My little ship slides like an arrow through unspoiled scenery — a stroke, and a duck rises. Greening trees loom on the banks of the Anacostia, and marsh grasses hide nesting geese that call, complaining that a sculler is near.

The Hill’s river is a paradise in spring, even if the water seems to come straight from hell. Douglas Siglin of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s outpost on 8th Street S.E. says I am crazy even to touch the Anacostia’s waters. “The stuff you can’t see is a lot worse than the stuff you can see,” he’s told me.

But I’m addicted to this open sewer, and so are many other Hill dwellers. The number of rowers is growing, as local high schools discover Washington’s “other” river, where waters are calm, at least. I can scull unimpeded (except for flotsam and jetsam) seven miles to Bladensburg, Md.

Now, developers are homing in on the river with vast schemes that will bring thousands to Buzzard Point. The National Maritime Heritage Foundation last week announced plans for a $50 million museum plus retail and offices and perhaps a hotel and Washington’s own tall ship. In this sewer outfall.

Mayor Tony Williams (D), whose green canoe is in the Anacostia Community Boathouse under the 11th Street Bridge, has backed a river walk for two terms, and it’s nearing reality. And baseball is coming to the river.

All these people. What are they going to see? Debris everywhere — a million Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, basketballs, shopping bags, fast-food containers, caps and pens and combs and inelegant discards from safe sex.

All this debris and crud washes into the river from dozens of sewer outfalls whenever there is what lawyers call a “storm event,” and it happens here because the city has been unable, and Congress unwilling, to change the 1890s sewer system that uses the river as an extra drain after D.C.’s familiar downpours.

It doesn’t happen in Baltimore, where the Inner Harbor is a destination. It doesn’t happen in Philadelphia, where the Schuylkill River is virtually debris-free.

River people — the Anacostia Watershed Society, Siglin’s Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Anacostia Watershed Restoration Committee, the Anacostia Community Advisory Committee (ACAC) and many others — have sought to solve this problem for years without tangible results. But, as Tom Arrasmith of the ACAC says, “We can’t build a prosperous community on top of a ruined river.” The tide is turning in the direction of commercial interests, for they will demand that desirable “waterfront” property not be “sewerfront.”

All of which makes the recent decision of U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina — who summarily dismissed a suit charging the Environmental Protection Agency with condoning violations of the federal Clean Water Act — hard to believe. The suit, brought by Earthjustice, made the obvious point that the Anacostia was far dirtier than the law allows. Urbina chose to go along with the status quo, ruling that dirt (turbidity in legal terms) and debris were confined to “infrequent disruptive storm events.”

Just avoid storms, Urbina said, and you avoid the filth. It was like saying if you want to avoid crime, stay off the street. But it is not so. The Anacostia is much more like a lagoon than a river. The trash and debris simply slosh back and forth with every incoming and outgoing tide.

It takes a week for the trash to disperse and the water to change color from a brownish hue. The mess will clog the shiny new marinas that are planned at the Federal Center; the cups, bottles and crud will appall the walkers on the river walk and the new park planned for baseball land. The apartment-dwellers will look out on a mat of wet garbage.

The D.C.-Utah deal: Will voteniks buy it?

The D.C. voting-rights bill most likely to succeed is a devilishly clever piece of legislative art — it gives and it takes.

Rep. Tom Davis III’s (R-Va.) bill is not a new idea. Giving the District a voting House member and “balancing” with an additional member for Utah was first proposed years ago. It entered the legislative lists last year but met opposition. Democrats expected to favor it figured that the normally Republican Western state would get redistricted to the detriment of any Democrat.

But now, opposition seems to be coming from D.C. voting activists, who may rightly feel that getting a single voting member of Congress may take the wind completely out of their sails — and make redundant all those license plates that read “taxation without representation.”

D.C. voting-rights advocates are faced with a tough choice. Are they willing to accept a half-measure that will get them a vote, or will they insist on the full D.C. delegation, two senators and one House member — the position that Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) advocates?

It’s a test of political practicality, but also of honesty, for to grant this little town of 530,000 all those lawmakers would suddenly vault D.C. from being the least-represented constituency to being the most-represented constituency except Wyoming. There is imbalance here, and more in the statehood-for-D.C. idea, which holds that D.C. should have a state Legislature as well as two senators and a member.

But will Davis’s bill pass? Or is it just another effort by a friendly suburban legislator who has been on the city’s side in some important issues? Look for this bill to fail for the oldest reason of all, where the city’s concerned: Senators and members have nothing to gain at home by voting for D.C. And as for the local voteniks — they will breathe a secret sigh of relief.

Eminent domain: Landowners’ upper hand

Behind the bickering over the price of land once considered cheap in industrial Southeast is the threat that the city could use the process of “eminent domain” to take property, whether or not the owners want to sell.

But, according to legal scholars, it’s not that easy, particularly in a case where the land in question is to be used to further the ends of a profit-making enterprise — say, the Washington Nationals franchise, or that amorphous entity, Major League Baseball.

One online encyclopedia, wikipedia.org, defines the term: “Governments most commonly use the power of eminent domain when the acquisition of real property is necessary for the completion of a public project such as a road, and the owner of the required property is unwilling to negotiate a price for its sale.” The Fifth Amendment requires that “just compensation” be paid and that “public use” of the property be demonstrated.

Cases where the process has been used to displace private owners and turn land over to developers have often been overturned in court. Lawyers at the Cato Institute and others say that recent decisions have made it harder for cities or states to use the process to benefit development schemes.

As far as baseball land is concerned, eminent domain seems a feeble straw with which to push a multimillion-dollar land deal. And if there are doubts about its effectiveness, what of the price cap for the stadium? It seems as if the landowners have the whip hand here.

METRO

• Exemplary Hill boy next door: James Rimensnyder, the son of D.C. historian Nelson Rimensnyder and wife Lisa, graduates from West Point this month after four years on the dean’s list there. He’s an appointee of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), a graduate of the Hill cluster schools and Woodrow Wilson High. The bad part? He says he wants to be a lawyer. ...

• Swimmers in training at the Capitol Hill Natatorium were in a pother last week over scheduled repairs that would have emptied the pool. But bad planning sometimes pays off: Repair crews begged off, cracks remain and the pool may remain open at least until outdoor swimming spots open their gates. ...

• The National Park Service has finally abandoned the pretense that it was doing a “major ecological repair” of the Anacostia Marina at 19th and M streets S.E., closed four years ago. It will reopen in June — but with boat storage only. ...

• D.C. has cracked down on that artful little dodge of covering your license plate with a piece of plastic that the horrid speed cameras can’t accurately catch. The fine for “any covering” of a license plate is $100. But does this cover the sprays now marketed for the purpose? ...

• Old computers here on the Hill usually end up on the sidewalk or in the alley. The city is offering a one-day drop-off Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Carter Barron Amphitheater, where electronics salvagers will put the old machines to good use. …

• “Renewed determination,” says that very determined lady Nicky Cymrot, who spearheads the Old Naval Hospital Foundation’s bid to restore the famous Hill landmark at 921 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E. The mayor turned down two plans for the building in a surprise move last month. Cymrot says her foundation will ask the mayor whether it would work for him to turn the pile into a center for Hill community activities...

• “Several hundred residential units” are coming to the empty 5-acre lot at 1600 Maryland Ave. N.E., former site of the city’s largest Sears store. Developer Clark Realty plans apartments plus retail for the site, long a wasteland at the east end of the H Street N.E. shopping corridor.