Saints at the River

With Allen driving, the two leave Columbia and head to the town of Tamassee, a more rural and rustic landscape ringed by the Appalachians. Along the way, Maggie, who has not dated in more than a year, is drawn to Allen’s woodsy after shave. She wonders absently why the man wears a wedding ring yet lists himself as single in the company’s insurance forms. “[A]s I watched him […] I wondered what the fingertips and palm of his hand would feel like pressed to the small of my back” (29).

For Maggie, the assignment represents inevitably a return to the ghosts of her past. She confesses how seldom she has visited the remote river town where she grew up since she left for Clemson University more than 10 years earlier. As they drive, she notices that the town has changed little. She points out the locals to Allen; she recognizes the houses and storefronts. Indeed, many of her relatives, most notably her father, still live there.

At the town’s only filling station/convenience store, in a conversation with the proprietor, Allen and Maggie learn about the simmering controversy over the recovery of the girl’s body. The girl’s body, local rescue teams believe, is lodged under a large rock on the far side of one of the river’s most intimidating cataracts. The site is virtually unassailable.

At Mama Tilson’s, a local barbeque eatery, Maggie and Allen are given a crash course in the importance of the river and the Wild and Scenic River Law  that, more than 40 years ago, was passed to protect what is widely seen as the last unharnessed and undeveloped river left in the Appalachian foothills. The river has federal protection from any alterations—even “temporary trails, portable dams, and anything that’s not already there” (33). Maggie, recalling the river in her childhood, understands the urgency of the effort to protect the river. “A wild river’s something that can’t be replicated or brought back once it’s gone” (34). She shares memories of working with the local environmental group on weekends back in college, taking photos for their brochures and their website. During that period, she was helping her father tend to her mother, who was dying of cancer. 

That night, the Tamassee Community Center is packed with local environmentalists, headed by the charismatic Luke Miller, alongside locals who are siding with the grieving family of the dead girl. Maggie studies Luke and, for the first time, explores her lingering feelings for the man with whom she had a relationship that ended eight years earlier. She recalls the tense confrontation when she first introduced Luke to her father, a farmer who viewed Luke as an outside agitator (Luke was from Florida) and a tree-hugger determined to cost the local economy good jobs just to protect a river.

The first to address the meeting is Herb Kowalsky, the girl’s father. He acknowledges the work of the county rescue team, twin brothers Randy and Ronny Moseley, but he points out the obvious: the recovery operation failed. He introduces an engineer from Illinois, whose company develops and installs portable dams. The engineer promises that his team can install a temporary folding dam, roughly five feet high, and recover the girl’s body within four hours. He reassures them, “The main idea is not to stop water but divert it to the right side of falls” (50).

Luke challenges the assessment. To install even a temporary dam will mean drilling holes in the river bedrock, a clear violation of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1978. Luke threatens to take the recovery plan to court and tie it up in the legal system for years. To console the father, Luke tells him, “I can’t think of a place I’d rather her body be than in the Tamassee” (53). The river, he tells them, is sacred and holy. His words stir the crowd. Maggie says Luke understands the power of words, he studied literature briefly in Florida before he quit college to come to the hill country. Luke warns that, should the town allow this incursion, it would begin an inevitable rush to develop the river. Luke himself once nearly drowned in the riptide currents of the river: “It was like entering eternity” (64).

Kowalsky is incensed, and the meeting quickly turns ugly. Maybe, the father says, “you hillbillies don’t know nearly as much about that river as you think” (56). The locals bristle—one quickly retorts that they may be hillbillies, but they know enough not let their 12-year-old kids wade out on a river during spring flooding. Maggie is surprised when, out of nowhere, Allen chides the crowd, “[The man] just wants to get [his daughter] out of the river, for God’s sake” (58). The meeting ends without a vote. The groups agree to meet the next morning at the river site by Wolf Cliff.