Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
League hockey. Teams run up the score and talk trash. So, we started taking penalties. Hard ones. We had roughnecks and rednecks and probably a chemical imbalance of testosterone” (99). The humble bravado and manly embrace of sport in this section are reminiscent of Rick Bragg and indicate how good ole boy/twenty-first century man coexist in Brantley’s psyche. One of the more moving narrative threads is his father’s struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Acquired in Korea, his father’s PTSD was undiagnosed for years and contributes to a complicated father/son relationship. The author hopes his children will have positive memories of his father, fears becoming too much like him, and uses the wisdom he has gained to become a better man. Brantley’s memoir contains bright promise. One hopes that Brantley will continue developing his writing and have as much to show when looking back over his career as Smith does. n
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“Nature writing in North Carolina is a literary tradition that has evolved over a span of three hundred years,” Richard Rankin notes in his introduction to North Carolina Nature Writing: Four Centuries of Personal Narratives and Descriptions, a collection that includes writers from John Lawson, William Bartram, and John Muir to Laurence Earley, Jan DeBlieu, and Bland Simpson.1 Since the arrival of European colonists, North Carolina nature writing has reflected and grappled with loss, devastation, and disappearance, Rankin asserts, describing the clearcutting, blighted forests, polluted waters, and shrinking species populations that followed contact and European settlement. It is in this vein that Bland Simpson and Ann Cary Simpson’s Little Rivers and Waterway Tales: A Carolinian’s Eastern Streams and David S. Lee’s Gulf Stream Chronicles: A Naturalist Explores Life in an Ocean River exist. These engaging books celebrate the places that define North Carolina and the relationships that North Carolinians have with those places and call for the protection and conservation of those places in the face of change that is no longer merely localized, but planetary, in cause and impact.
THE ARTS AND SCIENCES OF TAR HEEL WATERS a review by Scott Hicks David S. Lee. Gulf Stream Chronicles: A Naturalist Explores Life in an Ocean River. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Bland Simpson, with photography by Ann Cary Simpson. Little Rivers and Waterway Tales: A Carolinian’s Eastern Streams. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
SCOTT HICKS is associate professor of English at the UNC Pembroke, where he teaches environmental literature, African American literature, and first-year composition. His writing on environmental literature appears in such venues as NCLR, Callaloo, Environmental Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE).
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1
John Rankin, ed, North Carolina Nature Writing: Four Centuries of Personal Narratives and Descriptions (WinstonSalem, NC: John F. Blair, 1996) ix.