A Walk in the Woods

"Yew are? Well, good for you. Have a drink then."
"No really."
"How 'bout yew?" she said to me.
"Oh, no thanks." I couldn't have freed my pinned arms even if I had wanted a drink.
They dangled before me like tyrannosaur limbs.
"Yer not reformed, are ya?"
"Well, kind of." I had decided, for purposes of solidarity, to forswear alcohol for the
duration.
She looked at us. "You guys like Mormons or something?"
"No, just hikers."
She nodded thoughtfully, satisfied with that, and had a drink. Then she made Darren
jump again.
They dropped us at Mull's Motel in Hiawassee, an old-fashioned, nondescript, patently
nonchain establishment on a bend in the road near the center of town. We thanked them
profusely, went through a little song-and-dance of trying to give them gas money, which
they stoutly refused, and watched as Darren returned to the busy road as if fired from a
rocket launcher. I believe I saw him bang his head again as they disappeared over a small
rise.
And then we were alone with our packs in an empty motel parking lot in a dusty,
forgotten, queer-looking little town in northern Georgia. The word that clings to every
hiker's thoughts in north Georgia is Deliverance, the 1970 novel by James Dickey that was
made into a Hollywood movie. It concerns, as you may recall, four middle-aged men from
Atlanta who go on a weekend canoeing trip down the fictional Cahulawasee River (but
based on the real, nearby Chattooga) and find themselves severely out of their element.
"Every family I've ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary," a
character in the book remarks forebodingly as they drive up. "Some of them are in for
making liquor or running it, but most of them are in for murder. They don't think a whole
lot about killing people up here." And so of course it proves, as our urban foursome find
themselves variously buggered, murdered, and hunted by a brace of demented
backwoodsmen.
Early in the book Dickey has his characters stop for directions in some "sleepy and
hookwormy and ugly" town, which for all I know could have been Hiawassee. What is
certainly true is that the book was set in this part of the state, and the movie was filmed
in the area. The famous banjo-plucking albino who played "Dueling Banjos" in the movie
still apparently lives in Clayton, just down the road.
Dickey's book, as you might expect, attracted heated criticism in the state when it was
published (one observer called it "the most demeaning characterization of southern
highlanders in modern literature," which, if anything, was an understatement), but in fact
it must be said that people have been appalled by northern Georgians for 150 years. One
nineteenth-century chronicler described the region's inhabitants as "tall, thin, cadaverous-
looking animals, as melancholy and lazy as boiled cod-fish," and others freely employed
words like "depraved," "rude," "uncivilized," and "backward" to describe the reclusive,
underbred folk of Georgia's deep, dark woods and desperate townships. Dickey, who was
himself a Georgian and knew the area well, swore that his book was a faithful description.