THE MINISINK

By Neil deMause

Where Sussex County Route 580 tumbles down off the New Jersey ridgeline, it encounters a sudden band of forest. Here the trees are packed tight, taller and dense and foresty in a way unlike anything along the roadsides on the two-hour drive from the city. This, on the long, fast decline, is a good place to keep an eye peeled for white-tailed deer.

When the road reaches the bottom of the hill, the trees abruptly part, and open sky appears in front of us. A moment later, we're suspended over water, on a spindly steel structure barely wide enough for two cars.

Each time we pass this way en route to her parents' place, Mindy begins her history lesson. "When we were kids, we used to call this the 'clickety-clack bridge'," she says, as the wooden ties of the roadway clatter beneath our wheels. The Dingman's Ferry Bridge, one of a very few privately run toll bridges remaining in the nation, was built in 1900, after an earlier wooden one was wiped out by floodwaters. Far below, the Delaware River floats serenely by, its banks choked with spring runoff.

A few hundred yards later, past the man in the apron who collects our 75-cent toll and through another patch of woods, the road crosses a two-lane highway. The intersection's four corners are bounded by clearings, half-overgrown but still easily distinguishable against the taller background foliage. One corner was once a Texaco, when Mindy's family started coming here in the early 1970s; two others were antique stores. A few years later, all were gone.

As the road begins its climb out of the valley, we pass meadows that used to be houses, the ghost of a Sunoco. We see no buildings, nothing but wilderness and asphalt, until we achieve a certain unmarked altitude, at which point signs of human development suddenly return.

It is then we know we have left the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. That we are out of reach of the dam that never was.

The Delaware River begins life as rainwater in the Catskill Mountains, pooling up in the lakes and streams of the famous highland that gave the world both Woodstock and Jackie Mason. A share of it is piped off through giant aqueducts to slake the thirst of New York City; the rest flows southwest toward Pennsylvania. Gathering strength as it tumbles downstream, joining other trickles along the way, it gradually changes from stream to river, a main trunk served by tributaries, and deserving of a single name: Delaware. Over the course of 390 miles, this river -- a dwarf compared to the mammoth Colorados and Columbias of the American West, but among the largest in the East -- zigs and zags its way among the ridges of the Appalachians, charging along on the same course it's held since long before the Ice Age briefly interrupted its flow with a wall of glacier. The Delaware also moonlights as the eastern border of the state of Pennsylvania.

At Port Jervis, where the river's eastern bank shades from New York into New Jersey, the Delaware makes an abrupt right turn, and flows for some 35 miles uninterrupted between two parallel ridges. The stark shale bluffs that overhang the river here were considered so dramatic that they were chosen as backdrop for the "Perils of Pauline" movie shorts. At Walpack Bend, the Delaware makes a quick S-turn to cut through an intervening ridge, then piles up against Kittatinny Mountain for another 12-mile run to Stroudsburg, where it at last plunges through this final obstacle via the mountain notch known as the Delaware Water Gap. From there, it's on to Trenton, Philadelphia, and finally the open sea.

As far as anyone knows, the section of the Delaware Valley above the water gap was first settled in the ninth millennium B.C., when a band of settlers colonized the arctic tundra left behind by the last glacial remnants. As the world warmed and the seas flooded back in to restore their old coastlines, tribe succeeded tribe, until finally a group of Lenni Lenape arrived around 1200 A.D.; these became the Minsi clan, and the forested valley with the endless river running down its spine, the Minisink.

The Minsi lasted 400 years in the Minisink before Europeans arrived, and another century before the Europeans decided they'd had enough of them. In 1735, the sons of William Penn produced a deed that, so the sons claimed, gave them title to all land starting at Wrightstown, Pennsylvania, and extending back "as far as a man could walk in a day and a half." By drawing a line perpendicular to the direction of the "walk" -- or, rather, the run, as a man by the name of Edward Marshall scurried 55 miles in eighteen hours -- the Penns promptly took claim to the entire west side of the Delaware Valley. When the Minsi declined to leave their homes voluntarily, the Penns called in members of the Iroquois Six Nations to drive them out by force. The last Minsi in the Minisink departed beneath the smoke from the fires of their burning cabins. (When some returned a few years later and launched a series of raids against the new inhabitants, it would grow into the French and Indian War.)

