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introduCtion I began a journey alone the summer after my traveling companion Jasper died. A German shepherd/lab mix who tilted his head back and forth when you talked to him, Jasper canoed with me thousands of miles, including 652 down the length of the Tennessee River—from Knoxville to Paducah. We locked through nine dams and endured blistering heat, drought, chill, thunderstorms, swampy campsites, and nauseating boat wakes. Five weeks it lasted, from late August into October. Though he vocalized his opinion continually, only one time on the trip did Jasper balk at taking his place in the bow. When I paddled away that morning, acting as if I were leaving him there at a snaky campsite in Mississippi, he sat on the bank and stared, calling my bluff until I’d drifted fifty yards away. Then he plunged into the tepid water in pursuit, swimming faster than I could paddle. That day we got hit with the worst storm of the trip, and by midmorning, when we were shivering together on the treeless riprap shoreline under the same poncho, I apologized for not listening to his advice to slow down. Seven years later my wife Julie and I carried Jasper out to the side yard next to the young tomato plants, where we put an end to the cancer that he had endured with such stoicism and dignity. He took the injection without a flinch, understanding, I think, that the slightest fidget would make us grieve harder. I grieved the same way I celebrated life with Jasper: by taking to the water, this time alone, a yellow kayak replacing the canoe. Instead of traveling from headwaters to mouth, I paddled upstream to the places where dead rivers, otherwise known as lakes or reservoirs, revive themselves against the influence of dams. These journeys, toward destinations I initially called transitional zones, could just as well have been called dying zones had I been approaching from the opposite direction, downstream toward the pooling of the reservoir, instead of upstream, away from dams. I preferred going upstream for the effort and for what the effort seemed to symbolize, an escape from human alterations of the landscape toward a region of purity, authenticity, and transcendence. xii Introduction The word liminal, derived from the Latin word limen, for threshold, packed some of the metaphysical punch that I was seeking in these geographical quadrants. You can be in a liminal state of mind, in-between realities, so to speak, as you are in the process of waking up from a vivid dream, perhaps registering the bold-faced numbers of your alarm clock while babbling to some green, three-headed, tentacled nemesis floating at the foot of your bed. In anthropology a person undergoing a rite of passage, transitioning from one social state to another, from boy to man, for example, would be in a liminal state. Belden Lane, in his book Landscapes of the Sacred, has described it as “having left one place, one conventional state of being, and not yet having arrived at another . . . caught betwixt and between.” In pop culture, it’s embodied by The Twilight Zone (1959–64), the TV series that host Rod Serling introduced in his clipped narration, cigarette in hand, as “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.” Lane has described “liminal zones” as places that are “not-places . . . caught in transition, existing only on the margins of a structured world.” In the natural world, according to Lane, the liminal might be represented by the mouth of a cave, a hedgerow, a swamp, the confluence of two rivers, a natural arch, or the edge of a cliff. For me it’s where stilled waters begin to move. I grew up near Kentucky Lake—part of the dammed-up Tennessee— and for decades I’ve enjoyed fishing, swimming, water-skiing, cruising, and paddling its flat water bays, tributaries, and main channel. Now I live in a land dominated by dammed rivers—East Tennessee—and I’ve canoed the length of the two main working rivers that rise in the region: the Cumberland and the Tennessee, locking through five high dams on the Cumberland, nine on the Tennessee. I love these rivers no less for their being sectioned off into lakes, and I’ve consumed the relatively cheap, clean electricity that their harnessed currents produce. Still, river rats and reservoir dogs alike should know what happens when rivers are dammed, what we lose as well as gain...

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