Reviewed by Andrew J. Lewis | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

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Reviewed by Andrew J. Lewis | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Historians' Walkabout

Byrd's Line: A Natural History. By STEPHEN CONRAD AUSBAND . (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. x, 187. $22.95.)
Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. By THOMAS P. SLAUGHTER . (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Pp. xxx, 231. $24.00.)

Reviewed by Andrew J. Lewis, American University

Self-discovery through experience with nature and wilderness testing are very old tropes. Taking license to describe landscapes as both internal and external in order to muse about the self, the essence of the land, and the people, plants, and animals who inhabit it, the best American examples of the genre have attracted pilgrims, not just students and scholars, to Walden Pond, Sand County, or the Missouri River. Travelers following in the literal and literary footsteps of previous writer-explorers often leave accounts that are part natural historical, part reflective, and part imaginative. These pilgrims seek answers to experiential questions: Is this how the land appeared? How did it feel to travel these trails in the past? Is there something in the land that is essentially American? Can we thus understand the American past by understanding the land itself? 1

Critics might complain that those who re-walk the same trails often do so uncritically, indifferent to complexity and deaf to change, and those who write about their travels often do so merely as literary reenactors, a historically retracing their heroes' steps. Stephen Ausband's part exegesis, part travelogue, part natural history follows the "dividing line" between Virginia and North Carolina traced by William Byrd in 1728. Ausband quotes extensively from Byrd's History of the Dividing Line followed by his own first-hand knowledge of travel, fishing, and hunting along the same route. The comparison between journal and personal experience allows him "to give the sense of a conversation stretching across three centuries" (p. 15). The conversation that Byrd and Ausband have is highly taxonomic, the latter providing the reader modern names for plants or animals that Byrd observed along with brief natural history explanations. But Ausband also writes thoughtfully, sometimes touchingly, about the changes to the land over nearly three hundred years. He laments aspects of development—roads, the loss of species and habitat—but he celebrates, however uncritically, those patches of "wilderness" that remain. Ausband's book is a labor of love and a bid to re-experience what Byrd saw, felt, and even heard: we learn that visitors to the Alligator National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina can "hear exactly the same kind of serenade" (p. 53) of wolves Byrd heard in 1728. Perhaps. Still, Ausband's personal engagement with history and his dialogue with Byrd is a reminder that this is how most nonprofessionals experience the past. . . .

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