Saints at the River

“And I was a woman who spent much of her life focusing on surfaces to reveal deeper meanings.” 

Rash parallels the work of Maggie as a photographer and his work as a novelist/poet. Rash illuminates character, theme, and conflict throughout the narrative by his careful use of precise and suggestive images that reveal deeper meanings. 

“I glanced at his wedding ring and remembered a poem from my British Lit class where a woman wore a necklace engraved with the words Noli me tangere. Touch me not.” 

From the beginnings of their relationship, Maggie and Allen could both be wearing this necklace. The image is taken from “Whoso List to Hunt,” a sonnet of Petrarch’s translated by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Wyatt. Ironically, given the developing relationship between Allen and Maggie, Petrarch’s poem is about a man who has decided not to pursue a beautiful woman.  

“But I wasn’t like my brother. I couldn’t let things go. I didn’t even want to. Forgetting, like forgiving, only blurred things.” 

Long before we learn the actual story of the kitchen accident, we hear Maggie’s adamant refusal to forgive her father. This confession shows how far Maggie needs to go to experience authentic resurrection and the therapeutic release from her ghosts. 

“Though most of their customers saw the Tamassee as little more than a longer, more dangerous version of rides at Six Flags or Disney World, the guides considered the river sacred, and it was inevitable they would be drawn to Luke and his cause.” 

Central to Rash’s environmental novel is how we view nature in the new millennium, even as nature is being negotiated into irrelevancy: we might regard the dwindling wilderness as a wild and primitive energy; a sublime and holy space that commands our respect. We might view it as a commodity to be negotiated, developed, and controlled and then ultimately rendered as a harmless immersive interactive entertainment space for our amusement. 

“I can’t think of a place I’d rather her body be than in the Tamassee.” 

Although apparently heartless, as this passage is spoken to a drowned girl’s grieving parents, Luke’s comment speaks forthrightly to his sense of the river as a vast space holier and more sacred than any cemetery plot. 

“Reading his book had made me wonder, not for the first time in my life, if seeing too much suffering could overwhelm the heart." 

Maggie pages through Allen’s book on the atrocities of the Rwandan civil war and wonders whether the experience has destroyed Allen’s heart. This question speaks to the crux of Maggie’s (and Allen’s) evolution into healing. Both have suffered, but Rash refuses to accept despair as the last word.  

“It was like entering eternity.” 

This is Luke at his most Thoreau-esque. In describing his near-drowning in the Tamassee years before, Luke evidences the conviction and passion of the Transcendental experience of nature beyond the senses. 

“Only it wasn’t that girl’s face in the water, Maggie. It was yours.” 

The dream of Maggie’s father, which recurs later to Maggie, indicates Maggie’s emotional peril after more than a decade of insulating her heart and refusing the redemptive grace of forgiveness. Like Ruth Kowalsky, Maggie is drowning. Not in the river, but in her past: her anger, her guilt, and her regrets. 

“And maybe that’s the purest kind of love, Maggie, because I don’t expect the river to love me back.” 

Without irony, without qualification, Luke professes his love for the river. Luke’s relationship to nature raises stubborn questions for Maggie about the unreachability of Luke’s heart. She wants a lover. His commitment to the river, however, is his passion, and his love for it is absolute. 

“That the girl’s body is the Tamassee’s now, that the moment she stepped in the shallows she accepted the river on its terms. That’s what wilderness is—nature on its terms, not ours, and there’s no middle ground.” 

Luke’s message delivered to Ruth’s grieving parents is direct and clear: humanity cannot ultimately domesticate nature. For Luke, nature is a stunning power that reveals what our technology obscures; that in the face of raw nature, we are helpless, puny, and vulnerable. 

“I remembered how the river was only a sound whispering below us, and how, at least for a while, I did not think of Ruth Kowalsky’s body a mile downstream waiting to be raised, or think of my father dying a little more as he sat in his house alone.” 

When Allen and Maggie first kiss on the bridge over the Tamassee, Maggie experiences a moment apart—a moment suddenly, inexplicably free of the burden of her past. She is allowed to exist for this slender, delicate moment in the fragile immediacy of now, which, Rash argues, is the very medium of nature itself.

“But this situation with Ruth Kowalsky, it’s like I’ve been given another chance to be a good father by helping get that man’s daughter out of that river.”

In the parallel narratives of Allen and Maggie, Rash focuses on the need for redemption, drawing on the imagery and metaphors of Christian resurrection and salvation. The connection Allen makes with the girl in the river offers him a chance to make amends for his failures as a father. 

“It’s about being afraid of what you’ll feel if you can’t feel hurt and anger.” 

