Summer of Deliverance by Christopher Dickey

Author:Christopher Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Touchstone Book
Published: 1998-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

AT THE RIVER

The plot was simple and strong: Four Southern suburbanites decide JL to go canoeing in the last remnants of the Appalachian wilderness. They are Lewis Medlock, a survivalist determined to master Nature single-handed; Ed Gentry, a friend whose only real acquaintance with the wild is what he sees reflected in Lewis’s fierce excitement; Bobby Trippe, a soft denizen of sales meetings and country clubs who’s just along for the ride; and Drew Ballinger, the conscientious family man who, like the rest, has no idea at all what he’s getting into. These four plunge into a wilderness populated by few and brutal inhabitants—a terrifying place where one of them is sodomized at gunpoint, one is killed, one almost loses a leg, and all of them learn, of necessity, to murder.

I’d been watching that plot, the book, the script take shape since the days when my father took me onto the mild rapids of the Chattahoochee in an aluminum canoe, when I was hardly big enough to see over the gunwales. I’d never forgotten that night he and Al and Lewis King came back from the Coosawattee hurt and scared. I’d seen the arrow tremble on its rest as the tension of the bowstring grew too much to bear, and the silent flight of deer over fences as we staked out frozen cornfields; seen the young men climbing cliffs above the Italian sea, seen the narrow-eyed sheriff send us on our way at the edge of the Painted Desert. My father had sat in our living room in Atlanta in the fall of 1962 and talked the plot into that first Grundig tape recorder we’d bought in Germany, and we had all felt the fear of the wild among the dense, dark forests of Oregon. And all the while that he’d been writing the book, he’d been thinking of what the movie might be.

The novel hit the stands in the late spring of 1970 and climbed the best-seller lists quickly. Only the phenomenal success of Erich Segal’s Love Story kept Deliverance out of the number-one position. I watched from a distance. Jim Dickey was really on a roll, and all I could do was stand aside, amazed and amused, proud and a little appalled, as he loomed larger and larger in the book reviews, the magazine articles, on talk shows and publicity tours; combative and funny, drunk and outrageous and ruthless, in fact—and even more outrageous and ruthless in the stories he told about his experiences. Talk and testosterone were taking over, with heavy hits of Jack Daniel’s to keep things going. At a book-and-author luncheon with Erich Segal and Pauline Kael, Segal told the little old ladies that in his novel the only four-letter word was L-O-V-E. When the luncheon was over, and the three of them had crowded into the back of a limousine, somebody turned to Segal—my father would sometimes attribute this remark to Kael—and said: “Listen, you little cocksucker, what do you know about L-O-V-E?” It was a story that Jim Dickey liked to repeat on any and all occasions.

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