Though the faces of its human residents changed over the centuries, the valley was largely unchanged, as these things go. In particular, while plenty of people had considered damming the Delaware at one time or another, none succeeded, leaving it one of only four undisturbed rivers in the entire United States. Even in the late 20th century, floating downstream on a raft or canoe, with gentle rapids rustling along past occasional muddy islands, beneath the high forested bluffs to either side, it remained possible to look up and not know whether just over the ridge was New Jersey or the Lenni Lenape or no one at all.

The catalyzing moment in the modern history of the Delaware, everyone agrees, was the great flood of 1955. Within one week that August, Hurricanes Connie and Diane delivered a devastating one-two punch, dropping almost two feet of rain on the valley. Rivers flooded along the entire Minisink; one, Brodhead Creek, jumped its banks and washed away an entire summer camp. In all, 99 people died.

In that heyday of Cold War can-do-ism, this sort of meteorological impetuousness was simply unacceptable. And so, the Army Corps of Engineers promptly proposed an anti-flood offensive, consisting of 47 dams up and down the Delaware watershed. Its centerpiece was to be a massive earthen dam blocking the Delaware itself, providing water and power to the surrounding region in addition to flood control -- and, incidentally, flooding 12,000 acres of land from Tocks Island six miles above the Water Gap, where the 160-foot-high dam would rise, to Port Jervis, 35 miles upstream. It would be the largest dam east of the Mississippi, it would cost $90 million in 1961 dollars, and it would be completed by 1975.

Residents of the valley were incredulous, then horrified. Transforming the flowing Delaware into a giant lake, they pointed out, would destroy not just their farms and homes, but the natural beauty of the valley. During "drawdown," the partial draining of the reservoir during times of low water flow, mudflats would grow along the lakeshore; meanwhile, eutrophication, the buildup of algae as the result of agricultural runoff into stagnant water, would turn the reservoir into what one observer called a "gigantic cesspool."

The Corps listened to the complaints, and dismissed them. Residents grew angrier; some began to organize. Others sold their homes rather than face the encroaching floodwaters, and the legal battles that were already beginning to spread before them. "In the early years the attitude was, and it's probably usual in the case of a project like this, 'Oh, it's never gonna happen,'" recalls Mina Hamilton, whose childhood farmhouse stood on the Jersey side of the valley. Her father, she remembers, "sat there and said, 'With the war so expensive, they're never going to have the money to do this.' That was when they were already buying up land."

With the dam opening still years away and cash in short supply, the Corps was offering valley families the chance to become short-term renters if they so chose, living in their old homes until they were submerged. Mina's family, fearing the coming dam, wasn't interested -- but Mina and her husband were. They left their home in New York City, and became tenants of the government on her old family farm.

In her years as a valley emigre, Mina had written her share of letters in protest of the Tocks Island Dam, but returning to the scene she discovered a need for more urgent action. "My husband really pressed me to get involved in this matter," she says. "And then I had other friends who said, 'You really better do something about this.' Who, me?

"Pretty soon I was up to my neck."

At the time Mina arrived in the Minisink, the Delaware Valley Conservation Association had already made a name for itself in the valley. As the Tocks Island Dam ground inexorably forward, the DVCA met it with protests and road signs reading pox on tocks. Founded by a woman named Nancy Shukaitis, whose family had been in the valley since before the Walking Purchase, the DVCA's directorship later passed hand to hand through a series of valley women: Marion Masland, Joan Matheson (the science fiction author and publisher of the renegade anti-dam broadsheet the Minisink Bull), and in 1972, Mina Hamilton.

By then, the DVCA's ranks included a self-described "bored, pregnant housewife" named Sandy MacDonald. "I married a guy, and he had a house along the Delaware River right above the Dingman's Ferry Bridge. I was pregnant, and had nothing to do, and he said to me, we need to start getting involved in saving the Delaware. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then, in the course of his wanting me to get involved, I met a woman named Mina Hamilton." Sandy would eventually succeed Mina at the forefront of the dam resistance.

