Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land

Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia’s Pinhook Swamp.

Pinhook Swamp is a vital watershed and wildlife corridor linking the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America’s last wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart.

Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there—naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, downhome prose, she draws together the swamp’s need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes.