Issue 2:2 | Non-Fiction | John Lane

The Myth of the Chattooga: A Personal History

John Lane

From Chatooga (University of Georgia Press, 2004)

We Southerners are a mythological people, created half out of dream,

and half out of slander, who live in a still legendary land. --Jonathan Daniels

A river is a landscape 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 its history, danger, and beauty have shaped my own relationship to rivers.

"I do not know much about rivers," 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 Adventures 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 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 to Joseph 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 saw stories 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 weekend," as the movie's original trailer teases, and what happened to the 1.2 million paddlers, commercial and private, who have floated 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 Atlanta suburbs 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. Their story is mythic, a heroes' journey of separation, initiation, and return. Like the old myths, Dickey's fictional journey is a rite of passage for Everyman with a canoe or kayak.

Here, by “myth,” I don't mean the lies people tell about a place, or rumors, legends, or tall tales that develop around a landscape. Myth is part of our unconscious and therefore beyond words. "Myth is metaphor," Joseph Campbell liked to say. His PBS interviews with Bill Moyers, "The Power of Myth," introduced mythology and how myth works in our lives to millions in the 1980s. "A myth doesn't point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the facts," Campbell once said in an interview.

We can approach myth through words--Freud used "slips" of the tongue to locate our unconscious desires--but words can't fully define our myths. Words can only point the way.

The myth of a place like the Chattooga River is what was said before we arrived and what is left unsaid when we leave. Thinking about the Chattooga as myth helps me define the way the landscape works on my insides when I come into contact with the real river and helps me understand what remains with me when I go home. It's like Campbell's idea of a "mythic journey" seen in mythic stories, fairy tales, almost any narrative--separation from home, initiation, return. It's what a mention of the river conjures in many who know it, a certain set of unconscious expectations--the river as a place of great beauty, safety, fear, danger--that are often in conflict with what their senses tell them when they visit it.

"Funny thing about up yonder," Lewis says to Ed as the adventurers speed toward the distant blue mountains and falling rivers in Deliverance, "the whole thing's different. I mean the whole way of taking life and the terms you take it on." The terms on which I take the real Chattooga were formed through twenty years of paddling and hiking. It's always seemed an Eden, and yet I realize that to many it's been destroyed by the love of people like me.

Dickey believed that Chattooga country had been destroyed by being discovered, but I don't want to admit that the potential of the place is really less than it was, nor that protection and use in the past thirty years have diminished the worth of the river. "People have loved the river to death," one fisherman told me when I described the exploration I wanted to undertake in the watershed. "I hope you don't plan to add to that."

If the river has been loved to death, the romance started long before the present. Mississippian Native Americans burned and farmed the Chattooga's bottoms for centuries, and when the Cherokee moved on to the same sites, they continued these agricultural practices. Colonial farmers appropriated the Cherokee land, and later loggers dished out lots of hard love in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. For the last few decades, the Forest Service has managed the land, and now hundreds of thousands of people escape to Chattooga country for boating, fishing, hiking, and camping. Some in the surrounding rural communities see government management practices as less than ideal. "Look over there," one local resident told me. "With that government corridor they've created a desert, and nobody can make a living there but a bunch of rich kids with colorful boats."

Later in his life, Dickey thought the river had been spoiled because too many people had gained access to it. The Chattooga as wilderness had somehow faded in his imagination. Was he right? I admire Dickey's poetry and novels, but I'm not sure I agree with the dead poet, a man with a documented flair for exaggeration. Dickey was no expert canoeist, though he had canoed some white water in the early sixties with his Atlanta friends Lewis King and Al Braselton. Nor was Dickey a master hunter or bowman, nor an expert at camping or woodcraft.

James Dickey may never have been an adventurer like Lewis Medlock, but he was a writer whose prose and poetry cut quickly and often against the grain of status quo, surface politeness, and boredom. His messy life (and powerful art) showed what Henry Hart, his biographer, calls "the will to kick free from all judicious restraints." Dickey once said, "If your life bores you, risk it." Dickey seemed to really believe that, and he wanted his fiction and poetry to show it.

