangling his feet in the water.
For an official opinion – Sandy Schultz, the assistant superintendent of the Upper Delaware Scenic & Recreational River of the National Park Service, says the eastern, most northern-reaching branch of the Delaware River begins at Grand Gorge, a small Catskill Mountains resort 20 miles northeast of Margaretville.
The flow of the water in both branches into the upper main stem of the river, called the upper Delaware, is ruled by two huge reservoirs: the Cannonsville Reservoir on the west branch and the Perpacton Reservoir on the east branch.
Built in the 1940s and owned and operated by New York City, the reservoirs can provide the city with up to 800 million gallons of water each day, for which Hanna Kelker, who lives and works in Manhattan, is grateful.
“Our water quality is great,” says Kelker, a doctor and teacher at New York University Medical School. She and her husband, Norman Kelker, often come up to Margaretville and other spots along the upper Delaware to vacation a couple of days near the source.
“It’s soft water,” she says. “Perfect for my tea.”
The reservoirs’ downside
A source of drinking water, the reservoirs also are a source of controversy for the upper Delaware River.
Releases of cold water from the reservoirs created a world-class rainbow and brown trout fishery in the 27 miles of river from Hancock south to two small towns called Callicoon in New York and Pennsylvania.
Exotic species of trout – rainbow trout from the west coast, brown trout from Europe – were introduced to the river in the late 19th century. Both species remained nominal before the reservoirs were built. Now, they thrive in the cold water. The river’s native brook trout population, once dominant, was proportionally reduced.
Although the fishery was created by the reservoirs, fishermen, and those who make their living selling them gear, are blunt about their feelings for how often New York City releases the water.
“They just don’t care about us,” says Jim Costolnick, who owns Border Water Outfitters, smack in the middle of Hancock’s tiny downtown, 150 miles from the Big Apple.
Each spring, the small businessmen who make a part of their living from the trout fishery say the erratic release of water from the reservoirs often leaves them high and dry.
“My business is good for April and May,” says Lee Hartman, a businessman and fisherman. “The releases cut it down to a two-month fishery rather than a seven-month one.”
Wayne Elliot, a biologist and fisheries manager for the state of New York, says he understands their frustration. He’s an angler himself.
But all the parties who have interests in using the river have to be satisfied. “It’s a schizophrenic set of rules, and sometimes from Hancock’s point of view there’s no rhyme or reason,” he says. “But there is.”
Not so fast there, Big Apple
When New York City latched on to the idea of creating reservoirs north of Hancock and controlling a river that affected millions, it inspired lawsuits from other states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
The suits brought about two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, from 1931 and 1954, as well as the birth of the Delaware River Basin Commission in 1961. The commission, located in Trenton, settles issues concerning the river through discussion and unanimous decisions, not through litigation.
The Supreme Court rulings established water flow measures New York City must keep for the upper Delaware to remain viable. The most important is maintaining a 1,750 cubic-foot-per-second – or 13,000 gallons-per-second – flow at Montague, N.J., about 70 miles south of Hancock and just beyond the New York State border.
Over the years, the city also agreed to other measures it must meet to maintain the cold temperatures that sustain the fishery.
Even so, depending on snowmelt and rainfall, there are weeks and sometimes months when kayakers find themselves lugging their boats across ankle-high water, and where the fishing can be done only in pockets of the river.
And it may go from famine to feast, as it did in April, when the river flooded and caused millions of dollars in damage along the river north of Trenton.
“Between the floods of April and the shallowness of the water, we’re hitting a sensitive area,” says Carol Collier, head of the Delaware River Basin Commission. “We’re trying to find a balance between what’s regulated by the Supreme Court decree and what’s better for recreation and fishing.”
It’s a battle over competing interests that, each year, the Basin Commission, fishing businesses and the city begin anew.
Wilderness has long history of abuse
In 1978, most of the upper and middle Delaware River, from Hancock to the 70,000-acre Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, was declared part of the national wild and scenic rivers system, a federal designation established 10 years earlier, which preserves the water in its “free-flowing condition.”
Both the upper and middle Delaware River are in great condition, says Kenneth Najjar, an engineer and planner with the Basin Commission. He characterizes its water as “pristine,” and as clean as any river in the eastern United States.
But it’s a wilderness with a long history of abuse and a new set of problems.
It’s hard to imagine that the mountains of hardwood trees that line the river’s banks were once nearly denuded.
