7 Islands of the Ocmulgee - Paperback

by Gordon Johnston (Author)

These seven river stories, written after the author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European American, Native, and African American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South Rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon, Georgia. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river--and their ignorance of it--are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life. Each story engages a specific place, among them Pittman's Ferry, the Seven Islands, Smith Shoals, the levee in Macon, and the Ocmulgee Mounds of the Mississippian people. Canoe-camping on the Ocmulgee, subject to its weather and flow, and seeing how its force shaped the landscape, Gordon Johnston recovered a sense of time grounded in geology. "Humanity is small and new in the long life of the watershed," he says.