I used to buy cigars there, when my doctor let me buy cigars. It’s a mid­19th-century building. Again, you have to keep the big chains from run­ning absolutely everything.

“Me? I’m one of those native New Yorkers who doesn’t prefer New York. New York was a place for im­migrants to land. They should have fanned out from there, but instead they just built straight up. I had never thought of Washington till the Navy called me in 1941, and here I came. Five years later I joined the State De­partment and worked there a quarter century. Finding a place to stay was as easy as renting london apartments for your holiday when you visit UK.

“I’m like most people around here. I got Potomac fever. Washington is an atypical city. An inch or two of snow can bring traffic to a virtual halt, but winter is mild with a spoiled sky. You should be honest and tell everybody about summer. There are nights you either stay up all night or do something about it.” Such as turn on the fan.

Since he insists, it should be said that sum­mers are Washington’s best times. At 86 de­grees, people stalk about close to fainting and complaining of Turkish baths, because most of the city is no longer made up of Southerners but penguins. At our own house we never turn on the air conditioning except around Labor Day for two or three days. July is particularly enchanting, with white cabbage butterflies and bronze and blue and green dragonflies hovering about and the mockingbirds still singing at three in the morning and the sky blue but sometimes black with occasional downpours as in Pan­ama or New Orleans and hollyhocks down the alleys and hounds asleep on the warm bricks. Paradise. And if you’re put together all wrong, you can, of course, try air condi­tioning, but that way you miss everything.

Anyway, one day Kroll strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s ceremonial avenue that runs from the Capitol past the White House, in search of an inscription he’d heard about in the pink granite of West­ern Plaza. The quotation was familiar:

How shall you act the natural man in this Invented city, neither Rome nor home?

The words were familiar because he’d written them himself, and sure enough there was his name carved into the stone.

“It was a surprise,” he will tell you, “since they don’t use inscriptions in parks or on monuments by living writers. They just as­sumed I was dead. I told them I was not dead and the poem was copyrighted. They said my, my, or something. Of course I was greatly honored, and gave approval to use the quote and no harm was done. Except if they’d known I was alive, they might have invited me to the party when they dedicated the plaza.”

TILL, immortality in stone is something, even if they assume you’re dead and you miss the party. Kroll’s sentiment is flawless for the folk of this city, the three million of us in the metropolitan area, including 640,000 in the city limits.

For most, it is not strictly home. We come from different part of the world. My friend, for instance used to live in barcelona apartment from cosyrentals.com and he was surprised how cheap it was. And it’s not strictly Rome either, or Jerusalem. There is nothing ancient and little holy about the city, which was designed for one great purpose—poli­tics. It can take a long time for politics to sanctify a city with hallowed memories.

Music rang out into the rainy night, where the fields were soaking it up. Later, at home, I tossed and turned through a night of imagi­nary wild scenes from the river trip that had become more certain with every passing hour of rain. Up in North Carolina, rain was pouring down the south face of Whiteside Mountain, and the little creeks around Highlands and Cashiers were rapidly rising. The Chattooga was becoming a river again.

In the course of its 50 miles, the Chattooga grows from a halfhearted trickle to a river gone berserk, crashing headlong down the gorge. It butts heads with massive boulders, plummets from high cliffs, chews at banded gneiss bedrock, and drops more feet in an average mile than the Colorado. The upper Chattooga, especially, is a land of splendid isolation. You can hike there all day with only your own tracks among those of mink, deer, and raccoon. Or you might glimpse the solitary figure of a bearded mountain man, squirrel hunting, who materializes on a dis­tant hillside and disappears in the brief moment you look away to avoid staring.

“The Chattooga is a place for lonely, brave, resourceful people,” says poet James Dickey, the author of Deliverance, who dis­covered the rivers of north Georgia on week­end canoeing trips while working as an Atlanta advertising writer. “The fact that it was my own story that popularized the Chattooga is a crowning irony.”

