The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country - Softcover

Burroughs, Franklin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395643821 ISBN 13: 9780395643822

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1993

Synopsis

The author chronicles a canoe voyage through the Carolinas, reflecting on life on the river and the people he encounters

About this title

Review

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

About the Author

Franklin Burroughs grew up in South Carolina and now lives in Maine, where he teaches at Bowdoin College.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395643821
• ISBN 13: 9780395643822
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208