You can follow the Susquehanna River from the Chesapeake Bay in Harford County, MD past Harrisburg, PA, near the site of the nuclear melt-down at Three Mile Island and beyond. In the early ’60s, everyone was not as ecologically with it as they have become more so today. We must liken the Three Mile Island nuclear melt-down (1978) as a chapter in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. Its title was inspired by a poem by John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci“, which contained the lines, “The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. ” The withering here was from nuclear waste, the grande dame of “pesticides.” Now we still use pesticides to kill our weeds, and we do have rolling hills down to the Bay, but a gardening friend told me a trick. Cut the stalk of the weed down and do a little painting with a brush stroke of Round-up, the stroke of an Impressionist.

The Susquehanna River meets the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace, MD