The Rapture of the Deep - Bronwen Dickey

TRAVEL
by Bronwen Dickey
44 THE OXFORD AMERICAN } The Best of the South 2011
The Rapture of the Deep
diving the sunken south.
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN BY DUKE POWER COMPANY…THAT THE PROPOSED KEOWEE-TOXAWAY PROJECT WILL
FLOOD CERTAIN BURIAL GROUNDS AND GRAVES WITHIN THE AREA.
—The Keowee Courier, South Carolina, June 8, 1967
We motor out into Lake Jocassee, a large hydroelectric reservoir in upstate
South Carolina, on an early July morning—a beautiful day to dive with
the dead. The air in the Blue Ridge foothills is warm but not hot. A little
buggy. Good weather for putting a boat in the water, if you have one, and
many do; the wakes of Sunfish and Boston Whalers score the surface. Along the bank, summer
vacationers are setting up charcoal grills and gathering Coleman chairs into huddles around
portable stereos. When the wind sighs, it smells like summer camp, like leaves and sunscreen
and Cutter.
I pull on a five-mil wet suit and take a seat in the back of the boat near the captain’s chair,
from which a thick-necked guy named Rocky guides our pontoon past floating docks and boat
ramps. We move into what looks like an artificial ocean—eight thousand acres of clear blue,
almost four hundred feet deep in places. I check my gauges and tighten my gloves.
For months, I have devoted myself to researching the community histories of the Jocassee
Valley, a speck of Appalachia—six miles long, one mile wide—that no longer exists. In the late
1960s, South Carolina’s hard-up mountain farmers needed better jobs and more money, and
Duke Power needed to generate a few hundred thousand more megawatts to accommodate
the needs of the region’s ever-growing population. Drowning this valley and several others
offered an easy solution to that problem, or so it seemed at the time.
Vast impoundments of water like Lake Jocassee are now as much a part of the Carolina
landscape as are cotton fields, or red clay, or kudzu. But something in me rebels against erasure,
even when I understand its economic necessity, and to look out over the man-made lakes of the
Southeast is to see whole swaths of American culture submerged by the slow but sure flood of
progress. All the tangibles of human life—farms, stores, schoolhouses, churches—traded for
the energy that powers the lights and air-conditioning of people hundreds of miles away from
its source. People like me.
By early July, I have overdosed on historical data, spent too many long nights studying the
photos and letters of the valley’s families. I know that Cleo Chapman delivered the mail every
day for fifty years and “Preacher Billy” Holcombe spread the gospel on foot and Miss Mae
Wigington ran the schoolhouse and took the children to revival. I know that in 1919, Preacher
Billy’s son, Greel, shot and killed a man over a still and that, for his penance, he worked on the
chain gang that built Highway 178 to Rosman. Give me an old map and I could show you how
the baptizing hole on the Whitewater River and the Devil’s Hole, a big rapid on Devils Fork
Creek, shared the same water. But all the diagrams and topo maps have failed to cohere into
something I can feel. Now, like Adrienne Rich’s wreck diver, I have come to see the damage
that was done.
A
mid the clanging of aluminum
tanks, the boat’s engine beeps
and whines. Rocky stares into
a GPS screen, where he is
searching for a beer keg furred with algae. It
marks the descent line to the original site of
the Mount Carmel Baptist Church cemetery,
one of the last reminders that for generations,
people really did live and die here. Before
1968, the graveyard’s headstones crowned a
wooded hilltop, where they faced east, their
occupants awaiting the Rapture in proper
Southern Baptist tradition. Now the few
markers left are mired one hundred thirtyfive
feet under the lake, settled forever in the
silt.
The other divers stay up front, smoking
and swapping war stories—as divers tend
to do—from their longest dives, their
coldest dives, their deepest dives. “Does
it bother you at all, swimming around in a
graveyard?” I ask Rocky. “Does it feel wrong,
knowing that people’s relatives were buried
down there?”
“Nah,” he says. “Not really.” He keeps his
eyes fixed on the screen, looking for the blip
that would indicate we’re hovering above the
old cemetery. “Duke moved most of those
bodies before they started backing the water
up.” And that is as sentimental as Rocky
will be about it. Dead people were here,
now they’re not. I don’t mention the fifteen
or twenty Hesters and Whitmires who,
according to the records, were never moved
from their family graveyard a few hundred
yards north. As far as anyone knows, they’re
all still under the lake, somewhere.
He cranks the steering wheel around to
the right, swinging the bow of the boat into
Photographs of Lake Jocassee by Jeff Rich, April 2011.

etter position. “By the way, you ever been
narc’ed before?”
The longer a diver stays underwater, or the
deeper he dives, the more nitrogen builds in
his blood and the cloudier his thinking becomes.
Jacques Cousteau called this intoxicated
state l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs, or
“the rapture of the deep.” Most people these
days just call it nitrogen narcosis, or “getting
narc’ed.” Much like alcohol, how it affects
you depends on your physical composition
and personality, but usually it shows up as
intense euphoria, paranoia, or panic.
