Down The Wild Cape Fear:A River Journey Through the Heart of North Carolina Ingrid E. Luffman Philip Gerard. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2013. 276 pp.; maps, photos, bibliog., and index. $30.00 hardcover (ISBN 978-1-4696-0207-3) Down the Wild Cape Fear takes the reader along a journey down the Cape Fear River with the author. Traveling by canoe, johnboat, skiff, and kayak over 200 miles of river, Gerard tells the story of his present-day journey, along with the history of the river over the past 400-odd years. The book is organized into five parts, loosely by geomorphic reach. The first two parts cover the author's three-day journey down the upper and middle reaches by canoe with three colleagues – a birder, a wildlife biologist, and a river guide. Their journey begins in the North Carolina Piedmont just downstream of Buckhorn Dam above the Fall Line, and ends at Raven Rock State Park. This first part is rich with descriptions of the natural world: flora and fauna, hydrology, and fluvial geomorphology. Woven within are the author's observations of anthropogenic influences on the river, which in this reach consist of fish camps of various ages and conditions, and remains of old and modern dams. Part II continues the four travelers' journey into the middle reaches, from Raven Rock State Park to Fayetteville. Amid the relative isolation of the river, Gerard notes the sometimes jarring racket of cars on bridges as the surrounding lands become more urbanized. Interspersed throughout the chronicle of the river trip are stories of people and places along the river. Some are present-day characters that live and work in the watershed, while other stories tell of the history of the river and its people. Most entertaining in this section, are stories told by Dale Ryals (Cape Fear River Adventures) of hapless boaters who failed to plan and as a result, misjudged the character of the river, distances, water depths, and conditions. Gerard reflects on the parallels between teaching and adventuring: "It's an odd fact of adventuring that all the planning you do in advance actually allows you the freedom to give in to circumstance, to let the trip unfold rather than be too firmly directed. It's the way I teach writing: Prepare and plan, then give yourself up to it." (p. 63) The lower reaches from Fayetteville to Wilmington is the subject of Part III, completed in a flat-bottomed skiff with Gerard's biologist colleague from UNC, David Webster. No longer under paddle-power, their skiff boasts a thirty horsepower [End Page 197] four-stroke engine, made necessary due to slack waters caused by downstream dams. In this reach, the travelers have descended the Fall Line just below Fayetteville through a series of dams and locks, and the river is dredged and channelized to promote the transport of goods. Descriptions of wildlife and aquatic life abound, and the reader is introduced to a perspective of the river as a complete and integrated system. Gerard writes, "What is the river? Not the water – that is gone by the end of any day, spilled profligately into the ocean. That would be like defining I-95 by its traffic, which at any given point along the route changes by the second. A river is a container of sorts, enclosing water along with all the animals, fishes, and birds that move through it and locate themselves within it for a day or a lifetime. But it's also a dynamic engine of movement, a progenitor of plant and animal life, a habitat that is always in motion, a flow of water and the air above it, a place that just won't keep still." (pp. 87-88) This reflection and others like it are a common theme throughout. The journey down the estuary, from Wilmington to Bald Head Island, is outlined in Part IV. This section has more of an environmental focus, with stories of industry, superports, cement works, any of which may be abandoned, defunct, existing, or proposed. Beginning with a history of the pitch pine industry, Gerard eloquently makes the case for viewing the...