Dickey paddled the Chattooga only once and saw it only a handful of times, most often during the filming of Deliverance. In James Dickey's landscape, the line where fantasy leaves off and his real river experiences begin is hard to discern.

* * *

In the mid-eighties I was teaching at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts, and Dickey came to visit our poetry class. That night after his reading I cornered him at a party with hopes of hearing some true-life "combat" story from his trips down white-water rivers. I was approaching him as a fellow boater, and I hoped that he could add to the legacy of Chattooga stories I'd been gathering since I started paddling the Wild and Scenic River a year or two before.

When I asked Dickey to tell me about his first trip down the Chattooga, he seemed at a loss. He told a story instead about Burt Reynolds and the terrible time director John Boorman's crew had filming on the river. Dickey didn't talk as if he knew white-water rivers. There were no technical stories of missed eddies in Jawbone or frightening swims over "the single drop" of Bull Sluice at three feet. Dickey was like his character Ed Gentry, who had little experience with a river, but would never forget what he did have, and savored the possibility for deliverance from the day-to-day that such an experience gave "a regular Joe."

In Dickey's work he returned to rivers often, and powerfully, but rather than an approachable landscape, rivers were a blank wilderness screen where the artist could project his rugged vision of a place for what the poet has called "energizing . . . qualities which otherwise would never have a chance to surface." For Dickey, those qualities were often violent and sexual, and it was sometimes through encounters with the locals that he sketched out these fictional impulses. It is in his portrayal of local people, whether it's the "hillbillies" in Deliverance or the Japanese later in To the White Sea, where Dickey can be most deeply questioned. It's wrong to dismiss the encounters as mere fabrications. "Those people are out there," a long-time resident of the Chattooga watershed said to me once when I suggested naively that Dickey had created stereotypes in Lonny the banjo boy or the Griners or the mountain man who brutally rapes the outsider from Atlanta. "They're just not the only people out there."

From Dickey I have not learned much about my own obsessions or fears, but I see his obsessions and fears in many of the people I encounter on rivers. I go to the river if I want to know about the Chattooga. I pull down Dickey's work if I want to understand more deeply the desires and fears of unprepared characters when they come into contact with people and places they don't really understand.

But do we really fully understand any place? Can I criticize Dickey for not knowing the Chattooga in some profound way, when all my trips into the watershed have added up to less than a year's presence?

For those like the fictional Lewis who resist restraint, Dickey might be right about the way the Chattooga has changed. Today, Lewis would be chased down by the Forest Service for speeding up a country road trying to find the river. Permits are not required for hiking, but they are for camping in the national forest anywhere outside the Ellicott Rock Wilderness or the Wild and Scenic River corridor. If you are in these areas you are not allowed to camp any closer than fifty feet from the river. All boaters must fill out permits at their put-in points. All this regulation might make for a very tame wilderness, a place where it's no longer possible to experience life without restraint. If there's any wildness left in the Chattooga watershed, there's no doubt where it's found--not on the government-maintained trails through the federal wilderness, but in the water itself, running wild and free over resistant rock. It is there--in the ceaseless flow, the curling current--that Lewis could still find his wildness.

In Deliverance James Dickey describes the current in a white-water river "like a thing made of many threads being pulled." On the Chattooga the threads of human and natural history have become increasingly tangled and may never be untangled again. "The Chattooga, where we did Deliverance . . . it's ruined now by people trying to cash in on it," Dickey said in an interview a few years before he died in 1997. "It's screwed up now."

Adventure tourism on the Chattooga has reached levels some consider impossible for maintaining a "wilderness" experience. In 1983, when I first paddled the Chattooga, fifty thousand floated it. In 2001, commercial and private users of the river approached one hundred thousand. The last several years, commercial river use has actually dropped off a little, and a high-profile drowning on Section IV in the late nineties brought the Chattooga's various communities--the environmentalists, the commercial outfitters, the locals, the politicians, the agency charged with management of the river--into visible public conflict.

