Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land
Paperback, signed & dated. Includes shipping.
Cover painting by Johnny Dame.
Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative love letter to wildness with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp.
Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together these form one of the largest expanses of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River, the O2O Corridor. This is one of America's last truly wild places.
Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to preserve land and expand the corridor, spending a night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with it. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there -- naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store.
In lyrical, braided prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness in our own lives. Herein is a great philosophy to live by.