New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland
I’ve seen the Susquehanna River in three different locations. The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, NY, where I interned in the summer of 2017, lies on the north end of Otsego Lake, which is the source of the river; a bridge 8 miles south in downtown Cooperstown touts itself as the head of the Susquehanna. As a result, I’ve seen a lot of the lake and the various streams and ponds that feed it in Springfield and the surrounding area, and even driven twice near the Susquehanna from Otsego Lake to Oneonta.
My second connection to it came when I toured Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA (a school I ultimately did not apply to), which lies on the west side of the river’s west branch. Admittedly it’s unconnected to the main source at Otsego Lake, although to get there we also had to drive over the main branch that runs back to Cooperstown. The river is larger here, more significant,
Finally having once taken the road trip from Massachusetts to DC I’ve travelled over it on I-95 in Maryland. The river is very wide at this point as only a couple miles from the interstate bridge it drains into Chesapeake Bay going south to the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something spectacular about being able to see a river at three different points hundreds of miles away from each other. It makes me think about how small things can grow into big things, and how the power of water transcends boundaries and distances.