Kevin’s latest book, Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest, is available from the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield (Stackpole Books), on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and numerous independent online book sellers.
We experience, learn about, and enjoy nature throughout our lifetimes in the woods close to home. In the spirit of Walden, author Kevin Patrick spent a year connecting with White’s Woods, a 500-acre tract of Allegheny forest adjacent to his home in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He captured in prose and photographs the four seasons of this near-woods paradise, weaving natural history with human experience to create a geography of place to stand for all similar near-woods places.
The Near Woods story of Indiana, Pennsylvania’s White’s Woods told in four chapters.
Excerpt from the first chapter explaining Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest
“This nature book is written in the spirit of nature books as I have come to know them through Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Yi-Fu Tuan, Jacques Cousteau, National Geographic, Bambi, Tao, Luath, and Bodger and their Incredible Journey, and Marlin Perkins and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. This book was not inspired by a three-hundred-mile hike into the Sierra backcountry, a season surviving an Alaska wilderness, or after months of sleeping in the dirt of the Appalachian Trail. This story started on a purple Stingray hopping hills in the woods of suburban New Jersey. It grew among the shale-bank pines of orphaned Clearfield County strippings, and in the oak-canopied nettles at Brownfield Woods on the outskirts of Urbana, Illinois. The story followed me to the shores of the Little Miami River in Yellow Creek, Ohio, to the Meeting of the Waters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and finally to White’s Woods in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where, at long last, it became this book. This is a nature book not written by a biologist, ecologist, or even a naturalist. From the perspective of a geographer, this book is first and foremost about place. In all the places I have lived there have been little patches of nature cherished by locals but largely unknown and invisible to anyone beyond a few-mile radius. These are the near-woods. This narrative uses the observed experiences of a year in White’s Woods as representative of the larger Allegheny forest of which they are a part, but also as an example of the near-woods that border every town.”
WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEVIN
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