As the millennium turned, the public's resolve, so clear in the sixties and seventies, to maintain federal wilderness land seemed to be weakening. Though the laws seem safe from repeal, there are current political debates. Under recent administrations, privatization has become the watchword for those known as free-market economists, the idea being that private landowners can manage landscapes better than the government. To travel into the Chattooga watershed is to venture into the middle of all these issues.

In spite of these government complications, Dickey's isolated wilderness landscape is a reality. The wild country is still there, lots of it, even though many of the Georgia and South Carolina rivers with Native American names like the Chattooga have now been drowned under power-company lakes. These lakes still have rivers under them that the fictional Lewis could have recognized from his old maps. These rivers are literally dammed, just as the imaginary Cahulawassee was in Dickey's fictional dream. Part of the mystique of the Chattooga is that it is one of the only rivers to survive the demand for electric power and recreation.

Another part of the Chattooga's myth Dickey helped create is that the river can change you, and I have to admit it worked on me. My idea of wildness, natural beauty, and freedom may not be Lewis's, but it is always measured against what I've seen and continue to experience floating the river.

In 1972, when I stood in line with millions of others to absorb Hollywood's mythic images in John Boorman's film of white water, broken boats, and dangerous mountain men, I was impressed by the violent and beautiful river scenes. Because these scenes had been shot nearby, I watched Deliverance with a particular interest I didn't have in the settings of other popular films from that period.

Somehow knowing that Deliverance was filmed one hundred miles from my high school in upstate South Carolina legitimized my place for me. I found out years later that the novelist Walker Percy articulated this process, saying that movies "certified" a place. The Deliverance river was solidly certified, in my mind, by the time I first placed my boat in its current in 1983.

In my dreams I feared who might come out of the woods and what would be beyond the next bend, but in reality by 1983 I had topographical maps, river guides, and the experience of friends to confirm that Dickey's Deliverance river only existed on the shelf and on the screen.

Experiencing a real place, it seems logical, would cause the fictional one, the mythical other, to be left behind. With the Chattooga, that does not seem to be the case. The Deliverance river still sits atop the real river as an early morning mist sits atop the flowing current.

"One would think--or so we have been taught to imagine--that dreams are fragile things easily destroyed by reality. But increasingly, the opposite is true," Orville Schell wrote of the myth of Shangri-la in Virtual Tibet. Schell found that a real place (in his inquiry, Tibet) often is obscured by the dreams--whether the rafter's conquest or the developer's plans--we project upon it. I found the same true of the Chattooga. On the border of Georgia and South Carolina, the dream landscape dies hard.

In Dickey's novel four men are drawn from their safe but circumscribed suburban homes for a weekend of adventure in the north Georgia woods on a river that will soon disappear beneath the waters of a reservoir. Their dream is that they will be somehow delivered from the day-to-day. Their nightmare is that they are.

I can never leave behind Dickey's dark river when I paddle, even though little in my experience suggests I should be afraid of anything in the Wild and Scenic River corridor except a missed roll and a hard swim in the middle of a run of the difficult rapids on Section III or Section IV. But for me, each encounter with the real Chattooga is still informed by the dark, dangerous stream the Dickey novel and Boorman film bring me to expect. Maybe that's because, for me, the place was literature before it was place, or maybe the staying power of Deliverance is simply the power of popular culture, the power of myth.

* *

I don't remember feeling like a hero when I first paddled a white-water river, and I certainly didn't have to climb a cliff and kill anyone with a bow and arrow to finish the trip. I do remember a great deal of fear concerning what was around the next bend, though my fear didn't start with the Chattooga.

