Nature

Photographer Ian Martin, who plays the role of faithful sidekick in the book, drove the support vehicle—Martin’s then-14-year-old Volvo station wagon, with 275,000 miles on it—and was tasked with finding and picking up Swift and the canoe at the end of each long, hot, exhausting day on the river. Then, before bed (usually sleeping bags in tents), the two would have to prepare the day’s story and find somewhere along the often remote route where they could transmit words and pictures by phone line, all with very last-century technology: no cell phones, no wireless, just a Tandy Radio Shack laptop and a first-generation Nikon digital camera that cost the newspaper $15,000. It was a grueling pace, in which small victories merited celebration.

The journey was tiring, bruising and full of uncertainty, and, Swift says, “I have not had a Gatorade since.” Still, he admits, “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I was still paddling on the river. You get a real sense of ownership the longer you stay with the thing. I came away with a greater sense of this remarkable gift in our midst. If I had a hope for the book,” says Swift of Journey on the James, “it’s that people came away with a better sense of what they could lose if we don’t take care of it.”

As he knows better than most people, there is no one way to experience the James. It’s impossible to capture, to keep still. Late in April, for example, students and their families crowd the riverbank at Robious Landing Park for the James River Regatta, a high school rowing competition. Nine teams are in attendance with a collection of four- and eight-rower shells—sleek, narrow craft, graceful on water but unwieldy on land, the larger boats more than 60 feet long, oarlocks bristling several feet on either side.

Each 2000-meter heat starts far downriver, the shells at first out of sight around a bend, then distant, dark slivers against the water. Up close, you can hear the rowers grunt with effort, the coxswains shouting instructions, the boats creaking as the oars power through the water in (sometimes) perfect synchronization.

A little more than a month later, spring’s pale green has given way to dense leaf-cover, and on a weather-perfect Memorial Day, Riverside Drive in Richmond is so crowded with cars there’s very nearly a traffic jam. At the Huguenot Flatwater at the far western edge of James River Park, the parking lot is packed and people queue up patiently at the top of the wooden steps leading down to the water. The kayak and canoe people accessorize with Labradors, life jackets, and fishing gear. The college crowd—girls in bikinis, boys in their slouchy shorts—clutches mini-coolers and rubber rafts, pool toys, anything inflatable. In twos and threes, with the occasional shriek at the first touch of the cool water, they all launch onto the current and drift away, a colorful, rag-tag flotilla.

Summer has arrived, and the James moves along, slow and easy. Late in the day, a small group of children splashes and shrieks happily in a shallow stretch of the river as late afternoon slips into early evening. Their parents wait on the bank with towels. It’s time to come out, time to get out of those wet things, time for supper. But the children dawdle and delay, lingering until the light is nearly drained from the sky.