I tell him no, I haven’t succumbed to the
nitrogen rapture yet, which makes me pretty
lucky. Most divers will at least experience its
early stages at some point; some even chase
the feeling. “Usually people get narc’ed out
around ninety feet,” Rocky says. “We’ll be
down at almost a hundred and forty, so I guess
today’s a good day to start.” The boat smells
like diesel and smoke, rubber and old sweat.
I squeeze my head into a neoprene hood and
strap a knife to my ankle. I wait.
Before Duke Power, before the
dam, before any European settler
scraped out a meager living for
himself in the fertile bottomlands
of the Jocassee Valley, the Cherokee knew
this part of South Carolina as “Oconee.” Oldtimers
around here will tell you it means “the
watery eyes of the hills,” as though the land
has wept for itself from the beginning. More
than likely this is not true. Nor can anyone
prove that “Jocassee” means “the place of the
lost,” as the locals say it does. But for over a
hundred years, the farmers, sawyers, and mill
workers who lived in Jocassee believed in the
weeping hills and in the lost valley, and that
is its own truth.
Four large rivers—Toxaway,
Horsepasture, Whitewater, and
Thompson—once converged here,
in this small geologic depression.
They wound south from the Blue Ridge
Escarpment in deep gorges, broke into creeks
and streams, and carved enormous waterfalls
from billion-year-old hunks of granitic
gneiss. Even now, so much water cascades
through the forests of Oconee County that, in
summer, clouds of vapor veil the mountains,
like ghosts.
46 THE OXFORD AMERICAN } The Best of the South 2011 OxfordAmerican.org
As far back as the late-eighteenth century,
adventurous travelers considered Jocassee
one of the most lush, idyllic coves in all
of the Blue Ridge. The naturalist William
Bartram rode through the valley on his
way north from Florida in 1776, and in his
journal marveled at the American Eden
he had stumbled upon. “Now at once the
mounts divide,” he wrote, “and disclose to
view the ample [Oconee] vale, encircled by a
wreath of uniform hills; their swelling bases
clad in cheerful verdure, over which, issuing
from the mountains, plays along a glittering
river, meandering through the meadows.”
Here the world seemed boundless, Bartram
wrote, “infinitely varied,” and the gently
undulating mountains, “blue as the ether,”
appeared to roll forever toward the horizon.
If Bartram had walked through the same
place two hundred years later, it would have
been as Ezekiel walking through the valley
of dry bones. He would have seen a desert of
rock and stump, where the earth-movers and
chain saws had cleared the hillsides, creating
a large basin that a battalion of engineers
filled behind a towering four-hundred-foot dam.
I couldn’t quite get that barren image out of my mind when, a few months ago, Dennis
Chastain, a local hunter and woodsman, drove me to Jumping Off Rock so that I could get
a better look at the lake from above. It was so blue that it almost glowed, like a clouded eye
gazing upward. The bald eagles and peregrine falcons were out that afternoon, cutting the
air in long, dark slices. Dennis remembered when representatives from the power company
visited his high school back in the late ’60s and assured the students that, because of the new
reservoir, eventually their energy bills would be so low that Duke would no longer put meters
on their houses. “Well, that day obviously didn’t come,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“The problem was that we didn’t know how to value this resource at that time,” he told me.
“When the power company bought these people’s farms, it was probably more money than
they’d ever seen in a lifetime. You have to remember that life here was hard; these farmers were
living off salt pork, corn, and whatever they could grub in the woods. There was very little
education, and almost no medical care available to them. But they had turned the soil here for
five generations. How do you put a dollar value on that?”
By the time the water came creeping up over the hills in 1971, the families of Jocassee
had sold their cotton and tobacco farms for a little over a hundred and fifty dollars an acre
and moved on to different ways of living in Pickens, Seneca, or Eastatoe. Their empty houses
were stripped of valuable building materials, and, in some cases, looted for any personal items
left behind. As the dam grew in the distance, work crews torched the vacant homesteads, or
demolished them with wrecking balls. Then the flood began, crawling up through the valley
in inches. Once the tunnels diverting the river had closed, it took nearly two years for the lake
to fill.
Like the living, the dead could not stay. The last thing Duke Power needed was an armada
of caskets floating up out of the muck. In the local paper, the company gave sixty-days’ notice
OxfordAmerican.org THE OXFORD AMERICAN } The Best of the South 2011 47

efore moving more than a dozen small churchyards and family cemeteries to higher ground,
digging the community’s dead out of the earth with shovels and cranes.
“New graves? A big dump truck with a bunch of headstones and a pile of dirt in the back
is more like it,” my friend Dot Jackson told me not long ago. A fiery muckraker even now, in
her late seventies, Dot forgets nothing. She covered one of those cemetery relocations back in
1968 when she worked as a beat reporter and columnist for the Charlotte Observer. “But, to be
honest,” she said, “with most of those people there wasn’t much left to relocate.”
You hear lots of these stories if you hang around up here long enough. Stories of halfcompleted
grave removals, or of company representatives pressuring folks to sell their land,
or suits threatening the hold-outs with eminent domain. The government approved this project.
