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.
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