The Duke of Deliverance and the Prince of Tides

Last weekend I was asked to attend a conference at the University of South Carolina on the 10th anniversary of James Dickey's death. Acclaimed poet, author of Deliverance, and mentor to hundreds, Dickey taught in Columbia for nearly thirty years. Along with Pat Conroy, James Dickey is one of the two great literary figures South Carolina has produced since World War II. Their poetry and prose form gigantic rocky peaks still looming over all aspiring writers wanting to float their voices out on South Carolina's literary waters.

The last decade James Dickey in particular has come to cast a considerable shadow over my own work. With the publication three years ago of my book Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River I entered the growing stream of Dickey scholarship and reflection. In my book I explore my "real" Chattooga River along the border of Georgia and South Carolina, but I also place alongside it for contemplation the mythical Cahulawassee River where James Dickey sets the action of his 1970 novel.

In the early 1970s James Dickey introduced me to the power and beauty of wild mountain rivers available to my imagination on the western end of my home state. It was in 1972 when director John Boorman filmed the wildly popular movie Deliverance on the Chattooga that the two rivers, one real and one made up, first merged in the public imagination. "Deep, rocky, green, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond beyond reality" is how James Dickey has his protagonist Ed Gentry describe the Cahulawassee in Deliverance. Thirty years later it is still impossible for me to separate them.

I accepted my place on the celebration's program because I wanted to honor Dickey's memory and remind those present how important "the myth of Deliverance" is to me and should be to them. Deliverance is still an important, cautionary tale, a bloody telegraph sent from the edge of loss-of the old South, of wild landscapes, and wildness in the lives of newly settled 1960s suburbanites. Today vast stretches of South Carolina from Oconee to Beaufort are what Lewis rails against, and Ed finally comes to understand-suburban life can create sleep-walkers often in need of deliverance back into the bigger wilder world.  

Pat Conroy, one of Dickey's early students, was at the conference. "My wound is geography," Conroy has his protagonist Tom Wingo say in The Prince of Tides. Geography is my wound as well, and South Carolina's beauty of open land and forests and rivers and tidal marshes has gashed me often from the Atlantic Ocean to the Blue Ridge Mountains. With the 1986 publication of The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy showed me the "quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark."

What are we to do after reading Dickey and Conroy's dark hymns to geography but celebrate and fight any threat to South Carolina? Dickey has been dead for ten years, but Conroy is still hard at work, and his presence at the conference gave vitality and momentum to the gathering. I was able to talk with him and tell him how much I admire his novels and to share a sense of doom between us about the present day assault against his beloved South Carolina coast-the selling out of Beaufort County to large-tract developers. Conroy's deepest wound may now be the 16,00 houses threatening two vast open tracts north of Beufort. "I am a patriot of a singular geography on the planet," Tom Wingo says in The Prince of Tides. "I am proud of its landscape… my heart belongs in the marshlands." "My greatest worry," Pat Conroy now says," is that developers are going to figure out a way to pave the ocean."

It's a lot easier to pave the forests and the Piedmont ridge tops than the rolling waves. I know as soon as the coast is settled they'll move inland and it's possible that within a generation or two there will be nothing recognizable of the geography Dickey and Conroy celebrate.

Will we sell off all that is lovely and truly valuable in South Carolina to the most aggressive and calculating land speculators among us? Fifty years from now will there be a singular South Carolina geography left for our descendants to write about and be wounded by? Or will the Palmetto State become like any other place plundered for profit, a Southern New Jersey, a vast reach of suburban parcels broken here and there with land saved by easements and the last holdouts against the approaching real estate apocalypse?