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Waist Deep in Black Water
John Lane has scaled a granite dome in the Suriname rain forest and waded past cottonmouths in the heart of a Florida cypress swamp. He has shadowed crocodiles in a Yucatán mangrove thicket and paddled the rapids of North Carolina's Tuckaseegee River in search of a drowned kayaker. Waist Deep in Black Water offers a collection of Lane's own writings that range from wilderness exploration, to conservation issues, to explorations of family history in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Lane's trek to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark in Wyoming becomes an occasion to draw connections between religion, sexuality, and mountain lore. A hike into Kentucky's Red River Gorge prompts a meditation on the words and spirit of Wendell Berry, who helped prevent the gorge from being dammed. Some of Lane's writings are set closer to home, where the South Carolina hills meet the Blue Ridge. In "Something Rare as a Dwarf-Flowered Heartleaf," Lane recounts his campaign to stop the development of a woodland area within Spartanburg's city limits. Family issues also surface, as in " Pacolet River." Here Lane kayaks through country where his family has lived for generations as he reckons the distances between himself and his farming, millworking forebears.
Something is always at stake wherever Lane takes a stand of old-growth trees, a primate population, a friendship, a soul. Lane bestows loving attention on the places and people he visits in this collection and, in the process, goes beyond the traditional concerns of nature and travel writing.
Lane's trek to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark in Wyoming becomes an occasion to draw connections between religion, sexuality, and mountain lore. A hike into Kentucky's Red River Gorge prompts a meditation on the words and spirit of Wendell Berry, who helped prevent the gorge from being dammed. Some of Lane's writings are set closer to home, where the South Carolina hills meet the Blue Ridge. In "Something Rare as a Dwarf-Flowered Heartleaf," Lane recounts his campaign to stop the development of a woodland area within Spartanburg's city limits. Family issues also surface, as in " Pacolet River." Here Lane kayaks through country where his family has lived for generations as he reckons the distances between himself and his farming, millworking forebears.
Something is always at stake wherever Lane takes a stand of old-growth trees, a primate population, a friendship, a soul. Lane bestows loving attention on the places and people he visits in this collection and, in the process, goes beyond the traditional concerns of nature and travel writing.
200 pages, Paperback
First published November 11, 2002
2 people are currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
John Lane
35 books9 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
John Lane (1954–) is emeritus professor at Wofford College, where he taught creative writing, environmental studies, and directed the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. There, he helped imagine and direct the Thinking Like a River Initiative. Lane was named one of seven regional Culture Pioneers by Blue Ridge Outdoors. He has been honored with the Water Conservationist Award from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, the Clean Water Champion by South Carolina's Upstate Forever, and inducted, in 2014, into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
His selected poems, Abandoned Quarry, won the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Book Award, his nonfiction book, Coyote Settles in the South, was named a finalist and a Nature Book of Uncommon Merit by the John Burroughs Society, and his novel, Fate Moreland's Widow, was named Independent Publisher Silver Medalist.
One of the founders of the Hub City Writers Project, Lane lives near the banks of Lawson's Fork outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
John Lane (1954–) is emeritus professor at Wofford College, where he taught creative writing, environmental studies, and directed the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. There, he helped imagine and direct the Thinking Like a River Initiative. Lane was named one of seven regional Culture Pioneers by Blue Ridge Outdoors. He has been honored with the Water Conservationist Award from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, the Clean Water Champion by South Carolina's Upstate Forever, and inducted, in 2014, into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
His selected poems, Abandoned Quarry, won the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Book Award, his nonfiction book, Coyote Settles in the South, was named a finalist and a Nature Book of Uncommon Merit by the John Burroughs Society, and his novel, Fate Moreland's Widow, was named Independent Publisher Silver Medalist.
