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The Evolution Of Bess Heath
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Wouldn't that have been quite a different story?! I'm so glad that Tom ended up having a healthy respect for the river and was against daredevil stunts, probably in large part because I find the daredevils appalling. It would be one thing if they were left to their own devices, but invariably they must be saved by those who take great personal risk. The last time I went to Niagara Falls (it poured rain), I went to the little daredevil "museum" and couldn't stop myself from reading every article I saw. It was sort of like a train wreck... I was horrified, but couldn't stop myself.
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I don't understand the daredeviling mentality either. The closest experience with it growing up in Niagara Falls was when a high school boyfriend's brother went over the falls in a barrel wearing only cowboy boots and a hat. He survived. He was a wacky guy in many aspects of his life.
It made Tom a character that I fell in love with that he had a reverence for the Falls and the surrounding areas. He was a "keeper of the Falls" to me. Such as one the Falls had been entrusted to. There is a sense throughout the book that Bess knows she doesn't completely have Tom as her soulmate, that he is so connected to the Falls and its mysteries and spirit that she can never take its place. That's why the final scene when their son is taken seems so ritualistic and inevitable to me. Whether you meant it or not consciously, Cathy, there is much spiritual symbolism in your book.
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Deborah,
The spiritual thread that runs through the book was intentional but it wasn'r always there. At one point, after the loss of Isabel, Bess says, “It is in these moments of despair I most miss the idea of God, the idea that life has meaning, the idea that we are something more than the product of the random variations and natural selection Charles Darwin put forth.” Her faith has disappeared, and she is anguished. My own much-loved father died when I was writing TDTFSS. It was then with my own grief-ridden struggle with what believe found expression in Bess.
By the end of the book, Bess is leaning toward again accepting the existence of the mystical and glimpses “the flickering sliver of light that says Isabel has been with us all along, that Tom is with us still.” The notion is reminiscent of Tom’s conviction that Fergus was, in some way, always with him. In my mind, it’s what Tom wants for Bess—for her to continue to feel his presence—when he says, “Believe in me, Bess,” and, knowing the odds are stacked against him, plunges into the whirlpool
The Evolution Of Bess Heath
Early on I intended to write a story that more closely paralleled that of real life riverman William “Red” Hill and his family. In the first bit of the book that I wrote—it was long ago scrapped—Bess Heath was an old woman, bitter and hateful of the river. I had conjured her up from the little I knew of Red Hill’s wife, Beatrice, a woman quoted as saying that she hated the river, that she was afraid of it.
In what I envisioned as a prologue to the book, the reader heard from an aged Bess about the long hours she endured waiting for her husband to come home from his beloved river. At times it was a daring rescue that kept him away, but on more than one occasion Bess waited, same as Beatrice Hill, for her husband to return from undertaking a glory-seeking stunt. The prologue laid out other particulars of Bess’s life, all gleaned from what I knew of Beatrice’s: There were four sons, all raised to be rivermen. Two shot the lower rapids and later attempted the plunge over the falls, one plummeting to his death. The youngest was killed by a falling rock while working in a hydroelectric tunnel. The first line of that prologue read, My husband is bewitched by a hateful river, lost to me.
The final scene of that book, as I conceived it, would take place at the whirlpool. As had unfolded in 1931 when Red Hill was shooting the rapids a third time, the barrel of my fictional riverman would become trapped in the whirlpool and eventually be hauled to shore by the oldest of his sons. The book would close with that fictional boy being paraded about the stone beach of the whirlpool on his father’s shoulders, much as had come about for Red Hill’s brave boy. The reader would contemplate the scene knowing from the prologue that the same boy would years later die attempting the “big drop” in nothing more than a contraption of inflated rubber tubes, canvas and fishnet. Readers, I anticipated, would ponder the role a well-intentioned father played in determining his own son’s tragic fate.
Plainly The Day the Falls Stood Still deviated greatly from the initial plan. The Tom Cole I found myself setting down on the page was deeply reverent of the river. Its trivialization, whether by the daredevils or the power companies, was offensive to him. For my riverman, shooting the rapids in a barrel was not a possibility.
And for Bess that meant a dramatic shift, away from the bitter woman of my earlier tale.