You can sell us your property now, or we can condemn it and take it from you. It’s your choice.
Outside the firsthand accounts of people like Dennis and Dot, most of these are just that:
stories, gossip passed down over the years, and few souls are still alive who can confirm or
deny their accuracy. After enough telling, though, stories—even shadowy, half-remembered
ones—have a way of working themselves into the collective memory of a community. These
anecdotes, true or not, told me a good deal about the troubled legacy that big energy companies
have left in upstate South Carolina.
This story haunts me most: Before they left Jocassee for the last time, a couple of residents
stood on their porches and listened to the dynamite blasts. Some of them looked out over the
Whitewater River, its surface chromed in the sun. But one man, Johnson Chapman, did not
share the quiet resignation of his neighbors. He burned his house to the ground rather than
let the power company burn it for him. Ran kerosene through it, set it alight, watched it blaze.
A
grizzled man they call “Biscuit Bill” jumps in first. It’s his fiftieth birthday, and he
is eager to get down to that graveyard. He purges his buoyancy compensator and
disappears into a helix of bubbles, working his way down into the dark. I dip my
head under the surface and let the lake sluice into my wet suit. Rocky follows, encumbered
by the extra armature of deep-water technical gear. In the beginning, there is nothing
to look at, nothing to see—not even a bass or lake trout—just spears of sun piercing the green.
I pull myself down along the line, hand over hand—twenty feet, forty, sixty—lost in
rhythms of descent: the sweeping arcs of my flashlight, the gurgling hum of my regulator.
Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five feet into gathered blackness. As the needle on my depth
gauge ticks around the dial, my ears pop with a sucking whine, like the sound of a Ball jar being
twisted open.
We fall through the dark another twenty feet before I see the trees. By now, we have passed
through the thermocline, the temperature has dropped twenty degrees, and the cold curls my
joints until I’m so numb I can barely move. But there they are, a few yards off to my right: the
bone-white trunks of a dozen pines rising up from God knows where. They are leafless but
undecayed—unable to live, but also unable to die.
One of the men points to something in the distance, where a curved form moves into our
torch beams. A marble headstone, proud and upright in the gloom. Behind it stretch rows and
rows of empty plots, each neatly gridded by curbstones. The marker belonged to a man named
Silas Hinkle, a Civil War veteran, and his wife, Winnie, both of whom passed away decades
before Duke bought up the land they farmed near Cane Creek. I know Silas from his family
records; he lost an infant to the measles and died at eighty never having learned to read. On top
of his stone, a diver has placed a jeering plastic skeleton.
When Silas died back in 1918, his community would have sent him off properly. A
neighbor would have made his coffin, and the preacher at Mount Carmel would have washed
and dressed him for burial before laying him out in his family’s living room, where someone
had taken care to cover all the mirrors. A younger relative, or maybe a few of them, would have
“set up” with the body through that first night, singing hymns in the light of kerosene lamps
to ease his spirit into the next world. And when the time came to summon the gravediggers to
the cemetery, the church bell would have tolled a long time for Silas—eighty times, once for
every year he had lived.
At 127 feet, my thoughts start
turning in my skull at weird, kaleidoscopic
angles. Bill fins over
to the graves, but I’m still shivering
on the descent line, unable to let go. I
watch the ribbon of bubbles trailing from my
regulator and try to avoid vertigo. A capsized
feeling rolls through me anyway, one I can’t
reason myself out of. How strange we must
appear from the upward-looking vantage
of those plots. Three black-hooded figures
floating down through the trees, probing the
dark with flashlights. Alien angels, or worse,
from the mechanized future. Did any of the
people buried here know that the end of the
world would look like this? Everything they
built, everything they worked for, a hundred
and fifty feet underwater? That when they
rose from their graves, it would be under the
creaking of backhoes?
The Rapture, the Rapture. Were Silas and
Winnie still here, they would be waiting on
a Rapture that would never come.
This isn’t right, I keep thinking. We should
not be here.
Only two or three minutes pass before it
all becomes too hellish and Godless—the
empty graves, the numbness, the dull pulse
of blood in my ears. I signal to Rocky that I’m
not doing so well, that I’ve had enough, that
I’m heading up.
Once back on the surface, I throw
my gear into my car and pull
out of the parking lot without
saying much to anyone. Curtains
of kudzu fall over the gnarled two-lane to
Seneca, choking the railroad tracks along the
road, crawling up the posts of vinyl-lettered
church signs. whatcha waitin’ on? hell
won’t really freeze over. come to church.
I don’t go to church. I get out on the side
of Highway 11 and stand under an army of
steel power lines, which reach up into the
hills all the way to the braided horizon. The
lines buzz and pop and the air crackles with
their static.
Dennis told me something once that I
never quite understood until I saw the place
for myself, until I knew I would not go
back. “Jocassee isn’t at the bottom of that
lake,” he said. “You could drain it all today
and it would never be the same. Jocassee is
nowhere. Jocassee is gone.” ø
48 THE OXFORD AMERICAN } The Best of the South 2011 OxfordAmerican.org