This travelogue-meets-memoir serves as an unlikely historical examination of America’s landscape. Savoy, who is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College (and contributed an essay about the parks to Travel + Leisure), is a deeply poetic writer. Through the lens of her own relationship to nature, she reveals larger histories and traditions, while asking questions both difficult and probing about our nation’s past. Why, for example, did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow choose to use the name Hiawatha for his 1855 epic poem about a Native American hero, when that wasn’t the name of the Ojibwa chief he was writing about? She recalls a visit to the rim of the Grand Canyon as a child, connecting the sense of amazement her family experienced with the reactions of those who visited a site a century earlier, including Clarence Edward Dutton, a contributor to the 1875 geographical survey of the Rocky Mountain region. Dutton wrote that the view was “the most sublime and awe-inspiring spectacle in the world.”