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.