But the upper Delaware River was heavily used as a commercial transport for the timber, tannery and mining industries. During spring snowmelts, when settlers timber-rafted through the upper Delaware and Water Gap beginning about the mid-18th century, they took with them millions of feet of pine and hemlock. By the middle of the following century, the most easily accessible trees had been cut down.
For 30 years after that, tanneries harvested hemlock groves further inland to suck out their reserves of tannin, which helps preserve leather and other hides. But by 1880 the tanneries also were gone. Bluestone – a type of sandstone used for gravestones, sidewalks and in some homes – was mined from the mountains intensively from about 1840 to the turn of the 20th century.
Although these industries either have been radically reduced or eliminated, lumber mills still operate on the river, and thick meshes of gluey pulp can be seen in pockets of water near Hancock.
Mostly, though, the waters are clear to the shallow, rocky bottom.
Many species thrive; others aren’t so lucky
South of the two Callicoons to Port Jervis, N.Y., where the river takes a 90-degree turn into the middle Delaware, the warmer water is filled with sunfish, bass and walleye, which feed on several species of flies. It’s also a key spawning ground for American shad and American eel.
Once imperiled but now holding their own, the shad begin their lives in the upper Delaware, travel hundreds of miles south to the bay and into the ocean, then return years later to the river north of Trenton to spawn.
The more than 50 species of animals in the region include white-tailed deer, which can be seen in many places, turkey, coyotes, bobcats and black bears, which are more rarely seen.
Hundreds of species of birds soar over or stalk the river, including at least 145 bald eagles by last count, red-tailed hawks and great blue and green-backed herons.
But some species are in trouble. One, the tiny dwarf wedge mussel, which is found in a dozen other regions along the Atlantic Coast, may be declining in the upper Delaware because of the erratic freshwater releases of the reservoirs, says scientist Bob Limbeck of the basin commission.
But the biggest issue on the river, he says, is the rampant spread of Japanese knotweed, a decorative plant introduced into the area in the late 19th century.
“It out-competes the native vegetation,” he says. “It’s the first thing that comes up in spring and is so tall that it shades everything.”
It is changing the ecology of the river. “Native plants provide food and shelter for the native animal species,” he says. “Sedges, cardinal flowers, plants you normally find along the streams are losing out.”
Jim Serio of the Delaware River Foundation says the plant is the biggest threat on the river north of Trenton. “With the kind of root structure it has, nothing grows underneath,” he says. “When it dies, the topsoil is exposed, which washes away in the spring,” contributing to widespread erosion.
Large swatches of the 8-to-10-foot plant can be seen on either side of the river’s banks. Due to erosion, the river’s channel, naturally narrow and deep and cold, is becoming wider and shallower and warmer.
‘[We] can’t resist it any more. We belong up here’
But there are more quiet moments on the upper Delaware than anywhere else on the river.
A DuPont-Merck retiree, Richard Rhodes plans on moving to Lackawaxen, Pa., also on the upper Delaware and nearly 50 miles south of Hancock, sometime in early 2007. He will build a house overlooking the Lackawaxen River, which feeds the Delaware, next year.
“Me and my wife can’t resist it any more,” he says. “We belong up here.”
He will be moving closer to an acquaintance of his, Dave Simon, who annually paddles much of the river north of Trenton, either in groups or with a couple of friends. In the dozen or so years he’s been kayaking and camping, Simon has seen the river’s smoky rise at dawn, felt the sun blister his skin during the long, bright afternoons, and watched the water roll mournfully at twilight.
“I’ve seen beavers making their lodges,” he says. “I’ve seen fox cubs, yawning and stretching as they wake up in the morning. I’ve seen mists rising and floating through dozens of geese. I’ve seen deer drinking long in the river. I’ve seen it all, and I never get tired of it. Never.”
As Rhodes and Simon paddle beyond the Delaware’s upper and middle portions, filled with a mostly wild and sometimes lonely beauty, they head toward a part of the river where the course of the American Revolution turned toward victory, and where Lehigh Valley coal and steel helped fuel the nation’s Industrial Revolution.
WHY DO WE CALL IT THE DELAWARE RIVER?
A thousand years ago, the Delaware River was known as Lenapewi sippu, or “river of human beings,” by early inhabitants of the region. In 1524, Giovanni Verrazano became the first European to see its waters in the Delaware Bay. Henry Hudson saw them again in 1609, just before he discovered the river farther north and east that bears his name. But the name given to the bay, to the river and, much later, to the state, became a reality a year after Hudson’s sighting. An English captain named Samuel Argall named the bay after Lord De La Warr – who probably never even saw the river. De La Warr was then governor of the 3-year-old Jamestown colony in Virginia.