While I was in college I played around at white-water canoeing the two or three times a friend talked me into going on trips. During my senior year--1977--I went on two canoe weekends in a row, one on the Green River, an energetic stream always popular with summer camps, less than an hour from the college, and the other on the Nantahala River, a legendary white-water run near the Smoky Mountains. It was on these two streams with a group of novice paddlers that I experienced my initiation into white water. I remember nothing noble or mythic about either outing. I went on them the way someone goes to an amusement park. It was, I thought, merely a way to get a safe thrill on a white-water roller coaster.

Other southern colleges with more money and long-standing outing-club traditions--Sewanee and Davidson in particular--used more formal programs to develop paddling skills and appreciation for the outdoors. Though at times Wofford students called their love of white water a club, there was no chartered organization at the school in the seventies. At Wofford, white-water adventure was driven by the personality of psychology professor John Pilley. Short and compact, with close-cropped hair and glasses held in place with an elastic retainer, Pilley is still, thirty years later, a Popeye with gymnast's biceps. Paddling was perfect for him, all upper body, arms and shoulders. We knew, even if we didn't take Pilley's classes, that every weekend he would probably be out exploring the mountains and we were welcome to come along. News about trips circulated freely among the students, but it was understood that the leaders of each trip were responsible for who could go.

Pilley accompanied us on the two canoe trips, though we novices knew he paddled most weekends with another group of hard cores. Blue Hole canoes were available to us because most of these serious boaters, like Pilley and a half-dozen students, had begun to paddle kayaks. Several of these hard-core kayakers floated with us when we ran the Green and the Nantahala. As they drifted along beside us in their red fiberglass kayaks, they had the bored yet knowing countenances of those who have been to battle. They had seen serious white water, their ease seemed to say, and paddling novice streams was merely an amusement, a tune-up.

Six years later I came back to teach at Wofford, and Pilley quickly talked me into slipping on a kayak. My first experiences with the one-person craft weren't much more pleasant than my earlier canoe trips. Pilley says I was a beginner longer than anyone he had ever taught to paddle. I swam every major and minor rapid on all the intermediate rivers in the region--the Green, the Nantahala, the French Broad. It took a year before Pilley agreed I was ready to descend a section of the Chattooga.

By that time, I was prepared. So my first encounter with the Chattooga would have been pure enjoyment if it had been warmer. It was the winter of 1983, two days after Christmas. I was still getting comfortable in a kayak, and so paddling the Deliverance river, though not scary, was an event. The conditions were not perfect when we headed for the Chattooga the first time. It had been in the teens the night before, but Pilley assured me the weatherman was predicting a high near fifty for our outing. He said he wanted me to see the river in winter.

Driving over with me from Spartanburg, Pilley told stories about other trips down the river. There were the near misses to recount, or the times when Pilley or one of his old paddling buddies had almost drowned on the flood-stage river. This would become our ritual of preparation over the years. We would relive Dickey's story, minus the terrible consequences. I asked Pilley if he had ever been on the river after any of the white-water deaths, and he told a story about floating with a group down through the Narrows on a Sunday morning and finding the body of a paddler who had died upstream the day before.

Our float proved not to be so dramatic. It was a short one, only the top of Section III, from Earl's Ford to Sandy Ford, a distance of about three miles. Section III is not the most difficult of the Chattooga's four stretches (Section IV downstream of the Highway 76 bridge owns that distinction), but it offers plenty of challenging white water. It was a good place for Pilley to introduce me to the river.

When Pilley and I put in, it was still cold enough to see our breath. We were dressed for it though: not a natural fiber on either of us; polypropylene, nylon paddling jackets, wet-suit booties. It was quiet on the river and very cold, I thought, to be messing about in boats. There was ice in the shallows and the eddies glistened with a crystal sheen. As Pilley and I spun our boats into the first eddies just downstream from the white sand and stream-cobble beach of the Earl's Ford put-in, we cracked through a thin layer of ice. Pilley was an experienced winter paddler so he had brought gloves, a set of ten-year-old neoprene mittens that he had made himself from a pattern he'd found in the back of a scuba-diving magazine. Back when Pilley started to paddle, everything was homemade and durable. I'd forgotten my factory-made modern scuba-diving gloves. When we reached the river from the parking lot, a walk of a quarter mile down through thick winter woods, I nearly borrowed a pair of leather gloves--just something to shield the water a little--from an old man fishing at the put-in. He was carrying a pint of Jack Daniels and seemed in no danger from the cold.

