My Experiences on the Set of Deliverance

There is a subtle difference between waking up in North Carolina and waking up after nuclear weapons have obliterated all of society overnight. While both scenarios involve a lack of modern amenities and baking heat, it is only in North Carolina that you are served pancakes.

I had been meaning to write some things on my long trip to South Carolina from my hometown in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but the since the last few days were mainly driving across what could be a list of the most boring states in the Union (except for the Dakotas), I didn't really have many stories to tell. Today, though, was something different. Today was something special. Today, my feet were sunburned to the point where I could no longer wear socks.

Let's start this back at the pancakes. I was fed along with the rest of my family by a family of Southerners I apparently knew, and was informed that I was going to be rafting down a river today. It was 8:30 in the morning so I agreed because it required the least amount of my precious, precious brainpower, most of which was being used to remember how forks worked.
So it's about 9:00, and for some reason everyone is expecting me to actually put on a swimsuit and shit, and I'm just confused because I thought I was going back to sleep. I'm forced to make a compromise to keep this kind of bullshit from being the norm from the rest of this trip: I'll go on this boat day trip/suicide mission if no one tries to wake me up when we actually get to the vacation part of our vacation.

Off I go in the back of a pick-up truck, driving through rural North Carolina and sighting the sights, looking at the looks, etc. There are several old barns with no animals. Part of a small meadow is on fire for no apparent reason. Road laws have become road possibilities, as the truck swoops down through switchback mountain roads. The retarded kid from Deliverance is at most several miles away. In fact, jokes about Deliverance are the only jokes I will hear today. I think that says something about the modern south where its denizens have ceased raping backwoods travelers and have begun threatening to rape them, then laughing at them. Part of me (the non-raped part) feels that this is a stellar improvement. Another part of me is saddened by this loss of what was once undoubtably a part of the great fabric that was the American South (96% Slave-Picked Cotton, 4% Rape). The sun burns my pale, vampiric skin, and I can't do anything but sit and hope that my shirt can stop waves of radiation emanating from the Sun that would cook me into the edible levels for even the most discerning of cannibals.
We make a brief stop to pick up another member of the family Southern, a 12 year old with a hilarious accent. The house we stopped at to grab him is home to at least four dogs, all of whom show suicidal bravery in confronting a multi-ton moving vehicle. Fortunately, we go without dogslaughter. As we exit the premises, I notice the best metaphor for modern rural society ever: A satellite dish attached to a disused fence pole in the middle of the yard, its cord winding into the house. Truly we live in the age of technology.

After a few more death defying road maneuvers, we're at the start of our river journey, apparently the Thing To Do round these parts. The river is a brown, slowmoving thing, hopefully from silt and not any of the things I know people dump en masse into rivers. We wait for a while for no real reason, apply sunscreen, and set off downriver in an inflatable kayak. When the kayak was invented by whatever Arctic inventor way back in the fog of prehistory, I don't think it could ever be explained to him in any acceptable way that his idea for an effective whalemurdering craft would be used for entertainment purposes by pale people who had moved into a small river valley some thousands of miles south of them, after they had killed all of the people who had lived there previously a couple hundred years prior. Hell, I doubt I anyone would be able to explain inflatable anything to that guy.

Anyway, the river is a lazy river in the same way that Woodrow Wilson hated women, by which I mean it was a very lazy river (and Woodrow Wilson really hated women). Paddling down this fucking river was one of the most boring activities in conjunction with a body of water I've ever had. I feel terrible for people who do this for fun, because they have been gravely misled on the concept. It is literally two hours of sitting in the sun and staring at the brown, simple current. At the end, I got to trod through some mud then sit on a short bus. No joke, they brought down a retarded person bus to pick us up and bring us back to where we started, a journey that took about 10 minutes by car.

As I rode the pickup truck back 'home,' I noticed that in the valley of the burning grass, another, entirely different part of the valley was on fire. Not as if the fire had burned its way over there, but as if the entire process was some trainee arsonist trying to get a start in the fast-paced world of rural arson, and didn't really know how it worked. Reviewing the day, I had the sinking feeling that no one around these parts knew much about how anything really worked. Except rape.