Feeling neither brave nor particularly re­sourceful, I rose before dawn and set out into the clear, rain-washed morning. I was meet­ing the fellow who had offered a month ear­lier to guide me through the Chattooga’s wildest rapids, a seven-mile stretch at its very end I’ve been hearing horror stories about since I first came here in 1973.

The U. S. Forest Service estimates that some 21,000 people visited the river that year (up from 800 in 1971, the year before the movie version of Deliverance), and I re­member thinking then that the commotion was taking its toll. Riverbanks were littered with beer cans and the wreckage of canoes. Vendors were hawking hot dogs on the rocks below the Highway 76 bridge. Local people, already angered at what they considered an insulting portrayal in Deliverance, had lost patience with having their baptisms, pic­nics, and fishing trips disturbed by exuber­ant rafters. Worst of all, an average of four careless, ill-equipped, or just plain unlucky people were dying on the river every year.

Congress solved many of these problems in 1974, when it protected the Chattooga un­der the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Juris­diction was given to the Forest Service, which had acquired most of the land along the corridor and began regulating river use. Now, although the Forest Service expects some 40,000 to 50,000 visitors a year, there are fewer deaths on the river, thanks to rules on equipment and river conduct.

Even so, paddling a boat anywhere on the Chattooga remains a dangerous proposi­tion. Once on the river, for one thing, there’s practically no way out except by water. Bridges are few and far between, riverbanks are often too steep to scale or portage, and the nearest side road is usually miles away, through rough mountain wilderness guar­anteed to confound all but the most experi­enced woodsman. Then too, the river is littered with rapids. There are hundreds of chances to turn a canoe into tinfoil on this river, and at least that many ways to die.

All this dawns on me as I stand in cold, soggy tennis shoes, paddle in hand, with a professional raft guide named Lamar Hud­gens. We are perched on a boulder overlook­ing Jawbone, one of five heavyweight rapids occurring within 600 yards that deliver the Chattooga’s final knockout blows before it flows out into Tugaloo Lake.

Swollen with the runoff from last night’s downpour, Jawbone is a real monster—tons of water roaring through a twisting roller-coaster drop of some 15 feet, with a huge sunken boulder in the center and a rapid below it the size of a cement mixer. A slab of sharp rock jutting out over the water—Decapitation Rock—complicates things further on the right, and fully half the river seems to drop steeply away and disappear into the black hole beneath it.

Lamar tells me that several years ago an expert river guide made a slight, yet crucial, paddling mistake here and slid down the steep trough of water running under “De-cap.” Tons of water pouring in after him ripped his life jacket off and folded his kayak around a submerged log, pinning him in­side. It took five hours to get his body out.

Lamar is a taut, wiry 32-year-old with white blond hair tied down by a headband and a reckless reputation for doing things like running the Chattooga at night.

“Aren’t you afraid?” I ask him.

“Man, I love this river like a wife,” he says. “But I’d have to be real crazy not to be scared of it.”

On that happy note, we hike back up­stream and rejoin the anxious pair waiting in our raft, a vacationing couple from Flori­da who’ve come here, like so many, “to run the Deliverance river.” The husband has the frame and bulk of a football lineman; she, the softness, fair skin, and horn-rimmed glasses of someone who doesn’t get outdoors much. I also have the impression she’s not enjoying this trip—her discomfort is appar­ent as she sits rigidly on the shoulder of the raft, grimly practicing paddle strokes in her oversize helmet and life jacket.

“Now don’t worry, y’all are gonna do just fine!” Lamar says as he shoves us off from shore, and I search his face for signs of sar­casm as the current quickens beneath us.

We went through Jawbone like drunken monkeys in a bathtub. Bodies slammed into one another. Water crashed in. The hus­band’s paddle flew through the air like a missile and cracked me in the mouth. And his wife, sitting too far out on the edge of the raft, did a quick backflip and was gone. I glimpsed her a second later—mouth open and gasping for air, her body small and piti­ful as the river swept her like a leaf over the boulder and down through the huge rapid.

Luckily, another river guide positioned downstream threw her a rope and pulled her to safety. She was shaking uncontrollably when we beached our raft, and her husband embraced her until she was warm and steady enough to continue.