Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land by Janisse Ray (Chelsea Green Publishing, $12)
"Okefenokee Swamp, Osceola National Forest.
The areas of these two wild lands, which are owned by the people of the United States, total more than half a million acres. Between them is a pocosin, connected to Okefenokee by sluggish Breakfast Branch and to Osceola by Impassable Bay.
We know it as Pinhook Swamp. The land between. The little bridge.
It is 170,000 acres of dreary dismal. A giant piece of ground too deep for a human to wade in, too shallow for a boat to draw. Too tangled for passage. Full of mosquitoes and yellow flies. A place that holds the world together. A natural feature full of natural features. Some of the last real wilderness in the South.
Pinhook's fate has been to be ignored, even unnamed. Not that it wasn't logged. Like most of the country, it was. But somehow Pinhook Swamp never lost its wild character, its mystery, its incomprehensibility, its elegance. The loggers logged and left. The trees returned.
What if we bought Pinhook Swamp? What if we joined Osceola to Okefenokee? What if we preserved this 'land between' for perpetuity?… What if we dedicated ourselves to preserving and restoring a wild landscape, a corridor--O to O?" --excerpted from the book
