His Daughter, Their River in an Agonizing Embrace

Trapped below the surface, she waits, and waits, while a roaring river and a raging controversy swirl above her head.

Six weeks have passed since 16-year-old Rachel Trois and her boyfriend stepped into the Chattooga River, two adventurous teens on a hike through the Blue Ridge Mountains, trying to hopscotch across the same rocks and hurtling rapids featured in the film “Deliverance.”

Suddenly, Rachel slipped. The river swept her downstream, then slid her over a six-foot drop, then pulled her under. Her boyfriend slipped, too, but Rachel’s body probably blocked him from a fatal whirlpool, enabling him to swim ashore.

Rescuers know exactly where Rachel’s body is: Eight feet below the river’s froth, in a rock formation that gargles the current like a gaping mouth. But reaching her has proved too great a task for even the most rugged river men, who’ve risked their lives several times for Rachel.

Most are ready to call off the effort.

The problem is, Rachel’s father won’t let them.

“I have a very simple thing I want to do here,” says Joseph Trois of Leesport, Pa., where Rachel was looking forward to her summer job at the local pool, after her brief Southern vacation. “I want to get that girl out of the river.”

If getting her out means moving heaven and Earth, and stopping one of the Earth’s oldest rivers, and parting a sea of red tape, so be it.

His determination, combined with the deadly waters of the Chattooga, has complicated an already agonizing situation. Rescuers want to help a grieving father reclaim his daughter. But they don’t want to help the Chattooga claim another life. Rachel was the river’s 35th victim in the last 29 years.

Also, the Chattooga is protected by the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. One of the last free-flowing rivers in the South, it’s a natural wonder, as lovely as it is deadly, a mean-spirited marvel that drops through a gorge at 180 feet per mile in some spots. By congressional mandate, it must be maintained “in free-flowing condition.”

Already, one temporary dam has been built as part of the rescue effort. Should a bigger dam be built, requiring more holes drilled into the bedrock, some in this river town say the rights of future generations and the needs of nature will have been set aside for the sake of one family.

Wrenching though it may be, the Chattooga’s staunchest defenders say, a family’s grief is fleeting compared to the river. The river is forever.

‘I Am Frustrated, Yes’

Under the best circumstances, Joseph Trois is a man of few words. Faced with a stubborn river that refuses to release his daughter, and confronted by people who respect the river’s right to do what it wants, he can barely speak. Each word comes out like a nail pulled from a board.

“I am frustrated, yes,” says Trois, a businessman. “I don’t come from that area, I don’t know all those little things going on there. I have no agenda, other than to get my daughter out of the river.”

The first step was obvious. Rescuers hovered above the spot where Rachel was last seen, May 29, while dogs and underwater cameras determined precisely where she was.

“She’s in a 10-foot cone-shaped hole, feet first,” says Henry Gordon, head of emergency preparedness in Oconee County, on the South Carolina side of the Chattooga, which forms a ragged border with Georgia. “She’s wedged in there. And there’s a tremendous amount of pressure flowing on top of her.”

In a steady rain, the river rising and crashing all around them, divers made four tries at dislodging Rachel. The current was so fierce, it tore the masks from their faces.

Following standard procedure, the rescue team pulled back and waited for the water to fall. Maybe next week. Maybe next year. “The river will let us know when we can get her out,” says Dave Perrin, a guide for 20 years on the Chattooga. “The river has always given up its dead.”

But Trois wouldn’t give up his daughter. He found a New Jersey company, Portadam Inc., which volunteered to dam the Chattooga just long enough for divers to grab Rachel. The idea was furiously debated among rescuers, at a meeting Trois attended. Tempers flared. A fistfight nearly broke out.

“That was very irritating,” Trois says. “I was wondering what in hell was taking so long. Then I saw.”

So Trois reached out to the senior senator from South Carolina, and asked him to pressure the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the river. Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), whose 22-year-old daughter died in a car accident six years ago, wasted no time.

Do whatever it takes, he told Forest Service officials.

“The senator would never do anything that would put at risk somebody else’s life,” says Genevieve Erny, a spokeswoman for Thurmond. “However, he feels we need to weigh all options, and explore those options thoroughly.”

Despite the danger, despite concerns for the river’s pristine condition, Forest Service officials permitted the dam about two weeks ago. “We don’t feel it violated the Wild River Act,” says Forest Service spokesman Randy Burgess.

