To see just one of them is reason enough to make the journey to West Point on the Eno where the museum is located.

There is a 48th reason to go – to read deFerrari’s unpublished, eloquent essay, “A Small Piece of Wilderness,” about her deep bond with the Eno River.

“People have dipped themselves into this water for purification, white dresses floating on the surface, a preacher casting holy words, blessings,” it begins. “Most of us come here for what we call recreation, though the river might be cleansing us all, unknowingly, its waters intrinsically sacred.”

For 16 years, deFerrari has been hiking near and boating in the river, filling her sketchbook with what floods her eyes, what stimulates both sides of her brain, like the Old Blacksmith Shop at West Point on the Eno.

“I was drawn to the building because it is tucked into nature,” she said. “There are all these trees around it. It goes back to that thing of humans nesting in this world.”

A sketch of the Mangum House and the museum is also in the exhibit. In 1881, Durham’s Mangum family bought the house as a summer home, moving there permanently in 1883 with their 16-year-old son Hugh, who used the old tobacco packhouse as his photography studio. In the 1970s, the packhouse was restored and now showcases Mangum’s photographs and equipment and the work of local artists. The museum is at 5101 N. Roxboro Road and is open Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. The exhibit ends Oct. 28.

A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, deFerrari was living in Philadelphia in 1996 when she visited Durham to explore moving here. “I wanted to swim in real water. I wanted a place with swimming holes. So I have a friend here and I came to check it out. It was really larkish,” deFerrari said.

She arrived right before Hurricane Fran hit, downing trees that closed many places, including the Eno River State Park. “I climbed over trees eight feet high to get into the park,” said deFerrari, who lives near downtown Durham.

“The type of place the Eno is one of the reasons I came here,” deFerrari said. “When I first put my boat in the water, it caught my breath.”

She has two inflatable kayaks, one named Lily, the other Night Hawk. “I take my friends out and they get on the water and say, ‘Oh’ like something fell away when they hit the water. They would be anchored in themselves. The river helped them do it. The water seems eternal. I feel like it washes things out of you that you don’t need,” deFerrari said.

The yard of her youth consisted not of grass but held a garden, blueberry bushes, and fruit trees. “I grew up next to woods and I grew up when kids ran outside,” she said. “My parents took us camping every year. There is a real connection to land through my family.”

Mountains, even just the idea of them, gets deFerrari stirred up.

“Did you know that right where we are there were mountains as big as the Himalayas, about a billion years ago. Now we have rolling hills. That that existed and now this exists is wild and fascinating to me,” said deFerrari, who is a working artist and teaches classes in color and creating art landscapes at the Durham Arts Council and the ArtsCenter in Carrboro.

Her colorful sketches of the Canadian Rockies and the Adirondacks may inspire travel lust. The manner in which deFerrari makes each mark hints at the powerful force that birthed the structures and that have changed them, and this is not only in the vistas created just by nature. Even her sketches with man-made structures seem to hint that perhaps man was not their only maker.

The exhibit is dedicated to Minna Werner. “When I was putting the show together I was remembering her really hard. You don’t usually dedicate an exhibit but I thought, ‘I could do that,” deFerrari said. The pair met when deFerrari moved into a house in Philadelphia and was working in her garden.

“I looked up and Minna was there,” she said. “She lived behind me. We both loved bike riding. She rode a one-speed bike to the Outer Banks when she was 64. When she was 89 the doctor told her she had to stop riding since she was losing her vision and she said, ‘They want me to pull my horns in and I don’t want to. She had ice climbed and traveled on freighters and now she could not, but she was not bitter. She was always grateful. She affected me by showing me how a person can define her own life by her attitude toward it.”

Whether she is working with graphite, oil pastel, watercolor, or colored pencil in her sketchbook, deFerrari finds solace. She had never considered, until asked for this article, how she wants her work to affect people.

“The best way I can answer this best is by thinking about responses I’ve gotten,” she said. “There was a man who heard me read my essay at the exhibit’s opening reception. He said that hearing it made him remember what nature can do for your spirit, and he went out and took a walk on the river. I didn’t expect that at all.”