Countryside Conservatism and Conservation - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 102

Chapter 6: Countryside Conservatism and
Conservation
“Darkness pressed against the car windows, deep and silent, and I couldn't help but think I
was seeing into the future when much of this land would be buried deep underwater,” Sheriff
Will Alexander contemplated while responding to a Jocassee Valley bar brawl in the open-
ing pages of Ron Rash's novel One Foot in Eden . At the end of the story, Alexander's bit-
ter deputy drives out of the same valley “for the last time if I had any say in the matter. I
wouldn't be coming back here to fish or water ski or swim or anything like that. This wasn't
no place for people who had a home. This was a place for the lost.” 1 Rash's mountain drama
was set in the South Carolina upstate after the Korean War, and the narrative stretches into
the late 1960s, when “Carolina Power” finished acquiring mountain property, sawed tim-
ber from steep coves, and flooded the previously populated Jocassee Valley to complete a
massive hydroelectric project. The narrative ranges immediately from emotional floods of
posttraumatic stress and death to moments of lust and recovery. There was physical flooding
too: autumn rain and a muddy creek surging into a Blue Ridge Mountain cabbage patch as
a new artificial lake filled. These floods left trails of debris and spurred new discoveries as
well as signaling the arrival of new social and environmental relationships in the Sun Belt's
hydraulic waterscape.
Like all excellent fiction, Rush's novel relies on threads of fact. North Carolina-based
Duke Power Company began acquiring property in the Savannah River valley's mountain-
ous and peopled headwaters in 1916. But it would be a long time before the trees and people
were cleared from company land to make way for reservoirs in the South Carolina upstate.
Between 1970 and 1990, Duke built three hydroelectric dams—and three nuclear react-
ors—including the Lake Jocassee project. Not unlike Georgia Power's New South endeavor
in the Tallulah and Tugaloo Valleys a few miles to the west, Duke's Sun Belt schemes un-
folded during a private phase of southern waterway development. Duke was not the only
institution to bury parts of the Savannah River's watershed deep under water.
As the North Carolina company initiated its own capital-intensive master plan, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers embarked on its third and final energy and water project down-
valley at a place called Trotters Shoals between Hartwell (completed 1963) and Clarks Hill
(1952). While independent and beholden to different constituencies, Duke and the Corps
were also tied together; they both designed technological systems that complimented the ex-