The main issue for the DVCA, after stopping the dam itself, was the land acquisition. Almost as soon as the Tocks Island bill was signed into law, the Corps set to work buying up houses throughout the valley, by direct purchase when possible, by eminent domain and forced eviction when necessary. "You had people up here who had deep family roots and traditions, whose family homes had been here for two and three hundred years," says Sandy. "Remember that the Old Mine Road, which ran the entire length of this project, from Pahaquarry Mines up into Kingston, New York, is the oldest commercial road in the United States. It was built in 1610. Therefore, you had structures up here along the Old Mine Road that were built in the late 1600s, early 1700s. Many of them have now been lost to the bulldozers of the Army Corps of Engineers."

The Old Mine Road is at the forefront of my thoughts as Sandy tells this story, if for no other reason than that it is zooming by beneath the wheels of her VW Passat. We are conducting a tour of the back roads of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, or the "rec area" for short. "That's with a W," notes Sandy in a practiced sardonic tone. This is the region that would have been water, beach, and mudflat if the dam had become a reality.

The rec area looks about like countryside anywhere in the Appalachians: some second-growth wooded slopes (virtually the entire East has been logged at least once since Columbus; mid-19th-century Vermont looked more like modern clearcut England than like today's New England), occasional farm fields, ancient graveyards popping up here and there. But there are differences: many of the farms are without farmhouses, and the cemeteries sit forlornly by the roadside, with no towns to serve.

"This over here used to be farm fields," she says, as we pass a neatly rectangular fallow field. "They took 'em away from the farmer who lived here."

As she drives the two-lane roads, she looks out for what she calls the "driveways to nowhere" that mark the former landscape. "You can see a clearing sometimes, that's probably where a house was. Sometimes you can see how the flowers were planted, that used to be a driveway. Giveaways."

One house needs no giveaway. Known as Harrod's Nest, it was built in the 1860s, straddling a brook beside a bend in the road. We stop the car, get out, and peer through broken wallboards into what was once a dining room where Sandy sat and visited friends. "It's called a state of benign neglect," she remarks, looking at the whitewashed structure slowly crumbling into itself. The front door bears a sign declaring "keep out."

The crumbling wrecks are the rarities. More often, nothing is left of a house but an overgrown clearing, underneath which, if you could see through the dirt, lay buried lumber, metal pipes, and the other wreckage that remained after the larger pieces were hauled away to the dump. "Think about it," says Sandy. "You've got a house sitting on the river. You've got the drawdown effect. So every time the water goes up and down, it takes all that soil with it, reexposing all that shit they put in the basement. All the glass and nails and metal, all that crap. If the river really flooded, it'd take all that shit and put it in this big 35-mile-long sewage hole."

We cruise on. "There was a house here," she says as we drive. "Ann Janus was the women who owned it. Her house had been burned twice by the Indians, and Tom Quick hid in that house from the Indians, folklore has it. We were there when the Park Service tore it down. We were a day late and a dollar short -- we came here ready to lay down in front of the bulldozers, but it was gone -- we got bad information, it was gone by the time we got here."

The Passat bounces along unpaved Van Auken Road, which parallels the river's Jersey shore, separated by a narrow strip of woods. There are driveways to nowhere in abundance here: the summer homes along the river were among the first to fall to the Corps' bulldozers. On Old Mine Road, a handful of abandoned houses still stand sentry, awaiting Park Service rehabs that never come, their windows and doors sealed, a chimney their only connection to the outside world. "If you don't vent them, they rot from the inside out," explains Sandy.

These back roads show the most dramatic effects of the Corps' land grab, but no part of the valley has been untouched. Across the river in Pennsylvania, Milford added several old houses to its inventory when they were relocated from the reservoir zone, while Millbrook Village, N.J., was created out of whole cloth from relocated houses. Doubling back on Old Mine Road, we drive through the bucolic crafts village of Peters Valley, once the town of Bezans until the Park Service seized it and turned it over to the new residents.

