Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  There were double-deck bunks in the corners of the room. The corners were cold. We pulled three mattresses off the bunks and put them down side by side before the fire. We unrolled our three sleeping bags. It had been a big day; we were tired, and slept without stirring. Sam dreamed in the night that he was eating his own beard.

  With a load of honey and cathead biscuits, gifts of Mammy Young, we went down out of the valley in the morning, mile after mile on a dirt road that ran beside and frequently crossed the outlet stream, which was the beginnings of the Tallulah River. Some twenty miles on down, the river had cut a gorge, in hard quartzite, six hundred feet deep. Warner Brothers had chosen the gorge as the site for the filming of a scene from James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance. This mountain land in general was being referred to around the state as “Deliverance country.” The novel seemed to have been the most elaborate literary event in Georgia since Gone with the Wind. Deliverance was so talked about that people had, for conversational convenience, labelled its every part (“the owl scene,” “the banjo scene”). It was a gothic novel, a metaphysical terror novel, the structural center of which involved four men going through the rapids of a mountain river in canoes. They were attacked. The action climax occurred when one of the canoemen scaled the wall of a fantastically sheer gorge to establish an ambush and kill a mountain man. He killed him with a bow and arrow. Carol and Sam, like half the people in Atlanta and a couple of dozen in Hollywood, called this “the climb-out scene,” and they took me to see where Warners would shoot. The six-hundred-foot gorge was a wonder indeed, clefting narrowly and giddily down through the quartzite to the bed of the river that had done the cutting. Remarkably, though, no river was there. A few still pools. A trickle of water. Graffiti adorned the rock walls beside the pools. There was a dam nearby, and, in 1913, the river had been detoured through a hydropower tunnel. Steel towers stood on opposite lips of the chasm, supported by guy wires. A cable connected the towers. They had been built for performances of wire walkers, the Flying Wallendas. Nearby was the Cliffhanger Café. A sign said, “Enjoy Coca-Cola. See it here, free. Tallulah Gorge. 1200 feet deep.” The Georgia Natural Areas Council looked on. Too late to register that one. The eye of the Warner Brothers camera would, however, register just what it wanted to select and see, and it would move up that wall in an unfailing evocation of wilderness. I was awed by the power of Dickey. In writing his novel, he had assembled “Deliverance country” from such fragments, restored and heightened in the chambers of his imagination. The canoes in his novel dived at steep angles down breathtaking cataracts and shot like javelins through white torrents among blockading monoliths. If a canoe were ten inches long and had men in it three inches high, they might find such conditions in a trout stream, steeply inclined, with cataracts and plunge pools and rushing bright water falling over ledges and splaying through gardens of rock. Dickey must have imagined something like that and then enlarged the picture until the trout stream became a gothic nightmare for men in full-size canoes. A geologically maturer, less V-shaped stream would not have served. No actual river anywhere could have served his artistic purpose—not the Snake, not the Upper Hudson, not even the Colorado—and least of all a river in Georgia, whose wild Chattooga, best of the state’s white-water rivers, has comparatively modest rapids. The people of the Deliverance mountains were malevolent, opaque, and sinister. Arthur and Mammy Young.

  There were records of the presence of isolated cottonmouths on Dry Fork Creek, in wild, forested piedmont country east of Athens. Dry Fork Creek, a tributary of a tributary of the Savannah River, was about halfway between Vesta and Rayle, the beginning and the end of nowhere. We searched the woods along the creek. It would not have been at all unusual had we found the highland moccasin (the copperhead) there, for this was his terrain—Agkistrodon contortrix contortrix. What we were looking for, though, was the water moccasin (the cottonmouth), inexplicably out of his range. Cottonmouths belong in the coastal plain, in the rice fields, in the slow-moving rivers—Agkistrodon piscivorus piscivorus. Seeing a cottonmouth in a place like this would be a rare experience, and Carol fairly leaped into the woods. For my part, I regretted that I lacked aluminum boots. Carol was wearing green tennis shoes. Sam’s feet were covered with moccasins. Carol rolled every log. She lifted anything that could have sheltered a newt, let alone a snake. By the stream, she ran her eye over every flat rock and projecting branch. Always disappointed, she quickly moved on. Sam sauntered beside her. The flood plain was beautiful under big sycamores, water oaks, maples: light filtering down in motes, wet leaves on the ground, cold water moving quietly in the stream. But the variety of tracks she found was disturbingly incomplete. “There, on that sandbar—those are possum tracks. Possums and coons go together, but that’s just possum right there, no way about it. And that is not right. There shouldn’t be a bar like that with no coon tracks on it, even if the water goes up and down every night. Possums can live anywhere. Coons can’t. Coon tracks signify a healthy place. I don’t much like this place. It’s been cut over. There are no big dead trees.” One big dead tree with a cottonmouth under it would have changed that, would have glorified Dry Fork Creek for Carol, coons or no coons-piscivorus piscivorus caught poaching, out of his territory, off the edge of his map, beyond his range. I felt her disappointment and was sorry the snakes were not there. “Don’t be disappointed,” she said. “When we go down the Cemocheckobee, cottonmouths will show us the way.”