The river had that winter stillness about it. The only life we saw as we paddled down was a pair of mallards in an eddy where the sun was shining. Southern woods in winter are not only silver and dark. There are many conifers along the river--white pines, hemlocks--and the mountain laurel holds its green all winter, though dulled by the cold. It was so cold that the laurel leaves had curled inward like fat fingers around the branching stems. The most noticeable difference in the winter woods was how deep we could see into them. We could make out gray outcrops along the deep cleft of the valley a hundred yards into the forest.

Though not windy, it was cold, too cold for anyone but Pilley and his homemade gloves. My hands cramped gripping the paddle shaft. Pilley, I imagined, had paddled the river under just about all conditions. If the river has a human spirit, it is Pilley, who has paddled here for thirty years. Even back then it looked as if he had almost become the river, his skin gone dark and rugged like the rocks we passed.

Soon after putting on the river, we saw where Warwoman Creek enters the Chattooga from the Georgia side. Warwoman, a Class III rapid, is where beginners usually spill if they aren't ready for what's below. The rapid has two ledges; the first we ran right of center, and the second, a tricky left to right move through rocks. I did fine, following Pilley through and eddying out at the bottom. Sitting in the pool at the rapid's base, Pilley said he's always thought that Warwoman is the first rapid we see the Deliverance canoes slip through on Hollywood's river. He said he liked to sit here for a moment and gaze upstream into movie history.

A mile downstream we floated past First Island Rapid, and at two miles, Rock Garden, another rapid featured in Deliverance. In Rock Garden the Chattooga's rapids and riverbed began to take on that distinctive undercut intensity Deliverance's director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond exploited so hauntingly. Black spears of broken bedrock, stone fingers pointed upstream. The current took me slowly under one of them, floating me through a portal. In the cold they seemed particularly ghostly, pointing back toward the put-in.

As we passed through Rock Garden, Pilley reminded me that Dick's Creek Ledge, the first more difficult Class IV rapid on Section III, was just below. We scouted the river-wide ledge of rock from the exposed flat section in the center of the river. I looked down and noticed that the lip of the scouting rock was scarred with blue, red, and yellow residue, the history of a dozen years of plastic canoes beaching there.

Pilley pointed below and described how it was best to slip into the S-turn move that drops you six feet into an eddy behind a big rock cushioned by the current at the bottom. He said to follow him. "Avoid going left of the cushion," he said and he slipped into his kayak, popped his spray skirt into place, took several paddle strokes to push himself clear of the rock, and lined up for the descent. Soon he sat waiting in the lower eddy.

I followed, sliding quickly down through the white water, and spun into the eddy, almost flipping at the bottom. That day, the good flow made it a little frightening--current cantilevered, coursing, surging over ledges and into pools. The water was pushy. When my bow reached the eddy, Pilley was there to give me a brace as I tipped toward the cold water. It was over that fast, my first big rapid on the Chattooga. For years I carried a residual Dick's Creek fear with me each time I approached the ledge.

An hour after leaving the put-in, we were just upstream from the narrow run to the right of the island of Sandy Ford, our take-out. By the time we reached the island, the temperature had finally climbed into the high forties, and the sun, a flat winter disc, had barely staggered over Chattooga Ridge. We both became quiet as we approached this final stretch of white water upstream from our take-out. Above the rapid, we pulled into a calm eddy behind a large boulder on the Georgia side. The water level is usually measured in feet from zero (zero being the height of the river surface above a reference elevation) on a white-water river, and on that day it was close to two feet. There had been some soaking winter rains, and no leaves were on the trees to pull the run-off out of the water table. Two feet is a good level for the Chattooga any time of year, but it was particularly exciting in December.

