Walking Home Ground ─ In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth

When longtime author Robert Root moves to a small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in place—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the way, Root investigates the changes to the natural landscape over nearly two centuries, and he chronicles his own transition from someone on unfamiliar terrain to someone secure on his home ground.In prose that is at turns introspective and haunting, Walking Home Ground inspires us to see history’s echo all around us: the parking lot that once was forest; the city that once was glacier. "Perhaps this book is an invitation to walk home ground," Root tells us. "Perhaps, too, it’s a time capsule, a message in a bottle from someone given to looking over his shoulder even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet."

Robert Root has long been immersed in the nonfiction of place. He is the editor of Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place and the author of twenty books including Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale, named a Michigan Notable Book in 2004, the memoir Happenstance, and the craft studies E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist and The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction. Root teaches nonfiction in Ashland University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and for the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He and his wife live in Waukesha, Wisconsin.