On The Road With John James Audubon [antikvár]

We traveled by family car, covered some 35,000 miles, were on the road for thirteen months, and lived in a tent most of the way. Our purpose: to visit those places in the United States and Canada that John James Audubon had known during his travels in the early years of the 1800s. It was a journey on which he led us north to Labrador, south to the Dry Tortugas, west to Buffalo Bayou in downtown Houston, and northwest to the Montana-North Dakota border, with hundreds of stops in betweenup and down the eastern seaboard and through the heartland and along its great rivers, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and Missouri. (It was one of the sorrows of Audubon's life never to have had the chance to cross the Rockies and see the west coast.)We came to places where Audubon's name was unknown and to others where it was a tourist attraction. We met the inevitable, towns grown into urban sprawl and roadless wilderness now laced with highways. But we also found vast tracts of wild country much as it was in Audubon's day, and we discovered that many places he had known as rising new communities had vanished from the map and often from local memoryriver towns gone to dust, frontier settlements gone back to prairie. America has not been cemented over after all.The back seat of our car was replaced with shelves to give us extra space in which to pack the necessities for long distance camping and fireside research. Our basics were a typewriter, a pencil sharpener, books, two duffle bags of clothing, foul-weather gear, an old wooden milkbox packed with cooking equipment, a cooler to hold ice andix