Down
the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake
by Jack Brubaker
from Ocquionis Creek
In
an effort to monitor lake quality and increase public
awareness
of Otsego’s challenges, Harman and other faculty and
student researchers systematically test the lake, its tributaries,
and the Upper Susquehanna and compare those tests with historical
data. Harman and others have published The State of Otsego
Lake: 1936–1996, a 300-page description of changes
in the lake’s ecology.
That report and earlier studies found that the lake’s
water quality improved in the early 1980s, thanks to a statewide
ban on high-phosphate detergents and installation of an
upgraded sanitary waste disposal system at Glimmerglass
State Park. Quality began to decline again in the mid-1980s
and has continued to deteriorate, largely because of development
on the lake’s west shore. The number of lakeside
homes increased from 147 in 1937 to 407 in 1994, with
construction
accelerating at the end of the period. Total phosphorus
levels in the lake doubled in the 1990s, increasing algal
growth at the same time that alewives diminished the
populations
of algae-eating zooplankton.
Phosphorus is Harman’s primary concern. It flows into the lake from malfunctioning septic systems and in manure runoff from dairy farms, which occupy about 95 percent of the watershed’s cleared land. A Biological Field Station report in 1996 concluded that Otsego retains over 80 percent of the phosphorus that reaches it. Unless that percentage is reduced, the report said, the lake will suffer severely.
To
Harman, implementation of remedies for the lake’s
high nutrient levels and other ills is as important as data
collection. He is an activist scientist; beyond research
and teaching, he wants to transform the thinking of the
more than 2,300 people who reside in the lake’s watershed
year round and its thousand or more summer residents. He
wants them to take better care of their septic systems,
keep their cattle out of streams, and monitor the bait they
dump into the lake.
The field station has strong allies. Conservative landowners
who want to protect their own interests as well as Lake
Otsego compose the Otsego County Conservation Association.
Otsego 2000, a more activist group, would like to protect
the lake while also promoting new business in Cooperstown.
Motorless Otsego, a third conservation group and the most
radical, would remove all gasoline engines from the lake.
Not everyone agrees with the conservationists. Another point of view exerted itself forcefully during a lengthy argument in the mid-1990s over whether or not the DEC should build a public boat launch at Glimmerglass State Park. The DEC and some residents believed more boaters should be encouraged to use Otsego, accessible to the public now only by way of a launch in the Village of Cooperstown. Harman, Otsego 2000, and others claimed the launch is adequate and that more boats, particularly if launched from the state park, would further destabilize the lake. Governor George Pataki eventually scotched the project.
Mike Empey, a licensed fishing guide and president of the
Otsego County Sportfishing Association at the time, thought
the boat launch should be built. He believes Harman has
not proved beyond doubt that the quality of the lake water
is declining. He says Harman and the Biological Field Station
have engaged in "eco-science practiced as religion,"
at the expense of people who want to use the lake.
Empey’s brother, Ken, agrees: "If there had been
a referendum, popular opinion would have been overwhelmingly
in favor of a public boat launch." Ken Empey serves
on the planning board for the Town of Warren in Herkimer
County, at the extreme northern edge of Otsego’s watershed.
Cooperstown and other Otsego County towns want Herkimer
residents to participate in watershed improvement efforts,
but Empey and many of his neighbors want nothing to do with
that. "It doesn’t look like a good deal to us.
They would like to control the whole watershed because of
the lake, but we don’t have easy access to the lake."
In 1992, watershed municipalities formed the Otsego Lake Watershed Council to reconcile varying viewpoints while developing a master plan to protect Cooperstown’s drinking water, preserve the lake and the land around it, and provide for recreational use. Council members called for the State of Lake Otsego report so they would have a scientific basis for action. They quizzed groups of lake users to discover their priorities. They held public hearings, issued a management plan, and hired a watershed manager.
Harman believes independent elements of this voluntary plan will be implemented as consensus develops on lake-protection priorities. He hopes the consensus will support better farm management practices and wastewater treatment and stricter navigational rules and fishery management. "It’s kind of a mix between what a lot of people think of as a legislative hammer to hold over somebody’s head," he explains, "and a peer-pressure kind of thing where you think, gee, if I don’t clean my act up, all my neighbors are going to think I’m a turkey. That latter means of getting at things seems to work a lot better in many situations."