  Buffalo disappeared from Georgia in early Colonial time. William Bartram noted this when he visited the colony and wrote Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773—74. Bartram, from Philadelphia, was the first naturalist to describe in detail the American subtropics. After his book reached London, sedentary English poets cribbed from his descriptions (Wordsworth, for example, and Coleridge). Ten miles south of Dry Fork Creek, Sam, Carol, and I crossed Bartram’s path. In Bartram’s words, “We came into an open Forest of Pines, Scrub white Oaks, Black Jacks, Plumb, Hicory, Grapes Vines, Rising a sort of Ridge, come to a flat levill Plain, and at the upper side of this, levell at the foot of the hills of the great Ridge, is the great Buffiloe Lick, which are vast Pits, licked in the Clay, formerly by the Buffiloes, and now kept smoothe and open by Cattle, deer, and horses, that resort here constantly to lick the clay, which is a greesey Marle of various colours, Red, Yellow & white, & has a sweetish taste, but nothing saltish that I could perceive.” Bartram was describing what is now Philomath, Georgia 30659—a one-street town consisting of thirty houses and a buffalo lick. Philomath was established, early in the nineteenth century, as a seat of learning—hence the name. The town was the address of an academy whose students, in time, vanished like the buffalo. Now it was a place of preeminent silence under big oaks, and as we glided into town we were the only thing that moved. Ninety blacks, fifty whites lived there, but no one was out in the midday shade. The almost idling engine was the only sound. In an L-shaped elegant clapboard house, built in 1795, lived Dorothy Daniel Wright. Sam and Carol, having read Bartram’s description and having determined that the buffalo lick was still intact, wanted to see it and, they hoped, to register it as a Georgia Natural Area. Miss Wright was the person to see. It was her lick. She was in her upper sixties. Her hair was white and swept upward, and crowned with a braided gold bun. Her welcome was warm. She showed us the lick. Cattle and deer had licked it slick all through her girlhood, she said. Now it was covered with grass, some hawthorn and sumac, and dominated by an immense, outreaching laurel oak. Carol squatted flat-footed, knees high, and dug with her hands for various colors of clay. She ate some blue clay, and handed pieces to me and Sam. It was sweet, bland, alkaline, slightly chewy. “My first thought was ‘soapy,’” she said. “I expected it to get stronger, but it didn’t. The final thought was ‘sweetness:” She put a bit more in her mouth and ate it contemplatively. There was, apparently, no sodium chloride in this ground. Phosphate, sodium, and calcium are what the buffalo licked. Where did they get their salt? “Twelve miles away there
was salt,” Miss Wright said. “Twelve miles is nothin’ to a buffalo roamin’ around. Between the two licks, they got all the minerals they needed for their bovine metabolism.” Miss Wright had taught biology and chemistry in various high schools for forty-three years. She was eager to register the Great Buffalo Lick Natural Area, which had once been a boundary-line landmark separating the Georgia colony from the territory of the Creeks and Cherokees. She took us home to a lunch of salad and saltines. Into the salad went mushrooms, violets, and trout lilies that Carol had gathered in the mountains the day before.

  Leaving Philomath, heading south, Sam commented how easy and pleasant that experience had been and how tense such encounters could sometimes be. He talked about a redneck peanut farmer in south Georgia, owner of a potential Natural Area. This redneck had taken one look at Sam’s beard and had seemed ready to kill him then and there.

  “What is a redneck, Sam?”

  “You know what a redneck is, you little Yankee bastard.”

  “I want to hear your definition.”

