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Preface
- University of South Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface I have spent twenty-five years living in Rockbridge County, Virginia, the natural wondersof whicharesomanifoldandmarvelousthatalifetimewouldnotsuffice toknowthemall.Forthepastthirteenyears,myson,Edward,andIhavetramped and hiked and biked and canoed the rivers, caves, mountains, woods, and fields of this place he calls home but in which I will always be a visitor, my own childhood —fifty years earlier and five hundred miles farther south—spent on a coastal plain that bears little resemblance to the Shenandoah Valley’s open fields and forested mountains.Just as my father took me into the woods and waters of the place we called home, so I take my child, and together we build memories I hope will bind him to me when I,like my father,am buried in the earth we shared with our children.These essays are my reflections on some of the things Edward and I have discovered in our years together, discoveries made before us by the countless others who preceded us in this land and whose accumulated wisdom I have poached in my attempts to better understand this place I find myself in.The essays are intended primarily for my son, who, busy with his own version of his life, remembers these things, if at all, differently than I do. I hope that reading these essays will bring him pleasure in later years.I hope too that they will inspire whoever else reads them to learn the land they live in so that they know they need not travel farther than their own back yards to witness nature’s marvels. This page intentionally left blank ...