Reading Guide

Q&A with Cathy Marie Buchanan

1. How did The Day the Falls Stood Still evolve as you wrote?

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.