Somehow i lived through all this and barely noticed, except that i was already out there and had lived it during my childhood growing up in a nineteenth century farmhouse on a nineteenth century farm. That urban children would want those same experiences never occurred to me.
Yet it all revolved around this one movie.
Human deliverance is bound with this meme and will ultimately engulf the planet.. After all the entire of human knowledge and access to all humanity is available today on my cell phone. We all need to arise in the morning and put in a shift of four hours working with nature and communing with it at the same instance.
How “Deliverance” changed the way that we play
https://peopleofonefire.com/how-deliverance-changed-the-way-that-we-play.html
Creek men and women joke
that we were out wandering through the woods as soon as we could walk.
Learning how to wear shoes came later! My “later” came at age 10 when I
stepped, barefoot, on a broken Coca Cola bottle. However, that was not
how most people in the United States played and lived before 1972,
when “Deliverance” was released to the world.
Part Five of the Series on “Deliverance” and the enigma of Burt Reynolds
(Includes excerpts taken from © The Lord of Cumberland by Richard L. Thornton)
Journalists, movie-reviewers and bloggers today just don’t get it! The author of Deliverance,
James Dickey, was for his day a social radical. The mere act of four
businessmen putting a canoe in a Southern Appalachian river was highly
unusual. Just seeing someone in a canoe in a river would cause traffic
on a highway to stop and watch. The North Carolina and Georgia
Mountains were formerly deserted from the end of October to early May.
Most Southerners were terrified of being on a mountain highway, if it
snowed . . . and on a mountain river, anytime of year.
Construction of some ski resorts in
North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, plus Alpine Helen, GA in the
1960s had begun to draw some winter time visitors, but the economic
bases of virtually all towns in the region were textile and lumber
mills. All of these plants would be closed within a couple of years
after the signing of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) at the
end of the George W. Bush presidency in 1992. However, the tri-lateral
treaty was actually proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Dickey was from the South Carolina Low
Country, but as a teen, lived for a few years in the Cherry Log Creek
area of Gilmer County, GA. The Cherry Creek Valley is between Ellijay
and Blue Ridge. This is where he fell in love with the Appalachians.
In fact, his most famous poem, Cherry Log Road, was inspired by after
school afternoon trysts in an old abandoned car with a local mountain
gal. You can watch him read the poem at the end of this article.
This love of the mountains soon
transcended into a love of whitewater canoeing. His favorite canoeing
river was the Coosawattee River, which was near Cherry Log. Dicky was
horrified when local Boss Hogg’s produced enough political pressure to
get approval for Carters Dam, which would back up the Coosawattee River
and Talking Rock Creek, plus cover MANY nationally significant Native
American town sites. The creation of Carters Dam was the inspiration
for the book. Completion of the dam and the book were concurrent. Oh,
did we mention that at the time Carters Dam was the largest earthen dam
in the world and that it was built over a fault line in an active
earthquake zone?
The Back to Nature Movement
In 1970, if a young man had asked the
typical young lady to go hiking in the National Forest or canoeing on a
mountain river with some friends, she would have quickly punched the
“weird” button . . . and claimed to have other plans. Two years later,
she would have punched the “cool dude” or “man of my dreams” button . . .
especially if she has already gone to see “Deliverance.” In fact, I
distinctly remember asking an Emory University coed for a first date in
1970, in which we would eat at the Smith House Restaurant in Dahlonega
then look at the spring flowers and waterfalls along the highway to
Blood Mountain. She laughed at me and told me to find some hick girl
for such an outing.
Within a couple of years after the
release of “Deliverance,” many young people had “coupled up” and moved
to the mountains or at least some fertile valley to live off the land.
Yes, the change in values was that sudden. After I temporarily settled
into the abandoned chicken house near Track Rock Gap, I was astonished
to encounter many of my classmates from high school, who had been living
in the mountains since the mid-1970s.
One of my cousins received his Masters
degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University in Downtown
Atlanta then soon, along with his new bride, was running a cow dairy
farm in the Northwest Georgia Mountains. He eventually owned a
livestock and feed store then became a county agricultural agent then a
professor of Agricultural Science at the University of Tennessee. Two
years after I received my Masters in Urban Planning from Georgia State,
my bride and I were restoring an old mountain farm in the Reems Creek
Valley, north of Asheville. We soon would start the second
state-licensed goat cheese creamery in the United States and later the
first federally-licensed goat cheese creamery in Virginia’s Shenandoah
Valley. All along, I was a full- time architect and urban designer, but
my heart was in Nature and farming. Yes . . . that meant long hours of
work after the architecture work was done.
One of my classmates, who was studying
Industrial Science, started the Atlanta Area’s first outdoor recreation,
camping and canoeing store after watching Deliverance just before
graduation. Yes, that’s right. At the time in 1971, when Deliverance
was filmed, there is was not a single store in Georgia that specialized
in outdoor recreation . . . other than hunting and fishing. Prior to
then, if you wanted a tent or canoe, you could either buy it from Sears
or Western Auto or else order it by mail from a catalogue. My
fraternity brother openly admitted that the big change in his life
occurred the day we first skipped afternoon classes to go watch the
filming of Deliverance on the Chattooga River.
