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Vol. 8, No. 1: Spring 2002

Through the Cumberland Gap

by Doris Betts

These days most American teenagers have traveled in Europe, but I still haven’t crossed an ocean. I was already middle-aged before I got more than one or two states away from home. Then my family and I crossed the country so we could ride through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River in a rubber raft. This journey was my first sight of the far American West, where, said another North Carolina writer, Thomas Wolfe, “all the states are square.”

This article appears as an abstract above, the complete article can be accessed in Project Muse
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