Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River

The Myth of the Chattooga

The Myth of the chattoga a PERSONAL HISTORY This page intentionally left blank We Southerners are a mythological people, created half out of dream, and half out of slander, who live in a still legendary land. J O N A T H A N DANIELS RIVER IS Alandscape shaped by powerful and dynamic natural systems, including the human imagination. There's a reason that the flow of a river has been used as a metaphor for life and that of all the landscapes—mountains, oceans, deserts—rivers are what poets and writers return to in literature when describing the way human history cuts across time. The Chattooga River, forming a section of the border between South Carolina and Georgia, has been for me a landscape of discovery. The stories I've heard told about itshistory, danger, and beauty have shaped my own relationship to rivers. "I do not know much about gods," T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, "but I think the river is a strong brown god." Eliot grew up along the Mississippi in Saint Louis, the same river Mark Twain used as the backdrop for TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, those classic river texts. What kind of god would Eliot see in the Chattooga, in the shattered blue crystal of a mountain river falling over broken bedrock ledges? My love of James Dickey's 1970 novel Deliverance came before I knew the actual landscape of the Chattooga. The 1972 film, directed A by John Boorman and adapted from the novel by Dickey, included river scenes largely shot on the Chattooga, but not exclusively on that waterway. Many of the film's white-water action sequences were shot on Sections III and IV, though the most dramatic scenes featured the waterfalls in the gorge of the nearby Tallulah River. The novel and film had already been out ten years when in the early eighties, as a beginning white-water kayaker, I encountered the real Chattooga the first time. Nearly twenty years later, in 1999, I began this exploration of the complex relationships the popular imagination creates in the isolated, rugged mountain landscape along the border of Georgia and South Carolina that a National Geographic article called "Chattooga Country." I first read Dickey's novel as a high-school sophomore when it appeared in 1971 as a paperback. I found it compelling, and as a teenager I connected this best-selling adventure novel I read voraciously behind my book in algebra toJoseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , which was assigned in sophomore English. Both were river stories , and both employed a narrator whose world was shaken by what he found upstream. Dickey imagined a river called the Cahulawassee, based on the remote mountain rivers the poet—a sometime canoeist—had experienced . Dickey's story places four suburban men on a weekend canoe trip down the north Georgia river to face the worst man and nature have to offer. When the story is over, one of Dickey's characters has died, one has been brutally raped, another badly wounded running the rapids, and the final one has returned to tell a tale destined to become one of the central adventure stories of my generation . Dickey grasped a white-water river's potential as a landscape for heroic action. His poems are full of journeys, and his three novels take a similar shape as well. The poet sawstories as cyclic mythical journeys, rites of passage. The difference is monumental between what happened to Dickey's four suburbanites "when they decided not to play golf that 4 CHATTOOGA weekend," as the movie's original trailer teases, and what happened to the 1.2million paddlers, commercial and private, who havefloated the Chattooga since Deliverance appeared. In some ways the river has lived up to its hype. Since the movie, over thirty deaths have occurred in the river's formidable white water, and in the years after the movie made the river popular, unpleasant encounters with the locals were not uncommon, though no murders or rapes of "outsiders " were reported. My encounters with the river have been tame versions of the trip that Lewis Medlock, Ed Gentry, Bobby Trippe, and Drew Ballinger experienced when they left the Atlantasuburbs in Dickey's novel: I load a car with boats and gear, drive from home a few hours to the river, paddle a stretch of it, and head back home...