When I was a boy, I often spent summers at my grandfather's place in a small Florida community on the banks of the Alafia River. It was on that river, and in the woods that lined its course, where I first began to feel stirrings of a sense of reverence and wonder about the natural world.
Then, when I was older, in Louisiana, a friend and I often traced the haunting beauty of Honey Island Swamp in the Pearl River delta—a river where two thousand years ago Indians collected the freshwater pearls that were to be traded up and down the Mississippi Valley. Stands of giant cypress trees still grow in the great swamp.
There was also the thick, early-morning fog on Lake Cataouatche as we felt our way through in a twelve-foot bateau, and then the alligators discovered deep in the marsh as the sun burned off the mist. There were canoe trips on the tidewaters of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland; or on quiet glacial ponds in Massachusetts; or down the tree-shrouded Piscataquis River in Maine; or along Crooked Lake on the United States-Canadian border, beneath the cliff paintings that were already old when the first voyageurs arrived with the Hudson's Bay Company.
