She drove me to Deliverance

01Lived

When I worked in North Carolina in the late 1980s, one of the health club regulars became a good friend. Nothing romantic, just two people who got on. Truth be told, I'd known her maybe two weeks when she said, ‘I'd like to take you somewhere.’ Where? ‘You'll see.’ The answer was a two-hour drive into the Appalachian Mountains, and the deeper we went, the quieter it got. Towns thinned to houses, houses thinned to nothing, and my spider sense started ringing. I fought it and stayed in the car. We finally stopped in the middle of absolute nowhere, at a clearing walled with trees. ‘Just follow me.’ Every instinct I had said I wouldn't be coming out of those trees again, and by then it was too late anyway. The hills have eyes, as they say. The trees stood tight beyond a joke: not slow-you-down tight, turn-sideways tight, each trunk pressing your back and your chest as you slid between them, and with every one I squeezed past, the feeling grew. Then everything opened up. Forty years on, I have never forgotten the sight. The Chattooga River, exactly where they filmed Deliverance sixteen years earlier. The power of the water, the steep valley sides, that thick green. If you know the film, they get picked off along that river. The shiver went straight down my spine.