  “A redneck is a fat slob in a pickup truck with a rifle across the back. He hates ‘niggers.’ He would rather have his kids ignorant than go to school with colored. I guess I don’t like rednecks. I guess I’ve known some.”

  “Some of my best friends are rednecks,” Carol said.

  D.O.R. blacksnake, five miles south of Irwinton—old and bloated. “I’ll just get it off the road, so its body won’t be further humiliated,” Carol said. Across a fence, a big sow was grunting. Carol carried the snake to the fence. She said, “Here, piggy-poo, look what I’ve got for you.” She tossed the snake across the fence. The sow bit off the snake’s head and ate it like an apple.

  “Interesting,” Carol said, “that we can feed a rotten snake to something we in turn will eat.”

  I said I would rather eat the buffalo lick.

  Carol said, “I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve had better clay.”

  We were out of the piedmont and down on the coastal plain, into the north of south Georgia. The roadside ads were riddled with bullet holes. “PREPARE TO MEET JESUS CHRIST THE LORD.” “WE WANT TO WIPE OUT CANCER IN YOUR LIFETIME.” “WE CANNOT ACCEPT TIRES THAT HAVE BEEN CAPPED AS TRADE-INS.”

  Johnny Cash was back. Indians were now his theme. He was singing about a dam that was going to flood Seneca land, although the Senecas had been promised title to their land “as long as the moon shall rise.” Cash’s voice was deeper than ever. He sounded as if he were smoking a peace pipe through an oboe. Carol hugged herself. “As long … as the moon … shall rise … As long … as the rivers … flow.” “DON’T LOSE YOUR SOUL BY THE MARK OF THE BEAST.”

  We ate muskrat that night in a campsite on flat ground beside Big Sandy Creek, in Wilkinson County, innermost Georgia—muskrat with beans, chili powder, onions, tomatoes, and kelp. “I have one terrible handicap,” Carol said. “I cannot follow a recipe.” The muskrat, though, was very good. Carol had parboiled it for twenty minutes and then put it through a meat grinder, medium grind. Firewood was scarce, because the area was much used by fishermen who were prone to build fires and fish all night. Carol went up a tall spruce pine, and when she was forty feet or so above the ground she began to break off dead limbs and throw them down. She had to throw them like spears to clear the living branches of the tree. Pine burns oily, but that would not matter tonight. The muskrat was in a pot. Sam and I built up the fire. He pitched a tent.

  To pass time before dinner, I put the canoe into the river and paddled slowly downstream. Carol called to me from the tree, “Watch for snakes. They’ll be overhead, in the limbs of trees.” She was not warning me; she was trying to raise the pleasure of the ride. “If you don’t see the snake, you can tell by the splash,” she went on. “A frog splash is a concentrated splash. A snake splash is a long splat.” Gliding, watching, I went a quarter of a mile without a splash or a splat. It was dusk. The water was growing dark. I heard the hoot of a barred owl. Going back against the current, I worked up an appetite for muskrat.

  After dinner, in moonlight, Sam and Carol and I got into the canoe and went up the river. A bend to the left, a bend to the right, and we penetrated the intense darkness of a river swamp that seemed to reach out unendingly. We could only guess at its dimensions. Upland swamps occur in areas between streams. River swamps are in the flood plains of rivers, and nearly all the streams in the Georgia coastal plain have them. They can be as much as six miles wide, and when the swamps of two or more big rivers connect, the result can be a vast and separate world. The darkness in there was so rich it felt warm. It was not total, for bars and slats of moonlight occasionally came through, touched a root or a patch of water. Essentially, however, everything was black: black water, black vegetation—water-standing maples, cypress—black on black. Columnar trunks were all around us, and we knew the channel only by the feel of the current, which sometimes seemed to be coming through from more than one direction. Here the black water sucked and bubbled, roiled by, splashed through the roots of the trees. Farther on, it was silent again. Silent ourselves, we pushed on into the black. Carol moved a flashlight beam among the roots of trees. She held the flashlight to her nose, because the eye can see much more if the line of sight is closely parallel to the beam. She inspected minutely the knobby waterlines of the trees. Something like a sonic boom cracked in our ears. “Jesus, what was that?”

  “Beaver.”

  The next two slaps were even louder than the first. Carol ignored the beaver, and continued to move the light. It stopped. Out there in the obsidian was a single blue eye.

  “A blue single eye is a spider,” she said. “Two eyes is a frog. Two eyes almost touching is a snake. An alligator’s eyes are blood red.”