It's these sorts of tales of favoritism that still rankle valley residents -- politicians who received sweetheart deals for their own parcels of land in exchange for supporting the dam project; farms that were seized and leased back, but not always to the original owners.

Among the beneficiaries, in a way, is Sandy herself. For those whose houses were targeted for demolition, the Park Service offered two options: buy salvage rights and haul off what you can, or move the house itself to higher ground. Not long after Sandy met her current husband Joe, they bought a house on Van Auken Road near the river, welded it to a pair of 50-foot beams and the beams to the axles of an old truck, and drove it for miles down the rutted gravel road to the town of Layton, where they still live today. "So I actually have a Tocks Island Dam house," she says laughing. "I can't seem to get rid of that old project."

In all our twists and turns as we follow Old Mine Road, one thing has been missing: the river. I mention how on my last visit, I'd discovered that the Park Service had started charging a five-dollar fee to park at its formerly free landings on the Pennsylvania side of the river. This sets off a fresh outpouring of calumny for Parkie mismanagement from Sandy.

Fortunately, Sandy knows the valley better than the Park Service does. Off a bend of Old Mine Road, we turn in at a driveway to nowhere. A short walk down a rutted track to a clearing where a house might once have stood, a scramble down a muddy bank, and we're there: the Delaware slowly flowing past, an upturned stump half-sunk in the clear waters, a bird flitting to and fro along an exposed mudbank. At midstream, about 30 feet from shore, a thin wisp of dry land is slowly accumulating, grasses binding the sediment into a permanent island, splitting the river into two channels for as long as the forces of erosion take to begin to tear it down again.

There is not a trace of human habitation. We watch the waters flow past, look at the ridgelines beyond, stand in the cool shadow of the trees and try to imagine a hundred feet of water covering us, the island, the banks, the river, the treetops.

Dams have always been with us, but the modern mega-dam is definitively a creature of the last half-century or so, ever since the Hoover Dam stopped the Colorado and summoned Lake Mead out of the Nevada desert (and with it, Las Vegas). The first loan made by the World Bank after its creation in 1944 was for a dam in Chile, and since then building bigger and bigger dams has been seen as a mark of Progress, now reaching incredible proportions: Canada's massive James Bay project that is slowly flooding much of northern Ontario to send electricity pouring south over the rest of the continent; the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, which when completed in 2009 will flood 418 square miles of land and displace more than a million people. The conversion of surface freshwater to a human resource is so complete that neither the Colorado nor the Rio Grande now reaches the sea much of the year. Their mouths are the kitchen faucets of Los Angeles and Houston.

These dams, like modern toll bridges, have by and large been government projects, built by government agencies specializing in the movement of earth and the pouring of concrete: the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. "The Army Corps of Engineers is one of these self-perpetuating things where they kind of have to justify their own existence," says Sandy. "Let's build a bridge! I don't know, I think I want to go dam the Mississippi today, how about you? Nah, I think we could do the Colorado." The Army Corps of Engineers, she reminds, is the army -- "these guys are used to the bridge over the River Kwai."

Even the army has regulations, though, and for the Corps this has meant the rules of cost-benefit analysis. For every dam, every levee, that the army engineers seek to build, they must provide both a cost estimate, and a summary of benefits that will be brought by the project.

While costs for the Tocks Island Dam were easy to estimate (or underestimate, as many charged), the Corps pointed to a whole raft of varied benefits to justify them. Power generation, a key driving force behind most dams, would be a minor component (11% of total benefits) of the Delaware project, producing just 281 million kilowatt-hours, small as power dams go. (Some energy experts have calculated that when the energy poured into building and operating a dam is taken account, most hydroelectric dams are net electricity losers, consuming more power than they produce.) Likewise, providing water to the thirsty Northeast was assigned just 15% of the benefit.

Flood control, the original impetus behind Tocks, was down to 13% by the 1970s, possibly because someone had noticed that the dam would itself flood one-third more land than it protected -- and, for that matter, would have done nothing for the victims of the 1955 flood, who all perished on a tributary below the dam site. "That's the trouble with big dams," says Mina. "They don't control floods, because you never can predict where the rain is going to fall. You build here, and it falls over there. Stupid!"

