My Paddle to the Sea: Eleven Days on the River of the Carolinas

Three months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventaz n, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea.

Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change, but unlike Twain's character, Lane isn't escaping. He's getting intimate with the river that flows right past his home in the Spartanburg suburbs. Lane's three­
hundred-mile float trip takes him down the Broad River and into Lake Marion before continuing down the Santee River. Along the way Lane recounts local history and spars with streamside literary presences such as Mind of the South author W. J. Cash
Henry Savage, author of the Rivers of America Series volume on the Santee
novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Peterkin
early explorer John Lawson
and poet and outdoor writer Archibald Rutledge. Lane ponders the sites of old cotton mills
abandoned locks, canals, and bridges
ghost towns fallen into decay a century before
Indian mounds
American Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites
nuclear power plants
and boat landings. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters Twain himself would envy--perplexed fishermen, catfish clean­
ers, river rats, and a trio of drug-addled drifters on a lonely boat dock a day's paddle from the sea.

By the time Lane and his companions finally approach the ocean about forty miles north of Charleston they have to fight the tide and set a furious pace. Through it all, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, Lane is reminded why life and rivers have always been wedded together.