River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country

Henry Thoreau seldom wandered far from Walden Pond but got a good book full of self-discovery out of the deal. Like Thoreau, Franklin Burroughs stays close to home ground in The River Home (originally published as Horry and the Waccamaw), an account of a six-day solo canoe trip along the Waccamaw River, a little-known waterway that flows from North to South Carolina, ending in the swampy Horry County of his boyhood. Along the way Burroughs encounters feisty water moccasins, backwoods fishermen, and a sage woodcarver who regales him with tales of the great wet forests being cleared for the development of nearby Myrtle Beach. "Accumulated memory is disappearing with the landscape," Burroughs writes, "and people can no longer assume that, simply by being born in the country, they have its history by heart, and need not think further about it." Burroughs's quest for the idyllic South of youthful recollection is melancholic--the destruction of favorite places is, after all, a constant in most of our lives. His well-earned lesson is that of fellow Carolinian Thomas Wolfe: You truly can't go home again. --Greg McNamee