Instead, filling the bulk of the projected benefits was a component that hadn't even been included in the initial proposal: recreation. Fully 44% of the dam's value was assigned to increased recreation, the weight of millions of tourists flocking to the shores of the new lake serving to balance the project's ballooning cost. One dam proponent, in a fit of enthusiasm, proclaimed that even the dam itself would be a scenic resource, providing a "transition buffer" between the two landscapes of the giant reservoir and the unmolested downstream.

"We said, what are you talking about?" recalls Mina. "You're going to wreck this beautiful area, one of the last free-flowing pristine rivers in the northeast, and you're telling us that's a recreational benefit?"

Mina, for her part, remains convinced that the true rationale for the Tocks Island Dam was indeed water, but not for drinking. In 1972, a reporter for the Easton Express uncovered a master plan to build 15 nuclear power plants in the Delaware River basin. "The Limerick nuclear power plant north of Philadelphia is not even on the Delaware River, but the scheme was to pump water from the Delaware River over to the stream north of Limerick, and then they could use that in the cooling system," says Mina. "And they did eventually do that. A lot of those nuclear power plants were canceled through public opposition, but in the heyday of nuclear power -- and back in the '70s, they were talking about building 200 nuclear power plants in the United States -- they needed to have that water. They needed to have that water in the summer, when there's peak power demand, and when the water in the river is at its lowest."

The Tocks activists were not the first to criticize the Corps' cost-benefit analyses, nor would they be the last. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter called Corps estimates "grossly distorted," noting that in the then-recent case of the Sprewell Bluff dam on Georgia's Flint River: "Construction costs were underestimated, extremely low interest rates were assumed, nearby lakes were ignored, population projections were exaggerated, environmental damage was concealed, power production estimates were based on overloaded generator ratings, no archaeological losses are included, and major recreation benefits were claimed in spite of official opposition from state and federal recreation agencies."

Three years later, Carter's bill to create a Department of Natural Resources that would have overseen all water projects was scuttled by the Corps. Carter was gone a year later. The Corps is still around.

By 1974, the cost estimate had risen to $425 million, and the dam was no closer to being built. Mina Hamilton's father had been right about one thing: Vietnam-era federal budgets had little money left over for what was rapidly turning into the Corps' own quagmire.

The Delaware Valley, however, was already being transformed by the dam's advance troops. The job of land acquisition had been handed from the Corps to the National Park Service when the rec area was created, but the "parkies" proved a familiar adversary, doubly so when the Corps' acquisition agent -- "one of the biggest pricks the Corps had working for them," recalls Sandy -- transferred to take on the same task with the National Park Service. The main difference: instead of 12,000 acres, the park service now needed to acquire 60,000 acres for the expanded recreation area. The Tocks Island Dam: A Preliminary Review, a booklet published in 1973 by the Save the Delaware Coalition, reproduced photos of buildings, churches, a waterfall, all marked "to be inundated."

"It was like living in Montana," recalls Mina. "We were three-quarters of a mile down this dirt lane. Services were being abandoned in the neighborhood, roads weren't being plowed. We often skied in and out to get to our house. The phone lines weren't being maintained, the phone company didn't want to bother, so you'd pick up the phone and just hear crackling.

"Then you walk out the door, and run into bear, fox. It was wild."

The Corps' original intent was to conduct a rolling blanket acquisition of buildings, moving upriver section by section from the Water Gap. But as homeowner resistance grew and turned to litigation, the blanket started showing threadbare patches: if you were older or less willing to sue, your house was more likely to be taken. "They decided the easiest thing to do would be to target those people who did not have the resources financially or emotionally to challenge their decision," says Sandy. "The path of least resistance."

On those targeted for removal, the Corps brought the full force of its military might. "They literally dragged them out of their houses, threatened them, brought bulldozers to the front yard. There were people up here who couldn't understand why the government was trying to force them out of their homes. Now, a lot of these guys were veterans -- we're not even talking Vietnam, we're talking World War II -- and you got some guy in a suit saying, hey, bubba, we're taking your house, goodbye. It was a heartbreak for them."