The rapid below us was not that difficult—a Class II on a scale of six—but the hundred yards of boulders to the right of the island were challenging. It was what paddlers call a rock garden (fast, shallow water with rocks scattered throughout), and we'd have to pick our way down slowly from eddy to eddy. There were at least ten eddies in the hundred yards, and we tried to catch them all. I could see them stretching below us and out of sight where the rapid ended in the wide calm water of Sandy Ford.

Just off my stern, sun-bleached logs had piled up against the leading tip of the island, refuse from years of the storm surge of flood water. The large logs were matted and jumbled like straws. The power of the river is striking, even on calm beautiful December days.

I watched Pilley below me as he sat at the top of the rapid in his old Holloform, the first plastic kayak commercially available. He was pointed upstream toward me, sitting behind a large boulder, hanging in the eddy. I watched as he leaned forward in the kayak and took short, quick strokes, one long sweep, and then peeled out and into the current. Quickly and smoothly, he dropped down to the next eddy, and I followed into the one he had vacated. Pilley sat for a moment surfing a wave just to the right of the rock, then floated down to the next eddy. He repeated, and I followed, all the way to the bottom.

Soon we were through the long shoal and floating past Sandy Ford, where an old road once crossed the river, connecting South Carolina and Georgia. There are good sand beaches there, and in spite of the national laws establishing the Wild and Scenic River, there is still a rough dirt road down to the river's edge. In the summer, some locals drive their trucks and cars to the edge of the river, pull out their coolers, turn up their stereos, and crank up Hank Williams Jr. They sit belly-deep in the river in collapsible lawn chairs and raise hell. It's always a shock to slip through the broken gneiss of the shoal, wrapped in the kicked-up spray from falling water, and see three or four men in the river hefting Budweisers to the blue sky of the wilderness.

That day we had the Chattooga all to ourselves. Not even the ducks stayed with us. There were only the dark charcoal shadows of the winter trees against the outline of the hills and the green brush strokes of white pines. If it hadn't been so cold, maybe we would have floated the next ten miles to Highway 76, the final bridge of three that cross the river corridor.

"It's a perfect river," Pilley said as we pulled up at the take-out and popped our skirts.

* * *

And so twenty years ago I entered the myth of the Chattooga, like Saint George chasing his dragon. I'm not suggesting that now there is a huge billboard along the road every time I drive down to the Chattooga that says Mythic Landscape Ahead. Most of the river's early paddlers, like Pilley, or Lewis King, Dickey's model for Lewis Medlock, were drawn to the river for its powerful white water and challenge, not its potential to give paddlers a deeper understanding of themselves and their relationship to nature. These early paddlers learned by trial and error, as I did, how to handle the complexities of current and stone. They probably weren't even aware they were caught in the same forces of nature Dickey's characters would grapple with in Deliverance. These are the types of relationships to reality that writers consciously work out, not canoe clubs, weekend adventurers, or outfitters.

Not everyone with a stake in the Chattooga visits on day trips the way we boaters most often do. All the years I paddled the Chattooga, I always focused on the river. I never thought much about the people who live nearby, the locals, those a friend calls "the indigenous ones."

River running in the southeast came of age among people like college students and professors, lawyers, and the business class in southern cities. Not often were these early paddlers the farmers, loggers, and small-town merchants who populate the South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina counties bordering the Chattooga River. "A canoe trip?" one of the Griner brothers says incredulously in Deliverance when Lewis asks if he'll take the cars downstream to Oree. I'm not suggesting that the indigenous ones didn't love the Chattooga before the white-water paddlers discovered it, or that they don't love it now. Their love is primal, a part of them. "Something you see every day, you take for granted," one friend explained. "But you'd sure as hell would miss it if it were gone." To locals, the river is often beyond description. To them it's something akin to home, a place you feel your connection to very deeply but cannot articulate. The idea of getting in a boat and floating from one bridge to the next is still something many locals don't think makes much sense. Dickey's character, one of the Griner brothers, says, "I ain't never been down in there much. There ain't nothing to go down there for. Fishing's no good." Today, some of the locals paddle kayaks and rafts, and many even fly-fish in the deep isolated gorges upstream. And some of the paddlers argue that several decades of habitation have established them as locals and that they have the same stake in the river as the indigenous ones.

