To enter Great Falls Park on the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia, you need to go down a winding forest road that goes from suburban McLean to the the utterly opulent town of Great Falls. The careening road is surrounded by towering trees and McMansions of the Washington Metropolitan Area’s Nouveau Riche, before the road on your right shifts to a deeply shifting incline, a massive tree-studded hill going down to a river. Even when you’re in the forest, you see entries to homes, and big ones at that. You pay your fee, you park your car, and you enter the visitor's’ center.

It’s a fairly modern building with a historical look to it, with a fifteen-starred, fifteen-striped American flag that recalls the time the Patowmack Canal, an old spelling of the modern Potomac River that binds the park’s northern border. It is, if one knows history, Francis Scott Key’s Star Spangled Banner.

The visitors’ center itself has a history of the area, with the Patowmack Canal running through it, later repurposed for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, a failed venture to ferry goods from Cumberland, Maryland, to Washington, D.C., with a never-built section to Pittsburgh. Unfortunately for the capital-furnishers, the whole venture was overtaken by the railroads, and the canal never turned a profit. You learn of Matildaville, the abandoned resort town that was vacated after the main pavilion was lost in a fire.

After browsing through displays and watching the film they have, you wander outside and see the long, narrow ditch meandering through the park, with the occasional plank bridge over it. This is all that remains of a broken dream, a canal that would power a nation’s capital, its barges abandoned for the smoke-spewing iron horse.

But Great Falls is not merely a place of loss. After marvelling at a post that chronicles how high flood waters were every decade (and they can go quite high), you can go down to the winding forest paths to the jagged stone steps that lead to the overlooks of the Great Falls proper.

It is downright breathtaking. You see the river upon which a great city rests, and a great metropolitan area depends upon. Across the river, you see more forests, not in Virginia, but in Montgomery County, Maryland. You see Marylanders looking onto the same foamy rapids you are, and the kayakers and canoers paddling their boats through the raging water. It is a titanic river, blue-white and thunderous, not like the scum-infested cesspit it can seem like near the city. This, you realize, is the Potomac, epic and free, a river no rock or boulder can stop, a river worthy of the Nile, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Rhine, the Mississippi, and the Amazon. This is the river that gives life from Thomas, West Virginia, all the way down to the Northern Neck. This a font of civilization.

You take your eyes off the river, and you see the people around you, doing much as you were beforehand. These, more often than not, are people who want something other than Washington’s stately marble, Arlington’s slick towers of glass and steel, and Fairfax County’s suburban sprawl. They see, and you see, what this area was before the New Deal and the boom of population to serve the Federal Government, before the Civil War scarred it, before the Framers erected this city, before the colonists reared their heads. This is not a place where people reign; it is a place where Mother Nature laughs at Capitol Hill’s pretension to dictate world affairs.

As you leave, you once more see the ruins of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the monument to a failed endeavor. You pass in awe of the rapids that truly deserve the name “Great Falls,” humbled by the planet that birthed you. As you pull your car out, you are humbled. As you drive home, you view the McMansions that seem almost profane and shake your head at their arrogance.