In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont's Winooski River - Hardcover

Fish, Charles

3.38

8 ratings by Goodreads

9781584655503: In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont's Winooski River

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158465550X ISBN 13: 9781584655503

Publisher: University of Vermont Press, 2006

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Charles Fish, author of In Good Hands: The Keeping of a Family Farm and Blue Ribbons and Burlesque: A Book of Country Fairs, sets off on a journey down Vermont's Winooski River, from the headwaters in Cabot to river's end at Lake Champlain, in order to rediscover the river valley of his youth and to consider the power of place in all our lives. Recounting travels by foot, car, and canoe (which Fish christens "The Tub"), In the Land of the Wild Onion offers engaging and often humorous tales of adventures along the river, of impenetrable thickets and backbreaking portages, of battles with a recalcitrant canoe, of nights camping out among the mosquitoes.

The people Fish meets along the way spur discussions of geology, hydropower, hunting, fishing, farming, and tracking, to name a few. The chronicle of his journey is both a reminiscence of days spent living along the Winooski and a clear-eyed, deeply informative, and fascinating look at the changes and challenges to the habitat and resources of a river valley. What emerges is a portrait of the lives and rhythms of the valley, a rich and rewarding insight into how the land forms us and how we, its stewards, care for the land. Anyone with an interest in nature writing or local and regional resource management will profit from this well-told tale of one of Vermont's great rivers.

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About the Author:

CHARLES FISH, a native Vermonter and retired professor of English, lives in Dummerston, Vermont, with his wife Eleanor. This is his third book.

Review:

"Fish is an entertaining raconteur with a great story to tell and deep enthusiasm for relating it."--Vermont Life

"In the Land of the Wild Onion is an important chronicle . . . Those of us made happy by bibliographies will come away satisfied, and those of us who want to be cradled in the arms of a trustworthy author will have no complaints either. This publication does not allow its reviewers to assign stars; if it did, this book would get the maximum allotment."--Vermont History

"A substantial number of river and river-basin 'biographies' have been published over the years, including a number specifically relevant to Vermont . . . But none is as erudite, informative, and gracefully written as this one. The author's contribution is clearly in the tradition of Claudio Magris's 1989 river basic classic, Danube. To stress once again, what the author captures so magnificently is the complexity and importance of the inescapable interactions between human actions and the natural world--an achievement that suggests to me that this book should be read, enjoyed, and digested by college students and other scholars of ecology, geography, and environmental conservation far beyond the borders of Vermont and New England."--Northern Woodlands

"[Fish] succeeds in helping us to see the Vermont landscape both more clearly and more accurately. By doing so, we also become aware of how our own behavior affects the landscape. It is easy to think that landscape is just a backdrop for human exploitation. Reading In the Land of the Wild Onion, however, teaches us just how much thinking that way has allowed us to degrade our environment, and how changing our thinking, changing our behavior, using our scientific knowledge and our human compassion for nature, we can heal the landscape, and ourselves."--Brattleboro Reformer (VT)

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