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Marjorie Snipes & Flannery O'Connor: Immersion

Marjorie Snipes and her family live in Georgia but spend vacation time near Seeley Lake, Montana:

"It is amazing that while the world around us turns spring, the lake in front of our rented cabin remains frozen with snowpack. It is a diorama where foreground is spring and background winter, and some mornings I can’t decide which stage to occupy or how to be properly shod.

Yesterday, in tennis shoes, we played on the rugged shoreline of the Blackfoot River. My son threw rocks trying to skip them between subtle breakers. It was a day of discovery in a world emerging from winter’s tangles.

As my son reached under water to grab his last missile, his hand was caught by line. He pulled it from the water and then back up onto land, around a rock, and then under a stump, a testimony of its own. I can imagine that inexperienced fisherman also just wanting to go down this slope to touch the water. Either the fish whipped him or the waters, but he left behind enough line for us to re-string our poles with 'genuine, authentic, Blackfoot river line.'

I believe the perch and crappies in Georgia will jump at the chance to bite on this. It makes me wonder what my family has left behind on the Montana river."

In Flannery O'Connor's short story, “The River," a boy calling himself Bevel is startled by a dunk in a Georgia river:

"…Bevel walked on the outside edge, holding Mrs. Connin’s hand and looking down into the orange and purple gulley. It occurred to him that he was lucky they had found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the park. You found out more when you left where you lived.

They moved along a bridle path that twisted downhill through crackling red leaves and, at the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond. The preacher was standing about ten feet out in the stream where the water came up to his knees looking as if he might have been 19 years old.

“Maybe I know why you come,” he said in a twangy voice, “maybe I don’t. If you ain’t come for Jesus, you ain’t come for me. You can’t leave your pain in the river.” Without more warning, he tightened his hold and swung Bevel upside down and plunged his head into the water. He held him under while he said the words of Baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child. Bevel’s eyes were dark and dilated. “You count now,” the preacher said. “You didn’t even count before.”
 

(Broadcast: "Reflections West," 6/3/15. Listen weekly on the radio, Wednesdays at 4:54 p.m.)

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