Waist Deep in Black Water

John Lane has scaled a granite dome in the Suriname rain forest and waded past cottonmouths in the heart of a Florida cypress swamp. He has shadowed crocodiles in a Yucat n mangrove thicket and paddled the rapids of North Carolina's Tuckaseegee River in search of a drowned kayaker. Waist Deep in Black Water offers a collection of Lane's own writings that range from wilderness exploration, to conservation issues, to explorations of family history in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Lane's trek to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark in Wyoming becomes an occasion to draw connections between religion, sexuality, and mountain lore. A hike into Kentucky's Red River Gorge prompts a meditation on the words and spirit of Wendell Berry, who helped prevent the gorge from being dammed. Some of Lane's writings are set closer to home, where the South Carolina hills meet the Blue Ridge. In "Something Rare as a Dwarf-Flowered Heartleaf," Lane recounts his campaign to stop the development of a woodland area within Spartanburg's city limits. Family issues also surface, as in "Confluence: Pacolet River." Here Lane kayaks through country where his family has lived for generations as he reckons the distances between himself and his farming, millworking forebears.

Something is always at stake wherever Lane takes us: a stand of old-growth trees, a primate population, a friendship, a soul. Lane bestows loving attention on the places and people he visits in this collection and, in the process, goes beyond the traditional concerns of nature and travel writing.

Author: John Lane
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 04/09/2004
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.58lbs
Size: 8.64h x 5.56w x 0.57d
ISBN: 9780820326214

About the Author
JOHN LANE is a professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College. His books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He also coedited, with Gerald Thurmond, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia). He has published several volumes of poetry, essays, and a novel, as well as a selection of his online columns, The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph. Anthropocene Blues: Poems is his most recent work.