Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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of Gerard’s effort give cause for concern. Not only does he fantasize at length about the legendary mermaids of Mermaid Point, on the upper Cape Fear River, he also asks us to imagine them “porpoising” about. Fortunately, the recondite vocabulary and flat symbolism soon give way as Gerard settles into what he does best: talking to people who live on and around the Cape Fear about what the river means to them.
age of the interstate, and its current importance as both a place of recreation and a crucial source of drinking water. While, thanks to new dam designs, migratory fish like shad are making a comeback, the watershed still faces significant threats from large-scale phosphate mining and industrial hog farming. Gerard takes us into those controversies and puts them in the context of the Civil War battles and nineteenth-century
Peppering the journals of his down-river paddling trip with digressions into the natural and human history of North Carolina’s largest river basin, the inquisitive Gerard learns all he can from biologists and ecologists, canoe outfitters and barbecue chefs, tugboat pilots and police investigators. Readers who stick with him will learn about the river’s central role as a transportation route in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North Carolina, its fall to relative obscurity in the
commerce that took place on the very same waterways. Gerard is passionate about his adopted hometown of Wilmington and its river, and by the book’s end we get a sense of the innumerable interconnections that make the region a special, singular place. Gerard’s call of concern for the Cape Fear should be heeded, and should move us all to investigate, enjoy, and protect the often overlooked rivers of North Carolina. n
Photograph by Patrick Kurtz
a true story straight out of Poe, complete with inexplicable excavations in a locked basement. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (who get a mention here and there), Gerard likes a bit of mystery so much that he occasionally tries to believe in things he really doesn’t, such as portentous dream visions or flighty mixed metaphors. “Scars,” for instance, is a lovely and affecting story, generous in its sympathy for James Dickey in his brilliant and sad alcoholic decline, but once Gerard starts running with the metaphor of scars to the body as scars to the soul, he doesn’t quite know when to stop, leading to doozies like “Disappointment leaves a scar, a little stabbing blade that can ambush you even in memory” (116). But when he sticks to his gut, the prose shines.
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Photograph by Patrick Kurtz
Readers who pick up Gerard’s most recent book, the digressive travelogue Down the Wild Cape Fear, may feel a bit of trepidation. Through the ages, people have dumped nearly as much purple prose into rivers as they have sewage, and the first few chapters
above Cape Fear River at Raven Rock Park, Lillington, NC, April 2011
above Confluence of the Deep and Haw River into the Cape Fear River at Mermaid Point,
April 2011