Maggie’s brother Ben, although often off stage, is a heroic presence in Maggie’s narrative. He bore the brunt of the accident in the kitchen. He endured countless operations, and still, his face bears the scars. Here, he reaches out to his sister on the phone to encourage her to forgive their father before he dies. He is afraid she has grown too content in her anger and in her sense of hurt. He fears she has no clear path to any healthy, healing emotions. 

“Words so frightening we sealed out mouths tight, risked not a syllable of that language. Because we both realized once you open your mouth to speak such words you open your heart too.” 

This passage presents the disturbing logic of Maggie’s nearly decade-long estrangement from her father. It is easier, she has decided, not to engage in honest communication and not to even attempt reconciliation. Honesty is more terrifying to her than anger. 

“‘Spots of time’ was the phrase Wordsworth used for such moments, but the poet’s words were no better than mine because what I felt was beyond any words that had ever been used before.” 

Maggie recalls her canoe trip down the Tamassee with Luke years earlier. As a poet, novelist, and lifelong resident of the Appalachian country, Rash here captures the tectonic surprise in the sublime experience of the wilderness that ultimately (and ironically) beggars language itself. In this moment, Maggie moves beyond language as she’s overloading her sensory experience. 

“That’s what my church has said for hundreds of years—that a person is in purgatory until the body is given Last Rites” 

Rash here juxtaposes the rigid codes of Christianity with the wild and open energy of the wilderness. According to her religion, she must procure the body of her daughter to complete her journey into Heaven; without the body, the girl’s soul will never enter Paradise. Luke, ever the Transcendentalist, argues that there in the river, the girl is already in Paradise. 

“Knowing that despite people like Bryan and Luckadoo there’s still enough wild acreage left up here to hide a few things.” 

In these latter days of the industrial and technological era, we have all but lost the sense of nature’s mystery. Billy Watson here reminds Maggie that the possibility of the cougar’s existence indicates that nature is beyond the scope, control, and definition of either developers or environmentalists. Rash understands how deeply we need that mystery. 

“I had known Luke for eight years, and in that time my feelings toward him had covered the emotional gamut from love to hate. Only now did I feel something close to sorrow.” 

The defeat of Luke’s impassionate defense of the last wild river in the Appalachian South alters Maggie’s perception of her ex-lover. In defeat, even as he watches the bulldozers begin the work of gashing into the river channel, there is a helplessness that strikes Maggie as sorrow, a word freighted in New Testament Christianity with fathomless despair. Luke senses that the Tamassee is lost.

“It suddenly seemed as if we had all gathered for this one moment. Except moment was the wrong word, because what I felt was an absence of the temporal, as if the mountains had shut us off not only from the rest of the world but from time.” 

In the moment that Randy Moseley decides, against the counsel of his own brother, to try to recover the girl’s body, Maggie is aware that the moment is an epiphany. She feels as if those gathered at the river site, these saints, create a luminous moment of community; a moment defined not by anger and hate, but animated by caring and selflessness, heroism and sacrifice. The moment marks her emergence from the long entombment of her heart.

“The crumpled tissue fell from her hand. It looked like a dogwood blossom as it drifted toward the pool’s center, then sank.”

This striking image in which the tissue falls from the hand of Ruth’s mother after the death of Randy Moseley suggests several things: despair and hopelessness, the fragility of life, the nearness and distance from her dead daughter still in the river, and the unchecked power of the now un-dammed river.  

“It would near about kill your daddy if one of his babies was to get hurt.” 

After years of clinging to her anger against her father, Maggie has a moment’s sudden and entirely unexpected memory of when her father, whom she has long defined as a distant and uninvolved parent, revealed the depth of his love for his children and his concern over their wellbeing. This memory so completely contradicts her long-stored anger that she begins, at last, to move toward a more balanced view of her father. 

“Soon we’ll reach the shining river/Soon our pilgrimage will cease.” 

These hopeful lines, from “Shall We Gather at the River,” the inspirational gospel hymn sung at the memorial service at the river, juxtaposes the Christian notion of the river as an element of life-giving grace against the harsh reality suggested by nature of the river as a far more complex thing, as much about life as about death and a powerful energy entirely indifferent to us. Interestingly, Christian tradition often uses the symbol of crossing the Jordan River as the process of dying.  

“Then I saw what they saw, Randy’s and Ruth’s bodies rising from the pool’s depths into the light.” 

This of resurrection is rich with gothic overtones: two very dead bodies, one badly decomposed after weeks in the river, are brought up to the surface and shaken free by the detonation of three sticks of dynamite. It is a gruesome moment of literal resurrection juxtaposed against the radiant vision of Christian resurrection offered in the hymn just before the detonation.