American Doll and Toy Museum: Rocks and Dolls

American Doll and Toy Museum: Rocks and Dolls: Eleanor St. George, a famous doll author and collector of the late forties and fifties, wrote that doll collectors are seldom single minded ...

Deliverance, a Review

When I was little, my family watched Daniel Boone on television. The opening scenes showed in beautiful Technicolor the woods, the blue watered streams, all of it. It made me shiver. Even in sunlight, the landscaped menaced. To paraphrase Plath, sunlight struck the water and the land like damnation. It was all so lonely, isolated, but for a man and his gun. Fast forward to trips we took out west, driving through areas that saw very few people. The eerie Great Salt Lake, the Rockies and Tetons, lands of caves and canyons, devils’ towers and overhanging cliffs, rivers that seemed deepless, oceans that never stopped flowing. Flannery O’Connor’s story,” A Good Man is Hard to Find” amused and scared us. Would we run into the Misfit at an isolated sunny picnic area in Colorado, which we abandoned after our little dog faced the edging woods and wouldn’t start barking”? There was Paul Auster’s essay “Why Write?” In that, a little boy scout is struck by lightening and killed while they trying to seek shelter. My own camping experience was limited to a field biology excursion where teen boys tried to scare us at night, and were impressed that I was the one who didn’t scream. I nearly fell off a high bolder, yanked up poison ivy by mistake, and twice nearly stepped on snakes. Then, after three years of looking for the book, I read Deliverance by James Dickey. Murder and raped never scared so much. Many of the quotes made famous by the film by Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty were not part of the book. Instead, Dickey pointed out in chilling detail how four ordinary men from the city would be conquered, then conquer, a mysterious river and a deadly mountain and its inhabitants. Dickey opens and closes with descriptions of the river, in an allusion to James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. Dickey’s prose is poetic and deadly. As an avid hunter and outdoorsman, he knew which words conveyed the terror of the woods, and four men who were not expecting in their wildest dreams the misadventures they would face