Franklin Burroughs: Bard of the Coastal Plain
I reviewed this book for the print edition of The Hellbender Press, Volume 7, Issue 7, November/December 2005. It was one of three of my reviews included in that issue. Those reviews became the first installment of my column called “Nature’s Bookshelf.”
Billy Watson's Croker Sack by Franklin Burroughs
"It is always dangerous to question a college professor. They are paid to talk by the hour." So begins the explanation Franklin Burroughs gives of the term "Croker sack" in his book Billy Watson's Croker Sack.
The description is a postscript initially written for an editor unfamiliar with the word. As used in Burroughs' writing, the Croker sack is a large cloth bag containing the results of a day spent foraging the low country wetlands' bounty.
Despite this warning of long-windedness, Franklin Burroughs is an accomplished essayist. His writing is equally eloquent, whether describing his homeland in coastal South Carolina or his adopted home in Maine. He presents two disparate lands not contrasted but joined in the striking narratives in this book.
The croker sack’s contents are surprising and unpredictable, but the contents of this book are surprisingly delightful. Burroughs describes anglers, duck hunters, one moose hunter, and an aging bird dog, to which he pays his final respects. The stories are an engaging tapestry woven together on a loom that is the land itself.
When Dr. Burroughs spoke at the Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga in 2005, he delighted the audience with his humor and the love of the subject matter that shines through his writing. A short piece about his recovery from a childhood illness demonstrates his love of the land. Unable to accompany his father on the duck hunting trip, he looked forward to his daddy's return when he would see the results of the day's hunt. Meanwhile, he read voraciously.
About Audubon’s picture of a wood duck in Birds of America, Burroughs said, "Once in Sunday school, we were asked what we would have presented to the infant Jesus in the stable if we had gone there. The right answer turned out to be a pure heart or something along those lines, but I knew in my heart that it would be a pair of wood ducks, bright and friendly as the ones Audubon had painted."
Afterword:
Horry and the Waccamaw, 1992, W. W. Norton is the story of a journey through South Carolina by canoe. The University of Georgia Press published a second edition titled The Journey Home.
In 2006, Tilbury House Publishing released Burrough’s book about his travels in coastal Maine titled Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay. In an odd symmetry of names, Franklin Burroughs won the 2009 John Burroughs Medal for Best Nature Writing, awarded by the John Burroughs Association.
Several of his articles appear in Down East Magazine.
The Woods Stretched for Miles and Elemental South, both from the University of Georgia Press, included stories by Franklin Burroughs.
A brief biography appears at the end of his article “What Else Remains,” published by the Maine Heritage Coastal Trust.