Rob Neufeld on books: WNC novel fictionalizes trails serial killer
(2 of 2)The flip side
Romance is another matter. A love of Camp Green River is integral to lovers’ love. Almost every couple he knew, Senehi writes of the camp owner, Tiger Morrison met at camp, worked together at camp, or got together through some camp connection.
Morrison breaks up with his stylish companion, Liz, because of her disdain for the commonness of camp. Liz wants him to turn over the camp to Sammy, his daughter by his late wife, who died in a car crash with a drunken driver.
Sammy lives and breathes the camp. She practically grew up learning to look for and recognize anything that grew or crawled around on the forest floor. Over the past 24 years she’d hiked every trail on their three thousand acres a hundred times.
When Sammy goes on a hike to Ruby Falls with Patrick, a smitten camp counselor, they talk about one of Patrick’s charges, Tucker, a math prodigy with a nature deficit disorder.
Are you familiar with the Fibonacci ratios? Patrick asks Sammy. yes, she had read about it in the Da Vinci Code. the ratios show up in pine cones, flower petals and other natural patterns, and Patrick figures he can teach it to Tucker and try to draw him into connecting his number fetish to nature.
That’s the third element in the book: connecting children to an ethic that goes back to the Cherokee, from whom Morrison’s ancestors got the land, and to Ernest Thompson Seton, the Scots founder of the League of Woodcraft Indians.
It’s an ethic that this region can boast.
The year 2010, Senehi writes in her acknowledgements, marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of summer youth camps in the Hendersonville/Brevard area, which contains the highest concentration of camps in the United States.
Rob Neufeld writes the weekly book feature for the Sunday Citizen-Times. He is the author and editor of four books, and the host of the Web site the Read on WNC at http://TheReadonWNC.ning.com. He can be reached at RNeufeld@charter.net and 505-1973.
Rob Neufeld on books: WNC novel fictionalizes trails serial killer
