Free Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island by Will Harlan Page B

Sam muttered, “Goddamn redneck.”
    “What is a redneck, Sam?” McPhee asked from the backseat, notebook in hand.
    “You know what a redneck is, you little Yankee bastard.”
    “I want to hear your definition.”
    “A redneck is a fat slob in a pickup truck with a rifle across the back. He hates ‘niggers.’ He would rather have his kids ignorant than go to school with colored children. I guess I don’t like rednecks. I’ve known a few.”
    “Some of my best friends are rednecks,” Carol said.
    She identified more closely with the working-class southerner than the aristocratic elite. Both were equally racist and ignorant, she said, but at least rednecks got their boots muddy and earned a living by the sweat of their brows.
    Redneck stereotypes had worsened recently in Georgia due to the 1970 publication of Deliverance , the bestselling novel by James Dickey, the brother of Carol’s family friend and grenade defuser Tom Dickey. The book—and, later, the Hollywood blockbuster—followed the fictional journey of four city-dwelling, thrill-seeking weekend warriors who canoe down a wild stretch of whitewater in north Georgia. Ultimately, the conflict centers around handsome, athletic urban adventurists and rural southerners, who are darkly represented by a cross-eyed, inbred banjo player and two sinister men who sodomize a canoeist and command him to “squeal like a pig.” The book reinforced stereotypes of Appalachian folk as backward, lawless, uneducated rednecks. It also inspired a new generation of kayakers, canoeists, and whitewater rafters to explore the Chattooga River, where the movie was filmed.
    “There’s a lot more truth in the story than you might think,” Jim Dickey told Carol over dinner with Tom one evening. He based the book on a real-life paddling trip in north Georgia. He was canoeing solo, while his friend Lewis King—the paddler upon whom the Burt Reynolds character is based—drove to a spot a few miles downstream where he could pick up Jim. King parked along a logging road and started hiking down toward the river, when suddenly two armed men appeared and demanded to know his business. They thought he was a government agent looking for their moonshine still. The men held him at gunpoint beside the river for several hours.
    “Lewis was sweating bullets, praying for me to arrive before dark,” Jim told Carol. Jim had flipped his canoe in one of the rapids, so he was late getting downriver. Finally he rounded a bend and spotted Lewis and the armed men just as daylight was beginning to dim. When he arrived, the shotguns disappeared, and the men even helped him carry his canoe back to the truck.
    Deliverance was being filmed when Carol and Sam journeyed to the Chattooga River in 1971. They encountered no malevolent mountain men, but they met with hundreds of locals eager to protect their beloved river. Development and sewage threatened the Chattooga’s pristine headwaters. In the early 1970s, rednecks and radicals joined forces, hoping to permanently protect the Chattooga as a federally designated Wild and Scenic River.
    The key to the Chattooga’s Wild and Scenic designation was its most famous whitewater kayaker, Governor Jimmy Carter. Carter and his son often paddled down the Chattooga, perfecting their kayak rolls at Big Shoals and Turnhole rapids. Jimmy Carter was one of the first to paddle the class-IV Bull Sluice rapid in an open canoe.
    In 1972, Carter joined a whitewater rafting expedition down a harrowing stretch of the Chattooga. At Seven Foot Falls, Carter’s raft guide misjudged his line, and the raft toppled into the seething rapid, spilling the governor, the guide, and two others. At the bottom of the falls, the raft folded, bucked, and straightened once more, leaving only Rosalynn Carter still in the boat. Carter and the others swam safely to a nearby eddy. Nodding toward his wife, the waterlogged governor said, “Now you know who really steers the ship.”
    There was