These
are images of Midtown made while on a class assignment. I was required
to take two photography classes prior to going to Mexico.
A disdain for the Hippie Movement
The Hippie Movement began in San
Francisco, but by the time that James Dickey was teaching English
Literature at Georgia Tech in 1969, the nation’s largest Hippie Colony
(30,000+) was in Midtown Atlanta, across the Downtown Expressway from
Georgia Tech. Dickey had nothing good to say about what was happening
across the expressway. It was an artificial circus in which most
participants play-acted by putting on gaudy clothing and proclaiming an
anti-materialistic lifestyle, fueled by a wide range of drugs. Like a 24
hour a day, seven day a week carnival, the sidewalks were packed with
people . . . a dozen rock bands and a legend of guitars blending
together in the background. The reality was a parade of drug-overdoses,
murders, rapes, mental breakdowns, unwanted pregnancies and
disillusionment.
Dickey told us that mankind was never
meant to be packed together like rats at war with nature. Even though
he, himself, was an alcoholic, he was especially condemning of the use
of hard drugs to gain enlightenment. He said that his high was obtained
by being on a mountain river. Little by little, as he showed us color
slides of the mountains and the South Atlantic Coast, we began to
understand what he was saying. Many of the things he told Georgia Tech
students would appear two years later in the words spoken by characters
in Deliverance.
Teotihuacan – Cerro Gordo in the background. I started walking northward immediately after taking this color slide.
A little over a year after I last heard
James Dickey share his worldview with students, I was standing in the
plaza in front of the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. Something
happened on a sunny June morning in Mexico. I suddenly had the urge to
break free of the un-natural constraints put on me by “civilization” . .
. just as Dickey described. I saw the mountaintop of Cerro Gordo
looming in the background and wanted to be there. Without a canteen or
a map, I marched over the Pyramid of the Moon and down the forbidden
other side then continued northward across an ancient landscape, covered
in broken pottery and stone tools. It was the first time that I had
hiked in the countryside since age 14, when I was a Senior Patrol Leader
and Eagle Scout with a Boy Scout troop. That love of nature had been
concealed by the attraction for girls, football, girls, sock hops,
parties, girls, good times, plus becoming a man and a professional
architect. Now it was back and there to stay. By the end of the
summer, I was hiking alone in the jungles of Central America, with
nothing to protect me but the fearlessness of youth and a US Navy K-bar
knife. My life would never been the same. I had gone down my own
Coosahatchee River.
Looking back all those years ago, I
still can’t decide if James Dickey’s book and movie changed the world we
knew or if Dickey somehow sensed that the world was about to change and
so wrote a book about it. Mother Earth News Magazine was first
published exactly when the book, Deliverance, was first published. Whatever the case, there is was an instantaneous change in North America and Western Europe after Deliverance
wowed the movie theaters in the spring of 1972. Young people started
viewing hiking, canoeing and camping in groups as the most preferred
form of casual dating. Suddenly, one began seeing more and more people
on the Appalachian Trail during the winter and early spring. Department
stores drastically expanded their selection of camping equipment and
supplies. Stores, specializing in outdoor activities other than hunting
and fishing sprang up all over the nation. Politicians suddenly began
approving construction of more hiking trails and canoe access sites for
rivers. State and national parks had to expand their camping
facilities.
Soon the next phase appeared. After
spending so much time in the wilderness, hundreds of thousands of young
people decided that they wanted to live with nature all the time. They
would live off the land and grow their own food. They bought canoes
and trail bikes. Some gave up after one season. Recognizing that the
Southern Highlands contained the greatest concentration of these
“Back-to-the-Landers, Mother Earth News moved to Hendersonville, NC in
1979 and established an experimental “Eco-village.” In our section of
the mountains, farmsteaders were highly organized socially. Almost
every weekend, we held potluck dinners, musical jam sessions, volleyball
matches, picnics or dance parties. The skilled farmers, especially
those with Native American roots, stayed on the land throughout that
decade . . . until the first child came.
Then young couples discovered that
doctors, hospitals, supermarkets, car dealers and tax collectors were
not interested in bartering organic vegetables in lieu of cash. There
was a horrific recession during the first two years of the Reagan
Administration (1981-82) that was instigated by the interest on loans
being allowed to rise to as much as 23%. Many middle class
entrepreneurs went bankrupt, while still running successful
agribusinesses, because they couldn’t pay the interest. That recession
pretty much permanently ended the widespread involvement of middle
class families in entrepreneurship and speculative agribusiness. Some
Back-to-the-Landers stayed on the land, but drove into town to work at
conventional jobs, which would pay for their rural lifestyle. A few
were able to expand their original pioneer efforts into commercial
businesses such as smoked trout factories, licensed cheese creameries,
large organic farms and rural industrial plants for canning preserves,
etc. The joy of being part of thousands of young people, taking part
in the Back-To-The-Land Revolution, was gone.
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