By Victor Greto
It’s been a welcome transformation.
In the 330-mile journey it has taken from the Catskill Mountains in New York to the Delaware Bay, the Delaware River has transformed itself from a cold and clear freshwater river into an estuary, where the water is brackish and influenced by the powerful tides of the Atlantic Ocean.
It has transformed itself from a wilderness dotted with villages, to an industrial and commercial powerhouse, to a thriving landscape of marshes.
But in another sense, the river is the same in Hancock, N.Y., as it is in Bowers Beach, and points in between.
On any given summer morning in the upper Delaware, as fishermen and kayakers prepare to plunge into its depths, mists that seem as old as the river mingle in the warm air. The serenity, enriched by floating eagles and ospreys, suddenly breaks with the calls of birds, and the muffled splash of a deer making its way across the water.
Mist also rises on any given summer morning near Fort Mifflin, Pa., once on an island and part of a huge and thriving wetland, but now adjacent to the Philadelphia International Airport. The river’s quiet is cut every few minutes by the screech of airplanes and speedboat engines, but also by squawking geese and gulls.
And where the river empties into the bay, the salt marshes, once considered disposable wastelands, are now coming back, teeming with striped bass and fiddler crabs. An ecosystem, once near destruction, is re-emerging.
Though the river will never be as pristine as it was when the Lenape Indians first saw it more than a millennium ago, there is hope that it will never again be as filthy as it was during the middle of the 20th century.
Clyde Roberts, the last commercial sturgeon fisherman in Delaware Bay, has seen a lot happen to the river. He has seen a lot of good things go away – islands have eroded, shoreline has washed away, access points to the bay are fewer and his beloved sturgeon are few and far between.
Bur Roberts says the real news is not what has gone away, it’s what is coming back.
“The fish are coming back,” Roberts says. “That’s the biggest thing that has happened during my lifetime.”