Theme Of Water In One Foot In Water

Back when I was little girl, I always fascinated over water. I remember that I loved to be able to go down to Lake Chatuge, which is directly behind my house, and sit there, thinking about how wonderful my God is to make such a beautiful thing that we do not appreciate like we should. According to Oxford Dictionary, water is “a colorless, transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid that forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain and is the basis of the fluids of living organisms.” Ron Rash used symbolism, which is “something that represents something else” (Mays 205), in his book One Foot in Eden drastically in many different aspects about water. The symbolism of water in One Foot in Eden has many various meanings that are vividly expressed within

Whether it is being clean spiritually or physically, water has an enormous impact in being clean. Physically, we, as humans, take showers and/or baths to maintain our cleanliness for our personal hygiene. Ron Rash speaks about being clean when he wrote “a man bathes just to get dirt off him but it seems more to a woman than that (Rash 116)” and “It was a good, pure feeling to be out in the river on a warm spring day, knowing that come cold weather months later you’d lift quilts up to your chin and smell the washing powders and the damp of the river. But it was more than that. It was knowing something could be clean no matter how soiled and dirty it got (Rash 85).” Analyzing what Ron Rash said in these two parts of the book, he talks about being clean in a more in-depth meaning than just being physically clean. He showed an example of this with the cleaning of the quilts. To Rash, no matter what one’s past has been like or how dirty of a past a person has, you can always become clean. When it comes to being cleaned spiritually, one can say that being saved and attending baptism would be considered as cleaning someone of one’s sin. “Baptism through immersion into water symbolizes cleansing of hearts and conscience: “Let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water (Hebrews 10:22)”

When someone thinks of the word “flooded,” they tend to think of something being completely covered with water and it is more of a devastation than relief. In One Foot in Eden, there is a company called Carolina Power and they are coming into Jocassee to flood the land. Rash presented the fact of Carolina Power coming into the land to flood it when he states “I’d farm this land until Carolina Power ran us all out and drowned these fields and creeks and the river itself (40). For more factual evidence, the flooding in the Ron Rash’s book was based on true events. “In 1963, Duke Power Company (a Duke Energy Company, or DEC) formed Carolina Land and Timber Company, which purchased an 83,400-acre tract of land in the Horsepasture area from Singer Corporation and private landowners. Duke Power Company (DPC) announced construction of the Keowee Toxaway Project on January 2, 1965, and began development in 1967. The construction resulted in the formation of 18,400-acre Lake Keowee and 7,500-acre Lake Jocassee” (History of Lake Jocassee). Along with the flooding in the book, there was a Great Flood in the Bible that God made happen. In Genesis 7:4 NKJV, God said “For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made (biblegateway.com).” As a comparison of the two events that took place, the flooding