Again, the eagle beats his wings To climb above the trees Over the locks on the Rappahannock What's left of history. Where the Council and the contractors Over quality disagreed. Where the present meets the past And some things never change. For a man can only hold A piece of earth For a lifetime. Water leaks through fingers You can't hold it at all. I love the Rappahannock And its water running free. In the rapids of this river, That's where I want to be.
From Carter's Run at Waterloo It drops three hundred feet. Forty-seven locks in fifty miles 1849 complete. With first year's drought and railroads So quickly obsolete. A canal system for just four years And history ever since. An aqueduct and wood crib dam Fed power to the mills, And factories and tanneries The foundations are there still. The concrete dam in 1910 Electric generators until Only thirty years ago And now a poor man's home. Poison ivy coats the bank Where you climb around the dam. A century and a half of portages Canoes across the land. The damn dam blocks the spawning fish Floods rapids behind the span. I say its time to blow it up. There's no need for this dam.