Sardis

Easter Sunday and it's windy and cold for April in the Deep South. To make matters worse, squall lines have been blowing up from the Gulf all morning, hanging tattered clouds so low and thick they look like the soaked inside of a cotton bale. I'm on a three-day book tour—Memphis, Jackson, and Oxford, Mississippi—for Chattooga, a narrative about the river made famous in part by a southern writer named James Dickey. It hasn't really been a triumphant tour. On Saturday afternoon in Memphis, the Davis-Kidd chain store where I was scheduled to sign had forgotten to order Chattooga from the publisher. I stood around for twenty minutes while an embarrassed clerk searched for two copies of the book that the computer said were somewhere in the store. My one other stop in Memphis that evening was at an independent bookstore where, upon arrival, I discovered they'd closed early for Easter. A small handwritten sign in the window next to a nice pile of my unsigned books said, "Gone Fishin'." I am still hopeful concerning stops in Jackson and Oxford on Monday. The bookstores there—Lemuria in Jackson and Square Books in Oxford—are legendary for their hospitality to writers. Other writer friends who'd done this very tour told me I would not be disappointed by either.

Since I'm so close, I've told my Mississippi buddy Dixon Bynum that I want to paddle something of what's left of Faulkner's river bottom that made up his "Big Woods." Getting in touch with moving water will salve all my tour wounds and relax my tired mind. Dixon has set up a six-mile, half-day paddle downstream from the Sardis Dam, on what little free flow is left of the Little Tallahatchie River, which becomes the Tallahatchie thirty miles farther downstream after its confluence with the Coldwater River. It's no wilderness, but it will give me a window cracked open on what Faulkner called the "tall and endless" woods.

William Faulkner made up a mythical Mississippi county with the unpronounceable Indian name of Yoknapatawpha, and James Dickey did the same with a North Georgia river he called the Cahulawassee. Both mythical places have lived in my imagination parallel to real places. Both landscapes—the real and the imagined—have their appeal. Today I'll add the real Little Tallahatchie River to my life list of rivers I've paddled and figure out the connections to the myth of Faulkner's "Big Woods" as I float down.

Is it Faulkner's Big Woods that drowned under Sardis Lake? Not really. The big bottom of "The Bear" isn't any more a real place than Jefferson or Frenchman's Bend or the old Sutpen's Hundred. Dixon assures me, though, that southwest of here is where the real Faulkner is known to have hunted and camped along a real Mississippi river, and surely he used his experience in the Little Tallahatchie River bottom to create "The Bear" and several other stories. "Write what you know"—that's what we tell our students in creative writing classes.

I've driven out of Memphis south on I-55 parallel to the big muddy. After an hour I get off on Highway 315 and approach and cross the Sardis Dam—a vast mowed greensward of earthen construction so long that the Corps of Engineers has made a park out of the base of it with football and soccer fields. I cruise over the causeway and see that the dull brown lake on one side is humming with motorboats. The recreation space is downslope on the other. The whole complex is like a snapshot of twentieth-century engineering logic—drown something dynamic and wild like the Little Tallahatchie River; offer car camping, fishing, boating; chalk off a playing field or two; and call it "green space."

In the Deep South little is natural about a big lake. The terrain of Mississippi remained glacier free during the Pleistocene and, if not manipulated, the local water does what it's done for hundreds of thousands of years, which is...