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November 10, 2006
What book is in your backpack?
What are you reading these days? Currently, I'm reading two books. Beyond The Wall by the late, great Edward Abbey and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Landscape by Janisse Ray.
These books both provide a sense of place about vastly different places in North America.
Abbey writes about the arid southwest and Ray writes about the soggy southeast. Both writers have an extraordinary ability to paint a portrait of a landscape with their words. Ray writes about the Pinhook Swamp, which is located between the Okefenokee Swamp and the Osceola National Forest in northeast Florida.
Beyond The Wall is a series of shorts essays about a variety of western landscapes. In his essay entitled A Walk in the Desert Hills, Abbey writes "Me and my feet walk on. (Hardly any tread left in these old jungle boots.) Once a foot soldier, always a foot soldier. But I'll say this much for walking: it's the only mode of locomotion in which man proceeds entirely on his own, upright, as a human being should be, fully erect rather than sitting on his rear end." I couldn't agree more!
In the upcoming winter edition of American Hiker magazine, I review a new book of Edward Abbey's letters. The book is entitled "Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast." If you'd like to receive American Hiker, you can join American Hiking Society, and you'll receive four issues a year, plus a one-year subscription to Backpacker magazine - all for $30. Your support will also help American Hiking Society protect hiking trails all across America.
Happy Trails!
Hiker's Bookshelf | By Jeffrey Hunter | 12:19 PM
