Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 136

and why the forest burned in 1976. Dickey's novel (1970) and his subsequent screen ad-
aptation (1972) introduced the country to the stunning and adrenaline-pumping Chattooga
River. The basic story followed the epic trials of four suburban Atlanta professionals who
floated the fictional Cahulawasee River before a hydroelectric dam and reservoir drowned
the wild river forever. The film opened with construction images of Duke Power Com-
pany's Jocassee dam (one component of the Keowee-Toxaway hydronuclear project) as a
stand-in for the fictional Cahulawasee's dam. Lewis, played by Burt Reynolds, intoned in
an opening voice-over that the Cahulawasee was “just about the last wild, untamed, un-
polluted, unfucked-up river in the South.” 58 Dickey effectively communicated his opinion
about special rivers like the Chattooga, and his narrative revealed the risky transformative
powers that a wild South could bestow on people disconnected from nature. As the soft,
inexperienced, and domesticated Sun Belt suburbanites descended an increasingly chaotic
river, one member of the party was raped by a woodsman, two others committed murder,
and a third drowned after the party “voted” to bury the first casualty without notifying the
authorities. In the process of commenting on modernization's dulling effect on individual
freedom and the perilous consequences of wilderness exposure, Dickey's screenplay also
reinforced negative Appalachian stereotypes about a land of dueling banjos and backward
mountain people. 59 But despite the dark tale of male rape and murder on the Cahulawasee
that leaves today's campers apprehensive about spending a night in the watershed, the wild
and raging riverscape on the big screen attracted thousands to the real Chattooga River.
In 1971, the year before the Deliverance film was released, the Forest Service estimated
that 800 people visited the river annually. During the wild and scenic river study process,
one Georgia State Game and Fish staffer commented on visitor projections, and he worried
that a “loss of space and tranquility due to use by excessive numbers of people” was among
the “greatest” dangers “on this river.” Furthermore, Claude Hastings believed that im-
proved access to the river would actually invite recreational conflict between experienced
and inexperienced river users. 60 Time would prove Hastings right. Many of these early vis-
itors undoubtedly learned about the unmanaged river from local and regional newspapers
such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution . Others discovered the river via a network of pad-
dlers and national boating journals like American Whitewater , which published two Chat-
tooga boating guides prior to the river's wild and scenic designation. 61 The first generation
of southern paddlers—including Fritz Orr Sr., Ramone Eaton, Randy Carter, Hugh Cald-
well, and Frank Bell—had also introduced new boaters to the river as early as the 1950s.
Many of these men either owned or worked for summer camps, such as Merrie-Wood and
Camp Mondamin, in the southern Appalachians. This older generation initiated succeeding
generations of paddlers—including Payson Kennedy, Fritz Orr Jr., Claude Terry, and Doug
Woodward—to southern rivers, and they in turn established the most prolific guiding busi-
nesses of the 1970s that still operate today: the Nantahala Outdoor Center (Kennedy) and