"Grind, grind, grind, you'd hear the bulldozers crunching up houses," remembers Mina. "It's very hard for people to take in this kind of thing that's coming their way. That their land is there, and then one day it's going to be condemned" -- she brings her hand down against the arm of her chair with a sharp bang! -- "and it's no longer going to be there. Particularly in this very property-conscious country, it hasn't really sunk in that this is something that happens pretty regularly."

Probably the most bizarre spectacle, though, involved the hippies. In 1969, with evictions running high, the government suddenly found itself the owner of a large portfolio of riverfront property, at the same time as Congress was rerouting dam funds to the bombing of Cambodia. It was then that someone had what seemed like a brilliant idea to solve two problems at once: advertise in a New York newspaper for short-term tenants. "It was just one of these wonderful examples of the government shooting itself in the foot," says Mina.

The newspaper that was chosen was the Village Voice. Shortly thereafter, a wave of new settlers arrived in the old houses along the river. Many valley residents were appalled, though not Mina. "A lot of them were really neat," she says. "These wonderful homes, right on the banks of the Delaware, in this lush, fertile valley, were available for incredibly cheap rent. So these people moved in, and they planted their crops, and they did their back-to-the-land thing. Women are in their long gingham dresses, the men are out there trying to learn how to plow with horses. I mean, these people were living on the Lower East Side, suddenly they're trying to make goat cheese."

She pauses a beat. "Of course, they smoked dope. Who wouldn't, in that circumstance?"

The National Park Service, aghast at what it had wrought, went to court to evict its unwanted squatters. Finally, federal marshals were brought in. "They had this military action were they came in with state troopers in the early morning, started getting everybody out of the houses, and bulldozing down the houses with their possessions and everything else." In one fell swoop, the evictions managed two things at once: they attracted media coverage to the Tocks Island Dam fight, and they got people to sympathize with the pot-smoking hippies against the uncaring feds. "People said at the time, 'It looks like Vietnam! What are they doing out here?' Here's innocent little people with their gardens, with their tomato plants, and they're forcing them out. That really gave the government a black eye."

There's another image of a phantom Delaware Valley that coexists with that of the submerged treetops. In this one, rows of timeshare cottages and summer resorts coat the riverbanks from end to end, climbing up the sides of ridges in an endless sea of asphalt and aluminum siding.

Follow Route 209 south, and the image becomes real soon enough. As soon as the highway leaves the Delaware floodplain at Walpack Bend and heads inland, the scene abruptly changes: traffic surges, and suddenly the Fernwood resort is on one side of the road, a carefully groomed golf course on the other. Billboards appear, pushing MacDonald's breakfast bagels for the weary traveler.

In the days since the Minisink was the frontier, too far from industrial centers even to be workable as a copper mine, the world has shrunk. Cheap gas and the interstate highway system have brought the Delaware Valley within reach of the migratory masses of the New York and Philadelphia megalopoli, who are willing to accept a two-hour commute as the price of communing with the nature that was long since paved over along the Hudson and the Lower Delaware. And if in fleeing the suburbs they ultimately bring the suburbs with them, in the form of burgeoning communities of townhouses etching their way up the valley, that's not their problem. Like pioneers the world over, they will bemoan the despoilage wrought by those who follow in their footsteps.

The despoilage ends abruptly, however, at Walpack Bend, at the large brown highway sign announcing the boundary of the recreation area. And for this, the dam fighters give unabashed credit to the Tocks Island Dam.

"The development in western New Jersey was mostly in the '60s, '70s, '80s, so on. And the dam was passed in '61, so that put a cap on that development," explains Mina. "It would have been destroyed if it hadn't been for the imminence of the dam. It would look like all that development around Stroudsburg, ticky-tacky homes right up to the river. That's what the whole 30 miles of the river would be."