One of the founders of the Hub City Writers Project, Lane lives near the banks of Lawson's Fork outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
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February 23, 2016
This collection of essays by John Lane, a professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, explores his relationship with the natural world as well as with his own family and his future. Lane is surprisingly open about his life. His mother and her family had been from the mountains, but had moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina to work in the mills. His father, a World War II veteran, was the descendent of tobacco farmers in Eastern North Carolina. The author was born in North Carolina in 1955. His father owned a service station in Southern Pines. In reading this, I couldn’t help to draw connections to my own life as I, too, am a descendent from tobacco farmers and was born in a neighboring town two years later. In 1959, Lane’s life took a tragic turn as his father, who’d suffered from alcoholism and had repeatedly attempted suicide, finally succeeded. His mother moved back to Spartanburg, leaving Lane with many questions. As he is exploring the world in which we live, he ponders the meaning of his life and the future as he accepts that he’ll probably be the end of the line for his branch of the family as he has no children nor any prospect for having them. He explores his strange inheritance (his father’s suicide and an aunt’s stay in a mental hospital) and what these events might mean for his own life.
Lane self-disclosure is honest especially when dealing with his own faith journey. He graduated from high school and remained a virgin until he was in his junior year of college due to religious convictions. He later, as he tried to make his way as a poet, he read Buddhists literature. Although doesn’t say much about where he is today, it appears he is deeply spiritual even if he is not religious.
Lane recalls his first dream he can remember, from the year of his father’s death, when he was running in a local drainage ditch only to be chased by a wall of water. “Water is an aspect of my interior landscape to which I often return, and it remains central to my understanding of the world as a roaring river. (131) Water becomes the unifying theme in these essays. He quotes the poet A. R. Ammons, “If anything will level with you water will.†(101) Lane explores a swamp filled with alligators and cottonmouths in a search for old growth cypress. He drags college students to study the headwaters of a river, where he and his co-instructor is more excited about the possibility of adventure than the students. His last essay is of a paddle on a nearby river that that he’d overlooked in his younger days when he sought whitewater. Some stories have humor such as having Montezuma’s revenge descend upon him while paddling a canoe with little solid ground as a group surveyed crocodiles in the shadow of Mayan temples in Mexico. But that doesn’t compare to his telling of misadventures of three guys in that same canoe catching a six foot croc and realizing they’d forgotten the duct tape to secure its mouth.
Literature is another unifier in these essays as Lane draws from his readings. After all, Lane is an English professor. I was pleased to see that his readings of rivers were not limited to the usual (Mark Twain and Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It.) He’d read John Graves, Goodbye a River, which I had read and reviewed in my blog. I was excited to find that someone had paddled one of my favorite rivers from my younger years, the Waccamaw. Franklin Burroughs, The River Home, which is about his exploration of the Waccamaw, has been placed toward the top of my reading list.
Lane self-disclosure is honest especially when dealing with his own faith journey. He graduated from high school and remained a virgin until he was in his junior year of college due to religious convictions. He later, as he tried to make his way as a poet, he read Buddhists literature. Although doesn’t say much about where he is today, it appears he is deeply spiritual even if he is not religious.
Lane recalls his first dream he can remember, from the year of his father’s death, when he was running in a local drainage ditch only to be chased by a wall of water. “Water is an aspect of my interior landscape to which I often return, and it remains central to my understanding of the world as a roaring river. (131) Water becomes the unifying theme in these essays. He quotes the poet A. R. Ammons, “If anything will level with you water will.†(101) Lane explores a swamp filled with alligators and cottonmouths in a search for old growth cypress. He drags college students to study the headwaters of a river, where he and his co-instructor is more excited about the possibility of adventure than the students. His last essay is of a paddle on a nearby river that that he’d overlooked in his younger days when he sought whitewater. Some stories have humor such as having Montezuma’s revenge descend upon him while paddling a canoe with little solid ground as a group surveyed crocodiles in the shadow of Mayan temples in Mexico. But that doesn’t compare to his telling of misadventures of three guys in that same canoe catching a six foot croc and realizing they’d forgotten the duct tape to secure its mouth.
Literature is another unifier in these essays as Lane draws from his readings. After all, Lane is an English professor. I was pleased to see that his readings of rivers were not limited to the usual (Mark Twain and Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It.) He’d read John Graves, Goodbye a River, which I had read and reviewed in my blog. I was excited to find that someone had paddled one of my favorite rivers from my younger years, the Waccamaw. Franklin Burroughs, The River Home, which is about his exploration of the Waccamaw, has been placed toward the top of my reading list.
Displaying 1 of 1 review