John Lane

Q: Central to your book are the myths and legends about the backwoods South created or spread by Deliverance. You also touch on some of the myths and legends about James Dickey. These seem like elusive subjects to tackle. Were they? Do you feel like any of your notions about Dickey changed through writing this book?
A: I’ve always been in a tricky place: I’m interested in both the real and imagined river. I’ve paddled the Chattooga for twenty years and I have an interest in natural history. I guess you could call me an amateur naturalist. So each trip downstream, the river was real to me in a way a scientist could understand. I was accustomed to thinking of it as a real “natural system,” an observable landscape. When I began to approach the Chattooga through my imagination and the imaginations of others (through literature), I realized I had to deal with it as a very complex cultural landscape as well. No matter how interested one is in the real Mississippi, its periodic flooding and environmental health, Huckleberry Finn is always in the background. Humans had rendered the Chattooga in language for hundreds of years, beginning with the myths that have survived from the Cherokees and continuing through William Bartram, Rick Bass, Chris Camuto. Even the various guide books and newspaper articles added their various voices to the river. I knew I had to find a way to intertwine the human cultural history with the natural history and add my own personal history. I thought of it from the beginning as a sort of “literary first descent.” And of course for me a descent of the river lead through James Dickey. I am a poet and I’ve loved his work since college. His sensibility was important in my understanding the southern cultural landscape. His novel Deliverance, written about a fictional north Georgia river, lead quickly after publication to a film and it was shot on the very real Chattooga river. Dickey’s “Deliverance River” and the Chatttoga became intertwined in people’s minds. We’ll be sorting out the relationships Dickey launched between “real” and “imagined” for centuries. I’ve come to respect Dickey more as I explored his notions about wildness and adventure. Hopefully he’ll recover some of the position he held as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s.

Q: You’ve published three collections of poetry and two collections of essays, in addition to having edited numerous anthologies. But this is your first book-length narrative. Was the writing process different from your previous work?
A: It took a lot longer than anything I’ve worked on so far! I’ve had a notion that I wanted to write a book-length narrative about the Chattooga since 1985. That’s when I first wrote up a book proposal and circulated it. I’m glad it didn’t sell. It wasn’t much really, just a sample chapter and an outline. The publishers who looked at it had the idea that it should be a coffee table picture book. I started working on the book in earnest about 8 years ago after I had taught Franklin Burroughs’s The River Home several times. I realized, reading Frank’s great narrative about the Waccamaw, that it is possible to do what I wanted to do—combine the human and natural history in a single personal essay.

Q: I know James Salter wrote a novel in 1979 about rock climbing called Solo Faces, and he has said that it was difficult to write the descriptive climbing passages even though he knew the sport and is a great writer. Your book seems successful to me though. Did paddling—the culture and language around paddling—easily lend itself to literary writing? The narrative structure is both elegant and simple—you go down the river as you read the book. Did that structure help you write this?
A: It was a challenge getting the passages right about running rapids. There just isn’t much “literature” about whitewater to look back on as models. Donald Hall has a theory about sports writing, “the smaller the ball, the better the writing.” So golf has the best writing and football has less and maybe medicine ball has the least. Concerning “adventure” sports I think you could say something like, “the less adrenaline involved, the better the writing.” It’s just so hard to write about something as exciting as running a rapid while you are in the middle of it. There’s some great flat-water canoe nonfiction. John McPhee’s work comes to mind as well as Bill Mason’s meditations in things like The Path of the Paddle. Climbing has a long reflective literature, and most climbers would argue with you that the sport is not adrenaline driven. It’s a mental sport, more akin to dance. Maybe that’s why it’s got such great writing. Hiking has some great books and essays, as does bird-watching. One of the ways I feel I improved my descriptions of the Chattooga’s rapids was to sit by them and watch others run them and try to meditate on the experience from outside it. Then I’d go back and use those passages as digressions. As for structure, there are two good ways to write about a river. You either go down it or up it—Huckleberry Finn versus Heart of Darkness. Going up the river wouldn’t have been half as fun since I’m a kayaker. It is interesting though that several chapters—hiking chapters—do head upstream.

Q: It’s odd to think that a movie as harrowing as Deliverance could actually draw people to the Chattooga River area, but that is exactly what happened, isn’t it?
A: Exactly. Once you go over there you are hooked. It is one of the most beautiful rivers in the world. There’s nothing quite like it. If I could only choose one river to paddle the rest of my life, it would be the Chattooga.

Q: Are there other wilderness areas in the United Staes that have been as closely identified with a novel or movie as the Chattooga is with Deliverance?
A: Well, there’s the Everglades. I’ve taken students on a week-long paddling trip through the Wilderness Waterway and camped on the island Mr. Watson lived on. Peter Matthiessen wrote a novel about that landscape. Then there is The Monkey Wrench Gang. How could anyone ever read that Edward Abbey novel and not identify with the Four Corners area of the desert Southwest?

Q: In Chattooga you address ecological aspects of the basin’s history and current environmental issues. Where do you stand on issues of public use versus preservation?
A:Obviously I’m much in favor of enlightened use and protection of public land. I’m not one of those free-market types who believe that private interests could do a better job than the government managing land. I’m glad that the government, through the Wild and Scenic River Act, preserved the river corridor, and I wish we could preserve many more. Big government all the way, if it means more protected river miles! I think the three white-water outfitters have done a good job of managing use on the rivers. It’s here I probably differ most with James Dickey, who felt that the river was destroyed once it was discovered and floated by more than a few adventurers. I think if Dickey would have had a love for paddling canoes or kayaks (though he loved rivers, he remained a novice paddler throughout his life) he would have seen the river through different eyes. I think it was Stephen Jay Gould who said you only fight to save the things you love. Well, skilled paddlers love the Chattooga.