As early as 1965, Nancy Shukaitis had traveled to Washington, D.C., to call for a local conservation program to preserve the Minisink as it then was, with development restricted while farms and private housing were protected by "scenic easements." The Cape Cod National Seashore, Sandy points out, allows so-called "private inholdings" -- property owners who are allowed to stay in the park area so long as its scenic nature is preserved. "There's no reason why they could not have done that here. Say that when farmer John Brown died he could either deed his property to his niece or his nephew or keep it in the family but he couldn't sell it to somebody else who could then take his farm and develop it. But they just chose not to do that."

In 1968, Congress had allowed for just that with the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System -- a sort of landmarks designation for rivers that bars any damming -- requires "life options" in which the government buys the property, but landowners can stay there as long as they like, receiving present value less the value of the remainder of their stay.

"We don't really have a very well developed ethic in this country in terms of the common good -- it's every man for himself," notes Mina. "For all the years that I fought on that dam, people who knew me well would say, if you stop the dam and get the property back, won't that be great. I'd say to them, look, I am not going to get the property back, and that's not why I'm doing this. But nobody could get that. These are liberal, progressive friends of mine, but they couldn't get it through their noggins that someone would do this not to get their property back. It's a very foreign notion."

Even without scenic easements, though, Mina is glad to see the valley preserved. "One of the things that was great about that battle is that that valley's there. And it couldn't be taken -- no, it could be taken away. Everything can be taken away. But it's there, and whenever I go out there, and I see people paddling down the river, I see people hiking, I just think this is the cat's meow. It's just fabulous.

"That gives purpose to a life, if you've done something like that."

The ghost water finally began to recede in 1974, when Congress, alarmed by what they were hearing about runaway eutrophication and other nightmare scenarios, cut off the park service's land acquisition funds, pending a new environmental impact study by the Corps. The dam resistance was in high gear, Mina Hamilton leading a bicycle brigade that carried petitions bearing 3,000 signatures to a local dam hearing. In a resource book for anti-dam activists in other regions, Mina wrote: "To be an effective activist, it is necessary to think about your particular project and its perpetrators all the time, eating, drinking, walking, waking, dreaming and sleeping. You are at war."

The three-thousand-page report ultimately produced by the Corps was a masterpiece of hedging, admitting that, yes, eutrophication was likely in a Tocks Island Reservoir, but it wouldn't be too bad. It wasn't enough. On July 31, 1975, the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware -- three of the four states in the Delaware River Basin Commission that governed water resources in the watershed -- voted to suspend the project. Three years later, the Middle Delaware River was officially named a Wild and Scenic River, and the Tocks Island Dam was dead for good.

"It was wonderful to be a part of that," says Sandy. "There were so many of us who fought. So many people who went to rallies, and we addressed envelopes, and we went to meetings, and we spoke, and we picketed Congress. It was great. It made you feel like you were alive."

One of the reasons the Tocks Island Dam fighters won, in Mina's estimation, is that they never relied on the courts. "So many of these battles are lost because the citizens start being overwhelmed, and think, well, we'll go hire a lawyer. And there are only a certain number of tacks the lawyer can take -- the environmental impact statement hasn't been thoroughly conducted, or endangered species haven't been protected enough, or whatever. And as soon as that happens, all the citizens go, 'Pshew! The experts are taking care of it!'"

Tennessee's Tellico Dam, she recalls, was at first viewed as one of the great victories of the environmental movement, after the Supreme Court blocked construction on the project to save the tiny snail darter that swam in the upstream waters of the Little Tennessee River. But the victory was to last only as long as it took Congress to change the law, exempting the snail darter from the Endangered Species Act. "Because who gives a fuck about the snail darter, excuse my language. I mean, probably I do give a fuck about it, although I don't really know that much about it. I mean, I like nematodes. But the general public doesn't. So when the issue gets described in the press around the snail darter, you lose your method of organizing."

The Tocks Island fight, by contrast, "took an issue that people really cared about, which is how people are being treated by this giant bureaucracy. Little old widows are being pushed out of their homes, people who are sick are being told to show up in court tomorrow. We built support on a whole lot of other issues as well, but it wasn't just the environment. You can't just fight these on environmental issues alone."

Mina and I are sitting in her darkening Brooklyn apartment, which doubles as her yoga studio. (She has recently completed a book, Serenity To Go.) Our talk has turned to the flagging environmental movement, when she suddenly asks: Have I ever heard of the gastric brooder?

"Oh, the gastric brooder is a great frog! It was discovered only in the early '70s, somewhere in Australia. This guy discovered this frog with miniature frogs in its mouth. And he thinks, that's weird, a cannibalistic frog, eating its young. But they discovered that this was a frog that had developed the capacity to turn off the acid digestive juices in its stomach. And it incubated its babies in its belly, and then it spit them forth.

"And about six years after they discovered this frog, it had gone extinct. Zero. Not a one seen since 1974."

I note a recent newspaper story that mentioned, almost in passing, that the Atlantic salmon may soon become extinct in the United States, thanks to overfishing, pollution -- and dams.

"I think for a lot of people," she says, "who aren't even as much into this as you and I are, this information sort of percolates in, and it's scary. It's hard. So they don't want to go there -- don't tell me about it, it's too depressing, I'm just trying to pay my rent."

The sky outside is darkening, and Mina switches on a lamp. The bulb is a compact fluorescent, more energy-efficient and cheaper to operate than a traditional light bulb. We talk of the recent energy crisis in California, about conservation, about how conveniently it has given the president a chance to talk about new nuke plants, about drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.

Maybe someone should have a canoe trip on the Delaware, she muses, to raise money to stop the drilling in Alaska. It's an idle comment, but the look on her face gives the sense that at least one part of her brain is already mentally calculating where to get the canoes.

Though she's lived in the Delaware Valley for most of her adult life, and spent a decade fighting against the Tocks Island Dam, Sandy MacDonald nonetheless has no idea where Tocks Island is. We spend the better part of an hour looking for it, cruising the lower reaches of the Old Mine Road where it passes near the old copper mine itself, its historic buildings long since razed by the Corps.

Finally, driving through Worthington State Forest, where the dam builders were to have excavated the millions of cubic feet of soil they planned to drop into the Delaware to obstruct its flow, we pull over at a government-approved picnic area. Peering at the river, then at a roadside map, we count islands: if that one is Poxono, and that's Depew -- then this must be Tocks, yes. We admire it from the riverbank. It is long and narrow, barely 50 feet wide, a sliver of trees dropped into midstream. A flock of ducks attend it in silence.

We're driving back to Layton, Tocks Island over our left shoulder, when I ask Sandy if it's at least some consolation that she didn't have to live through seeing that scene buried under 160 feet of dirt.

She pauses for a long while, her mind elsewhere. "I tell you," she says at last, "I'll never forget that sound of cracking glass. Wood splintering, and the smell of that diesel. It was like now you see it, now you don't. And except for the fresh dirt, you'd never even know there had been a house there.

"It took them a matter of minutes. You take the blade of a bulldozer, and you put it right at the floor. And they raised up the bucket, and they pulled the bucket back, flipped it so the house imploded. And then you go around and do it on another side. Before you know it, everything's in the basement -- metal kitchen cabinets, in the ground, copper pipe, in the ground, hot water heaters, washing machines."

One friend, she recalls, died during the height of the dam battle, leaving most of her possessions in a house marked for demolition. Sandy made calls trying to find takers for her piano, her books, but to no avail. They were all buried by Corps bulldozers shortly afterwards. "If life was a cartoon," says Sandy, "they took an eraser and got rid of her."

Still, she can take comfort in the saving of the river, if not the people who lived on it -- and in other benefits she never expected when she first began fighting the dam. "I never said boo to anybody. This project changed my life. It gave me a voice. The women, the people who I was with, specifically Mina, gave me a voice. They taught me how to think, they taught me how to write, they taught me how to get up in front of a public meeting and speak. And I will be forever grateful to them for that.

"Even though we have the federal government in here, it's probably the lesser of all evils. Environmentally, and for the river -- yeah, it was a victory."

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NEIL DEMAUSE endorses Bill "Spaceman" Lee's 2004 presidential campaign: "No guns, no butter. They'll both kill you."