* * *

Early on in my exploration of this subject, one thread led me out of the Chattooga watershed and into North Carolina. Someone had told me he knew a man who had worked on the movie set. I should go and talk to him, he said. So I drove over the mountain toward Sylva, a small mountain town that had been filmed for one of the final scenes of Deliverance. The lemon yellow Shell station and video parlor was hanging on a narrow strip of land between another mountain river and a state highway. It doubled as a big-game check-in station.

Inside, the store was a modern mountain one-stop: fast food, videos, and hot dogs. The man behind the counter was tall, in a pressed short-sleeve, pale-yellow dress shirt. He had the bulk of one of Dickey's Griner brothers. I said I'd heard he had some Deliverance stories. He smiled. Thirty years ago he'd helped set the charges for the blast at the dam site the film crew captured for the movie's opening credits.

"Remember that road down to the dam site?" he said, laughing. "I drove that road every morning for three years when we were building that dam over the mountain at Jocassee. You know, that's the lake where in the movie the arm raises up at the end."

He introduced his wife, who was working behind the video counter. "You ever rent it out?" I asked.

She squinted hard and said she did, that they keep Deliverance in stock and it's rented quite often: "You know Burt was on a talk show once and he said the worst place he ever ate was right down there in Sylva. Old Burt, he came in here and pissed everybody off."

"I saw Deliverance when it came out at the Ritz down in Sylva," the man behind the counter said. "Some guys had been at the premiere in Atlanta so the word had already come back that it was really down on us. But when they turned it loose at the theaters I went down to see it anyway." He said a hush fell over the movie house when the "hillbillies" came on the scene.

"You remember it, don't you?" he asked his wife, who nodded.

"It got under people's skin around here," she said, remembering. "That's a fact."

He said you could feel the tension in the theater, "especially in that part where they have sex and squeal like a pig."

"To me that movie was making fun of us," his wife said. "You still have people coming in here saying, 'You're not really from around here are you?'"

"You could tell they thought they were better than us," the man said. "They leveled off the top of a damn mountain down there at Jocassee so they could fly in their helicopters up from Atlanta. If they weren't flying, they were driving Scouts and Rovers."

* * *

The river, and the people who live around it, are beginning to take on a personality, one my old friend Pilley might not completely recognize. Now the Chattooga comes alive for me not only through my memory of it from river trips but through its human and natural history and the legacy of stories, hundreds of them, told to me by those isolated from it by time or distance and those close enough to see it every day. Norman Maclean ends A River Runs through It by saying, "I am haunted by waters." Maclean's book is the story of two brothers, local boys who love to fish and fight, and the Montana mountain river that is the backdrop for their struggles. Dickey was a southerner, and Maclean a westerner. I don't believe Maclean was haunted by the same ghosts James Dickey's characters encounter in the dark forests along the Cahulawassee. Maclean's ghosts were more similar to mine. In his novella, very real people love the river and work up an intimacy with it throughout their lifetimes. My intimacy with the Chattooga has come over time as I've paddled, hiked, and driven through the watershed. Most of my visits have been recreational, though in recent years I have also traveled to the area looking for inspiration and the shadows of Dickey's novel. Intimacy also comes from reading, and I've piled my study high with newspaper and magazine articles, books and newsletters about the river.

Spring is a good time to come to the mountains. The water is high and the wildflowers are beginning to bloom. Mountain laurel, tulip poplar, dogwood, and redbud are in complete display. The air is crisp and clear. So in March I pack my truck and begin my search for the real and mythical Chattooga. I know its many ghosts—from memory and imagination—hang hauntingly in the mist.