Authors: Earl Swift
ISBN-13: 9780813921198, ISBN-10: 0813921198
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Date Published: June 2002
Edition: REPRINT
A staff writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift has been a Fulbright fellow and twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has backpacked the entire Appalachian Trail and completed a circumnavigation of the Chesapeake Bay by sea kayak. He lives in Norfolk with his daughter, Saylor.
From its beginnings as a trickle of icy water in Virginia's northwest corner to its miles-wide mouth at Hampton Roads, the James River has witnessed more recorded history than any other feature of the American landscape as home to the continent's first successful English settlement, highway for Native Americans and early colonists, battleground in the Revolution and the Civil War, and birthplace of America's twentieth-century navy.
In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling the entire length of the James. He hadn't been in a canoe since his days as a Boy Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater, not to mention man-made obstacles, to challenge even experienced paddlers. But reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot of freeze-dried food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself he hoped not literally in the river and its history.
What Swift survived to bring us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in a fourteen-foot plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life of Virginia. Fueled by humor and a dauntless curiosity about the land, buildings, and people on the banks, and anchored by his sidekick Martin whose photographs accompany the text Swift points his bow through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and effluent-spewing industry. Along the banks, lonely meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring dunkings, wolf spiders, near-arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay.
Readers who accompany him through his Journey on the James will come away with the accumulated pleasure, if not the bruises and mud, of four hundred miles of adventure and history in the life of one of America's great watersheds.
Swift, a staff writer for the , presents a chronicle of three weeks in a 14-foot plastic canoe and 400 years in the life of Virginia. Fueled by humor and curiosity about the land, buildings, and people on the banks, he views Confederate forts and POW camps, ante-bellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and the contrast between meadowlands, suburbs and skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring dunkings, spiders, near arrest, channel fever, and high winds, he makes it to Chesapeake Bay. The book contains a few b&w photographs. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Day 1 | On which the journey's protagonists wander hypothermic and disoriented on Lantz Mountain, birthplace of the James | 1 |
Day 2 | On which the expedition follows the infant Jackson through the Alleghenies, and a gantlet of vicious pets | 9 |
Day 3 | About which the less is said, the better | 19 |
Day 4 | On which we reach navigable water, traverse Lake Moomaw, and reflect on the high cost of recreation | 27 |
Day 5 | Of whitewater and wolf spiders, and the Jackson's first brush with industry | 38 |
Day 6 | On which the expedition battles its way past all manner of obstacles to reach the James | 51 |
Day 7 | On which we paddle through a furnace, and among boomtowns gone bust | 56 |
Day 8 | Of oxbows, old stone, and the ghosts of a frontier past | 64 |
Day 9 | On which the expedition braces for big excitement and the prospect of crippling injury | 74 |
Day 10 | On which we risk soaking and arrest in the foam of Balcony Falls, then behold a river robbed | 85 |
Day 11 | Fleeing Lynchburg | 95 |
Day 12 | Thirty years after the river's worst night | 105 |
Day 13 | An old carving, an old ferry, and an old town at the horseshoe bend | 121 |
Day 14 | On which puny-brained geese outsmart us, and the fist of an angry God swings oh so close | 128 |
Day 15 | On which the expedition escapes State Farm in a hell-for-leather dash | 134 |
Day 16 | On which our faith in all things Swedish is tested | 146 |
Day 17 | Risky business in Richmond | 151 |
Day 18 | In the wake of the first European settlers--and against the tide | 161 |
Day 19 | What's that smell? | 174 |
Day 20 | On which we find Jamestown not at all like that Disney movie | 188 |
Day 21 | On which the expedition suffers one last blow | 199 |
Day 22 | At the James River's mouth | 211 |
Notes | 221 | |
Acknowledgments | 241 |