Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 142

should have been conserved but over how this federally managed and unique river would
be used and by whom.
New South, New Deal, and Sun Belt economic interests had attempted to resolve the re-
gion's water and energy challenges with canals, dams, reservoirs, levees, and deeper chan-
nels. Private and public engineers changed rivers' shapes, forms, and functions to cope
with problematic flooding and drought. Another coalition of postwar southerners reevalu-
ated those old supply solutions to the region's water problems and moved in a completely
different direction. Like allies around the nation, the Sun Belt's countryside conservation-
ists and environmentalists thought dams and river structures were the problems and not the
solutions. For these engaged activists, the Wild and Scenic Chattooga River solved a new
problem: In a region that lacked significant free-flowing rivers, the Chattooga's new des-
ignation broke with the past and illustrated a new relationship between southern water and
southern power.
Author John Lane has described his personal Chattooga experiences to illustrate why the
river attracts people and what the river delivers to those who know and use it today. As a
nature writer, Lane tapped into what people have taken from and what expectations people
have of the river shed, including water quality concerns of longtime headwaters residents;
observations of the riverscape by literary and academic visitors; backcountry experiences
sought by backpackers; and the ambivalence of the residents of Clayton, Georgia, over the
impact of Deliverance on their community. Ultimately, he interprets the southern landscape
as sublime on its own terms, in terms that Rabun and Oconee County residents from yes-
terday and today would agree with, including those residents who continue to believe the
river was taken from them. 90 Bearing Lane's context in mind, we should remember that
in the end, through a series of choices in a century of energy regime transformation, the
spectacular Chattooga River, the star of Deliverance , was consciously left wild, or at least
undammed by the Georgia Power Company and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and
was delivered to the national whitewater boating and environmental community for safe-
keeping.