The Sylvan Path mixes a Barry Lopez-style portrayal of our natural beauty with a William Least Heat Moon-like celebration of our people - people whose lives are still firmly tied to the last great forests: guides and outfitters, tribal elders, moonshiners, trappers, and faith healers. Ferguson meets and interviews people who don't just love the woods, but practice them. Men and women whose lives still turn on that one thing that long ago nearly everyone swore would keep America dancing for a thousand years - the woods. With a Thoreau-like reverence for nature and the individual, this intensely evocative book seeks to recover the soul of America.
Nature writer, 1956- Award-winning author Gary Ferguson has written for a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair and the Chicago Tribune, and is the author of twenty-six books on nature and science. His memoir, The Carry Home, which the Los Angeles Times called “gorgeous, with beauty on every page,” was awarded “Best Nature book of the Year” by the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. Gary is the co-founder of Full Ecology, with his wife, social scientists Mary M. Clare.
It's been some time since I read this and it didn't leave strong impressions like a Bill Bryson treatise of similar title.
2017: I reread this text again and rereading from a Naturalist point of view rather than just a spectator gave the book deeper meaning. The change in reading bias increases an appreciation of insight from his first person narrative of the spots he dropped in to visit and some of the people he interviewed.
I didn't see anything 'new' to me in it, but appreciate some of the messages I've been reading reiterated in his pages. I'm wondering how much of his work has infiltrated the writings of others as his is 1997 publication . . .