Circling Home

After many years of limited commitments to people or places, writer and naturalist John Lane married in his late forties and settled down in his hometown of Spartanburg, in the South Carolina piedmont. He, his wife, and two stepsons built a sustainable home in the woods near Lawson’s Fork Creek. Soon after settling in, Lane pinpointed his location on a topographical map. Centering an old, chipped saucer over his home, he traced a circle one mile in radius and set out to explore the area.What follows from that simple act is a chronicle of Lane’s deepening knowledge of the place where he’ll likely finish out his life. An accomplished hiker and paddler, Lane discovers, within a mile of his home, a variety of coexistent landscapes—ancient and modern, natural and manmade. There is, of course, the creek with its granite shoals, floodplain, and surrounding woods. The circle also encompasses an eight-thousand-year-old cache of Native American artifacts, graves of a dozen British soldiers killed in 1780, an eighteenth-century ironworks site, remnants of two cotton plantations, a hundred-year-old country club, a sewer plant, and a smattering of mid- to late twentieth-century subdivisions.Lane’s explorations intensify his bonds to family, friends, and colleagues as they sharpen his sense of place. By looking more deeply at what lies close to home, both the ordinary and the remarkable, Lane shows us how whole new worlds can open up.

Two verbs: to roam, to home. Nature writers, going back at least to the great T'ang Dynasty poets, have wrestled with these two urges. Lane spent the first half of his life roaming and writing about life on the move. Now comes Circling Home, his big-hearted account of settling down with a family and homing in on the richly textured landscape that surrounds his new hearth. Like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson before him, Lane superbly demonstrates the virtues and the obstacles of becoming native to one place.|Lane puts a saucer down on the topographical map of his homeplace and finds within that circle 'a theory and practice of settlement.' Circling Home recounts the 'adventure travel' he does within that one-mile radius. Whether building a sustainable home with his new wife, kayaking the flooded creek with his stepsons, walking the golf course with his naturalist's eye, or unearthing local history in conversation with his neighbors, Lane writes with beautiful care and attention. This book makes very good company for anyone trying to live a more intentional life.|Keen-eyed, Lane's observing—always reminiscent of Thoreau, but especially in this work—sparkles with colors and scents and emotions. His language spills out with all the paid dash and billowing foam of the creek that cuts through his circle.|Eloquent and esoteric essays about the archaeological and ecological wonders found beneath [Lane's] feet. Taken together, his descriptive reports create a painstakingly intricate portrait of the land he lovingly calls home.|Lane's focus on the particulars of his place pulls readers into a broad view of humans' and nature's movements. . . . Circling Home comments intelligently, and despairingly, on land use, suburban sprawl, and the real possibility that the artifacts by which future generations judge our own may be beer cans and plastic bags. . . . But Lane tempers his civic outrage with a writer's proclivity for seeing alternate points of view. . . . [H]is conversational prose style makes Circling Home a good read—a pleasant way to ponder our own obligations to our constantly changing world.|[Lane] uncovers a wide range of curiosities, from the microscopic to the majestic, and in the process, cultivates a deeper sense of family and place.|While Lane devotes plenty of ink to the area's quasi-rural geography . . . he delves as deeply into the area's rich history and the conflicting agendas of a present-day community at odds over issues of land use, wetland preservation, and property rights. What really shine are the personal encounters at Circling Home's core. Through these encounters, Lane shows us just how connected we are to the land.

JOHN LANE is a professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College. His books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He also coedited, with Gerald Thurmond, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia). He has published several volumes of poetry, essays, and a novel, as well as a selection of his online columns, The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph. Anthropocene Blues: Poems is his most recent work.