Here at the headwaters of the Susquehanna, as at so many places along the river’s length, competing interests want to maintain the quality of drinking water in the lake while also fishing and boating in it and living and farming in its watershed. That goal may be attainable; but given the vagaries of nutrients and alewives, alongside some watershed residents’ concerns that the environmental case has been overdrawn, ultimate resolution remains as clouded as Otsego’s glimmer.
The Outlet
I dream of a blue lake sleeping . . .
And I see a village gleaming . . .
And out from the lake’s broad bosom
A river is gliding slow.
—Mrs. E. J. Bugbee of Fayette, Iowa, in a letter to the editor of the Cooperstown Republican and Democrat, 1858
When James Fenimore Cooper published The Pioneers in 1823,
he pluralized his subtitle addendum: or, The Sources of
the Susquehanna. In his introduction to a later edition,
however, the author noted that "New York having but
one county of Otsego, and the Susquehanna but one proper
source, there can be no mistake as to the site of the tale."
That site is Lake Otsego and the channel draining it.
Ocquionis Creek and Shadow Brook are ultimate sources of
the Susquehanna. The outlet from Lake Otsego is the river’s
traditional source. This is where most people searching
for the source stop.
"The site is gravelly, stiff clay," wrote the
river explorer Richard Smith after visiting the place in
1769, "covered with towering white pines, just where
the river Susquehanna, no more than ten or twelve feet wide,
runs downward out of the lake, with a strong current."
Majestic pines still ascend Lake Otsego’s eastern
cliff, but the outlet has changed. Since its damming in
1905, this section of the Susquehanna runs three times wider,
but without force. The concrete dam several hundred yards
downstream from the outlet significantly deepens and slows
water in lake and river.
Fenimore Cooper described the predammed outlet in The Deerslayer:
"[Beyond] the fringe of bushes immediately on the shore
of the lake . . . [was] a narrow stream, of sufficient depth
of limpid water, with a strong current, and a canopy of
leaves, upheld by arches composed of the limbs of hoary
trees. Bushes lined the shores, as usual, but they left
sufficient space between them to admit the passage of any
thing that did not exceed twenty feet in width, and to allow
of a perspective ahead of eight or ten times that distance."4
In the mid-1840s, several years after Cooper wrote The Deerslayer,
the noted journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis visited Cooperstown
and asked the novelist to show him the source of the Susquehanna.
Cooper, then in his fifties and widely recognized for his
literary accomplishments, led the younger Willis to the
outlet. "It was something to see two such sources together,"
Willis reported, "the pourings-out from both fountains,
from visible head and visible head-waters, sure to last
famous till doomsday." Willis admitted that upon entering
Cooperstown he had ridden over Main Street Bridge "with
neither tributary look nor thought" toward what flowed
beneath—the Susquehanna’s outlet from Otsego.
He really needed Cooper to guide him there.
In 1899, six years before Cooperstown residents dammed the
river, Charles Weathers Bump, on assignment from the Baltimore
Sun, stood on the bridge Willis had crossed and looked back
toward the Susquehanna’s start. "We gazed down
upon as pretty a brook vista as can be seen anywhere,"
he wrote. "Leafy trees and bushes overhung the water
in profusion, and some grew quite in midstream, with their
roots clinging to mossy rocks. The water was so calm and
clear as to reveal, with the aid of a friendly sun, the
charms of the river bottom, and the stream seemed to us
to have a mood akin to ours, unwilling to leave the ‘Glimmerglass’
for an onward hurry to the Chesapeake."
Carl Carmer visited the outlet in the early 1950s, as he
was preparing to write The Susquehanna for his Rivers of
America series. The dam had changed the scene. "A few
yards from the lake it is not quite four feet deep,"
he observed, "and there children swim, shadowed sometimes
by the high bank across from Riverbrink [the first home
on Cooperstown’s River Street, which parallels the
stream]. Canoes drift here and fishermen, hardly expecting
a catch, idle with short lines dangling in water so clear
that the fish can see them."
©2002 The Penn State University