Finding someone around here who disagrees isn’t difficult.

“It was like a kick in the stomach to hear that drill going off,” says Perrin. “On the other hand, that family’s going through a lot worse than a kick in the stomach.”

The dam not only failed, it nearly led to disaster. While stretching the metal-and-fabric apparatus across the river, rescuers were swept away. As the dam gave, one man was hurled against the rocks. Another went barreling toward the same hydraulic whirlpool that got hold of Rachel.

“He had to go sit in the woods, he was so freaked out,” says Buzz Williams, a former river guide who now heads the Chattooga River Watershed Coalition, which tries to fend off man-made threats to the river--among them, he says, grieving families.

Williams admits it, he loves the Chattooga, almost like a daughter. A lanky outdoorsman, whose gray hairs will soon outnumber his brown, he’s guarded and cherished the Chattooga for years. The river returned the favor by introducing him to his future wife, a fellow guide.

“Wilderness is the salvation of man,” Williams says, chomping a cigar upstream from Raven Rock, where Rachel died, and where she waits--and where white-water rafting expeditions still go jouncing along every day.

Aside from the wisdom of risking more lives, Williams questions the legal right of Forest Service officials to alter the river in any way, no matter how small: “The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act says the river shall not be altered. They went down with a jackhammer and drilled 20 holes for this dam. I think both a third-grader and a federal judge would agree with me, that’s altering.”

Williams allows that a parent’s grief should be top priority. He concedes that Rachel’s father “probably thinks I’m the devil incarnate.”

“It’s not so much that drilling these holes is a big deal,” he says, “except I know where this is going to lead. It gives purchase to those who argue we need to alter these places. Are they going to argue to pour concrete in the holes? Put a plug in Left Crack? Turn rescue operations loose with the mandate to put in dams that require drilling holes in bedrock? Where does this end?”

Nearby, a man in flip-flops creeps along the river, tip-toeing on the slippery rocks as Rachel might have done. The man’s friends watch from shore, laughing nervously each time the man missteps.

“You see that rock over there?” Williams says, pointing right of the man. “We call that Decapitation Rock. See that hole there? We’ve had three people drown in there.”

The river’s treachery is part of its beauty, Williams says, a point of view that grieving families don’t share. He understands. It’s when the politicians don’t see that he worries.

Days ago, Williams got a letter from Thurmond. If the river is so unsafe that rescuers can’t reach Rachel, the letter said, maybe it’s time to declare the river off-limits.

Williams shudders. Only through access, he says, can people learn about the river’s beauty, and its fragility.

“If [Thurmond’s] going to restrict access to a place Congress has set aside for you to go and enjoy,” he says, “he’s taking away a fundamental right this country was built on.”

Meeting Begins With Moment of Silence

Last week, Williams and 85 other people attended another emotional meeting, at which Rachel was again Topic A.

The meeting began with a moment of silence. No one there knew Rachel. They didn’t know she wore a bright orange dress to her prom the night before she died. They didn’t know she was the hard-trying catcher on the Schuylkill Valley Girls Softball team. They didn’t know about her bubbly personality, or her ability to keep a secret, or that she was just four days shy of her 17th birthday.

Still, they mourned her as if she were a local, and for now she is.

Then the meeting came to order. The safety of the rescuers was the main concern. One woman said she couldn’t live with herself if someone were killed retrieving the body of her daughter. Besides, the woman added tearfully, “I can’t think of a more beautiful final resting place than the Chattooga.”

Forest Service officials haven’t said what the next step will be, whether they’ll wait for the water level to fall, or make another attempt in the next few days. Portadam is ready to try again, with a taller dam, and many locals say the company should be given free rein. Something, anything, should be done. “They can go to the moon,” says Burnell Galloway, drinking coffee outside his barbershop, “they ought to get her out.”

Shirley Watts, owner of Savannah Street Cafe, says she’s haunted by the idea of Rachel, the image of her, suspended in that water. Like many locals, Watts won’t be able to get on with things until the river gives up that girl. “I think about it every day,” she says. “It crosses my mind every day.”

Trois works at it every day: phoning senators, rescuers, whomever. “It’s a job,” he says, and the job helps dam the grief, though he knows that when the job is done, and Rachel is free, the grief will wash over him like a raging current.

“I’m keeping my emotions in check so I can accomplish this,” he says. “My girl is in the water. We want her out. That’s as simple as I can make it.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story