James Dickey - Deliverance

Around the turn it came into view, and broadened in white. Everywhere we were going was filled with spring-bubblings, with lively rufflings, not dangerous-looking but sprightly and vivid. There was not the sensation of the water’s raging, but rather that of its alertness and resourcefulness as it split apart at rocks, frothed lightly, corkscrewed, fluted, fell, recovered, jostled into helmet-shapes over smoothed stones, and then ran out of sight down long garden staircase steps around another turn.

I looked for a way through. Drew pointed straight ahead, and it was better done that way than saying it. I sank the paddle into the river. The main current V’d ahead of us, and looked to be straight, as far as I could tell, though the V that indicated the fastest water disappeared about halfway along down the rapids.

“Call the rocks,” I hollered. “We want to go straight down the middle.”

“Ay, ay,” Drew said. “Let’s go there.”

We headed into the waist of the V. The canoe shifted gears underneath, and the water began to throw us. We rode into the funnel-neck and were sucked into the main rapids so suddenly that it felt as though the ordinary river had been snatched from under us like a rug, and we were tossing and bucking and banging on stones, trying to hold the head of the canoe downriver any way we could. Drew bobbed in front of me, leaping toward a place that could be reached in no other way. He was incompetent but cool; no panic came back from him. Every time he changed sides with his paddle, I changed to the opposite side. Once we began to go catercornered; the water began to swing us broadside like mania, and I felt control sliding away, off somewhere in the bankbushes looking at us, but Drew made half the right move and I made the other half, and we righted. The hull scraped and banged over rocks, but we hung straight in the current, trembling with force and luck, past the deadly, vibrant rocks we overflowed.

I yelled to Drew to keep his paddle on one side or the other. He chose the right—the biggest rocks seemed to be there; they kept looming up, through the water and just under it—while I alternated between sweeping us forward, adding to our speed wherever I could, and pulling backward on the river whenever we got too close to the rocks on the right. Already it was beginning to be like work I knew, and I felt safer because of that.

Now I could look on past Drew and see the white water lapse and riffle out into green and dark. There was a short flourish of nervous rippling that took us between two black boulders, and we were through.

Drew hiked up his hand on the gunwale of the canoe and looked back, with a surprised pleasure.

“Old Lewis,” he said. “He knows something.”

I looked for the other canoe, which was not far ahead of us. Bobby and Lewis were plowing away at water that looked curiously dead, after the rapids.

But it was evening water. There was no sun on it, and the light that made the reflections was going fast. Far off ahead was the pouring of another set of rapids or falls with—I was already ready to bet—a curve in it.

I was awfully tired, though not sore. As the sun lost energy, so did I, and the edge of night-cold clinched it. I wanted to let go of the river.

We drifted slowly. The current entered my muscles and body as though I were carrying it; it came up through the paddle. I fished up a couple of beers from our pack and opened them and passed one to Drew. He twisted back and took it, one lens of his glasses dark with the sunset.

“It’s a hard life with us pioneers,” he said, and whistled a line from “In My Birch-Bark Canoe.”

I lifted my beer and drank, keeping the beer coming in as fast as I could get it down. The nylon of my legs was drying out and clinging to my calves and shins. I pulled the cloth legs loose from me and took up the paddle again. I felt marvelous.

We were about even with the other canoe. Like that we went down more drifting than paddling, into the dark coming upriver to meet us. There were no rapids—though we kept hearing them—and we were riding through rocky banks and tall mournful long-leaf pines. Once a little road, overgrown with weeds and bushes, ran along the left bank for a few hundred yards and then gave out at a fallen tree. A hawk circled in the dying blue, the trailing edge of his wings standing out sharply in the deep intensification of the evening sky.

It was beginning to be very wild and quiet. I remembered to be frightened and right away I was. It was the beautiful impersonality of the place that struck me the hardest; I would not have believed that it could hit me all at once like this, or with such force. The silence and the silence-sound of the river had nothing to do with any of us. It had nothing to do with the town we had just left, with its few streetlights in the mountain darkness, its cafes and the faces of farmers in the tired glow of rigged wires in the town square, and the one theater showing a film that was appearing on late television in the city. I dozed, much as I had done with Lewis in the car in the morning, and I saw again our approach to the blue hills, the changing shapes and colors and positions as we came toward them, except that in some way or another my mind got turned around and I was going backwards, away from the hills and through the Clabber Girl signs and away from the country Jesuses and back to the buildup of roadhouses and motels and shopping centers around the city. Martha was there, and Dean, and it was a shock for me to realize, all of a sudden, that I was not with them; that I was looking onward into curves of water. Martha was worrying now, watching TV with Dean. She was not used to being without me at night, and I could see her sitting with her hands folded, in the position of a woman bravely suffering. Not suffering badly, but suffering just the same, her feet in hot mules.

I backwatered a little, and drove us with a long stroke up alongside the green canoe. An insect hit my lips like a bullet.

“Don’t you think we ought to make camp pretty soon?” I said to Lewis.

“Yeah, I do. I’m afraid if we go any farther the banks might begin to get too high for us to get out on. You-all look for a place on the left, and we’ll look over here.”

We ran some small rapids, phosphorescent in the twilight, feeling hardly more than a slight alteration of the stream under us, but it was enough to remind us of the trouble that would result if we were to dump the equipment in the water in the dark. The trees and bushes where I was looking were connecting, becoming one solid thing; it was very hard to make out what the details were like. But there did seem to be a kind of shelf about four feet up from the water. I pointed this out to Lewis, and be nodded. I swung the canoe toward the place, working cater-cornered against the bias of the stream. We hit the bank with a soft yielding bump. I got squeamishly out into the water and held the canoe, the sliding cold around me full of the presence of night-creatures. Drew scrambled out and tied us to a sapling. I pulled myself up and out as Bobby and Lewis maneuvered alongside; the hair on my shoulders crawled with discomfort.

We unlashed the stuff and began to make camp. Lewis had brought some long flashlights, and he set these up on stumps and in the forks of bushes to form an area of concentrated light. In and out of this we moved, working at strange duties. Lewis seemed to know where everything was, and went around placing articles on the ground in the positions from which he expected them to rise and create a camp: the two tents, the grill, the air mattresses, the sleeping bags. They tried to be useful, but Drew and Bobby did not seem to be getting much done, and I saw the folly of just standing around and letting Lewis do everything, though it would have been all right with him if I had. I was sleepy, and I went to the equipment that had to do with that. I blew up the air mattresses with a hand pump, all four of them; it took a good half an hour, and I was pumping steadily all the time, while the river lightened in front of me and the woods at my back got thicker and thicker with blackness.