  Two tiny coins now came up in her light. “Move in there,” she said. “I want that one.”

  With a throw of her hand, she snatched up a frog. It was a leopard frog, and she let him go. He was much within his range. Carol was looking for river frogs, pig frogs, carpenter frogs, whose range peripheries we were stalking. She saw another pair of eyes. The canoe moved in. Her hand swept out unseen and made a perfect tackle, thighs to knees. This was a bronze frog, home on the range. Another pair of eyes, another catch, another disappointment—a bullfrog. Now another shattering slap on the water. Another. The beaver slapped only when the canoe was moving upstream. The frog chorus, filling the background, varied in pitch and intensity, rose and fell. Repeatedly came the hoot of the barred owl.

  Sam dipped a cup and had a drink. “I feel better about drinking water out of swamps than out of most rivers,” he said. “It’s filtered. No one ever says a good word for a swamp. The whole feeling up to now has been ‘Fill it in—it’s too wet to plow, too dry to fish.’ Most people stay out of swamps. I love them. I like the water, the reptiles, the amphibians. There is so much life in a swamp. The sounds are so different. Frogs, owls, birds, beavers. Birds sound different in swamps.”

  “You see a coon in here and you realize it’s his whole world,” Carol said.

  “It’s a beautiful home with thousands of creatures,” Sam said.

  With all this ecological intoxication, I thought they were going to fall out of the canoe.

  “Life came out of the swamps,” Sam said. “And now swamps are among the last truly wild places left.”

  We went back downstream. Tobacco smoke was in the air over the river. Occasionally, on the bank, we saw an orange-red glow, momentarily illuminating a black face. Fishing lines, slanting into the stream, were visible against the light of small fires. The canoe moved soundlessly by, and on into the darkness. “The groids sure love to fish,” Sam murmured. The moon was low. It was midnight.

  Now, at noon, a hundred miles or so to the southeast and by another stream, we were sitting on the big felled oak, pouring out the last of the wine, with Chap Causey moving toward us a foot at a time in his American dragline crane. He swung a pair of mats around behind him and backed up a bit more, and as he went on gutting the s
treambed the oak began to tremble. It must have weighed two or three tons, but it was trembling and felt like an earthquake—time to move. Carol picked up a piece of dry otter scat. She bounced it in the palm of her hand and looked upcurrent at the unaltered stream and downcurrent into the new ditch. She said, “You can talk about coons’ being able to go off into the woods and eat nuts and berries, because they’re omnivores. But not this otter. He’s finished.” She broke open the scat. Inside it were fishbones and hair—hair of a mouse or hair of a young rabbit. There were fish otoliths as well, two of them, like small stones. She flung it all into the stream. “He’s done for,” she said, and waved goodbye to Chap Causey.

  On down the dirt road from the stream-channelization project, we saw ahead a D.O.R.

  “Looks like a bad one,” Carol said.

  Sam stopped. “Yes, it’s a bad one,” he said. “Canebrake. Do you want to eat him?”

  Carol leaned over and looked. “He’s too old. Throw him out of the road, the poor darlin’. What gets me is that some bastard is proud of having run over him. When I die, I don’t want to be humiliated like that”

  Sam threw the rattlesnake out of the road. Then we headed southwest through underdeveloped country, almost innocent of towns—Alma, Douglas, Adel, Moultrie, a hundred miles from Alma to Moultrie.

  D.O.R. king snake, blue jay, sparrow hawk, wood thrush, raccoon, catbird, cotton rat. The poor darlin’s. Threw them out of the road.

  A.O.R. hobo—man with a dog. “Oh, there’s a good guy,” Carol said as we passed him. “He has a dog and a bedroll. What else do you need?”

  D.O.R. opossum. Cook County. Three miles east of Adel. Carol spoke admiringly of the creature flexibility of the opossum. Among the oldest of mammals, the possum goes all the way back to Cretaceous time, she said, and, like people, it has never specialized, in a biological sense. “You can specialize yourself out of existence. Drain the home of the otter. The otter dies. The opossum, though, can walk away from an ecological disaster. So much for that. Try something else. He eats anything. He lives almost anywhere. That’s why the possum is not extinct. That’s why the possum has been so successful.” One place this particular possum was never going to walk away from was Georgia Highway 76. Technology, for him the ultimate ecological disaster, had clouted him at seventy miles an hour.