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Overview
Three months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventazón, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea.
Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change, but unlike Twain’s character, Lane isn’t escaping. He’s getting intimate with the river that flows right past his home in the Spartanburg suburbs. Lane’s threehundred-mile float trip takes him down the Broad River and into Lake Marion before continuing down the Santee River. Along the way Lane recounts local history and spars with streamside literary presences such as Mind of the South author W. J. Cash; Henry Savage, author of the Rivers of America Series volume on the Santee; novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Julia Peterkin; early explorer John Lawson; and poet and outdoor writer Archibald Rutledge. Lane ponders the sites of old cotton mills; abandoned locks, canals, and bridges; ghost towns fallen into decay a century before; Indian mounds; American Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites; nuclear power plants; and boat landings. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters Twain himself would envy—perplexed fishermen, catfish cleaners, river rats, and a trio of drug-addled drifters on a lonely boat dock a day’s paddle from the sea.
By the time Lane and his companions finally approach the ocean about forty miles north of Charleston they have to fight the tide and set a furious pace. Through it all, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, Lane is reminded why life and rivers have always been wedded together.
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.
Table of Contents
The Blessing Rio Reventazón Glendale and Little Five Falls Pacolet Portages Overnight at Louie's Grindal Shoals The Wild Pacolet Confluence Night on Goat Island Lockhart Portage Wood's Ferry Campground Riding the Flood Parr Shoals Reservoir Haltiwanger Island Approaching the Fall Line Columbia Layover Green Diamond Congaree 601 Rendezvous Lake Marion Portage Hill's Landing Our Bridge Too Far The Lower Santee Jamestown Landing Aiming for Hampton Plantation Atonement
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