Dark Water

The canoe hurtled around bends and through the churning races beneath bridges and railroad trestles, through a jungle of swamped elm, green ash and sycamore on the current of spill from the gates of the Addicks. Beside us Helm's righted craft threaded massive unmoored logs and strands of bush rope hanging into the water from above, its small global positioning system logging a clip of 7 mph into Memorial Park, nearly four times the speed of a normal paddle.

At 10:18 a.m. Helm reminded me to call the Coast Guard. A few days before an officer had miraculously granted us a permit to paddle the bayou on through the Turning Basin and the Ship Channel; he'd only asked that we dial him today by cell phone. But now the man who answered the phone seemed not to understand that we were in paddlecraft. "What did you say?" he asked, "You're titling?" "Paddling," I said as trees blurred past. "Oh." There was a pause. "You'd better go ahead and give me that permit number." Two minutes later he called back and asked us to ring again at the Turning Basin. "I still think we're going to get a showdown," Helm said.

As we floated past a River Oaks backyard and the curious gazes of a llama and a burro, I began to feel a deep sense that things weren't right. In 1843, the Englishwoman Matilda Houstoun paddled up the bayou with similar sentiments. "In passing over this singular body of water," she wrote, "...one cannot but imagine that he is drawing to the abode of some evil spirit, whose genius is stamped upon everything that meets the eye."

We shot under the Shepherd bridge through the flotsam of a Dasani bottle, a tennis ball and a can of Coors, heading towards a smell that biologist Scott Barnes describes as "sweet corn tortillas." Three hundred thousand Mexican free-tailed bats chattered beneath Waugh and squirted pungent poop from the span.

My worries were mounting. As we approached the Enron building, nearly 20 miles of paddling remained and Kramer was still barely rowing at all. Crushingly, we'd just been informed by Helm that we'd been laboring all morning while holding our carbon-fiber paddles backwards.

Fresh sod and wild petunias soon announced the newly renovated stretch of waterway known as the Sabine-to-Bagby Promenade -- but it was really just the same old bayou dressed up. A wet track suit and tattered boxers were strung from a line between I-45 freeway columns like Tibetan prayer flags. Japanese tourists photographed us as we slipped around the boils behind pillars. In 1997, convinced that her son was possessed by the devil, Evonne Rodriguez strangled him with rosary beads and threw him from the Commerce Street bridge. Just ahead of it something broke the surface and slammed into my paddle. "Holy shit!" I yelled. But it was only a fish.

At 11:49 a.m. the current slowed and we reached Allen's Landing, the downtown confluence of White Oak and Buffalo Bayous and the city's former port. A brutal heat beat down. In the 1830s, when sun and mosquitoes "as large as grasshoppers" drove a group of swimmers here, the water became alive with alligators, according to one settler's account. A swimmer scrambled up the bank and came face-to-face with a panther. Houstoun found the spot sinister. "One cannot enter these shades without being reminded of his impressions of the Stygean (sic) pools," she wrote, "or without being imbued with such feelings as Vergil (sic) would wish his reader to imagine possessed the bosom of his hero when he descended into the shades of Avernus."

Some 150 years later, Allen's Landing would be better known as the site where Houston police officers beat up Joe Campos Torres, handcuffed him and threw him in the water to drown, sparking the Moody Park riots. The shaded banks had by then given way to cement bulkheads. But as these enduring oven bricks baked us in the noon sun, I still couldn't shake Houstoun's sense of drifting towards the devil-god of the river.

The current died. We plowed towards the pillars of U.S. 59. Ramps thundered above the water and bent together along the bank like contrails speeding towards a war. In 1997 a van missed this curve and plunged into the bayou, killing the driver. A year later a pickup hurtled over, killing two. Deep thuds echoed from above as Helm passed a mortally wounded shopping cart.

At the next railroad bridge, near a cluster of banana trees probably seeded from some thrown-away snack, the biologist Barnes recently discovered the bayou's only known flock of red vented bulbuls. "Let's kill them," he told his colleagues, "before they devour everything." In Hawaii, the colorful little bird from India has been a notorious terrorist, a voracious hoarder of all manner of seeds, bugs and fruit favored by native avifauna. Along the bayou, it's only the latest in a long line of invaders that includes the Chinese tallow tree, the South American nutria and the Jurassic-looking Amazonian plecostomus fish.

We paused before the trestle and watched it carry a train of six-wheeled military vehicles off to war. Still, another battleground was right here. Between the bridge and a few miles past the Turning Basin, workers have found the floating corpses of at least 150 pit bulls and nine humans in the past decade. Last year, Barnes found a dead man east of York Street; he wasn't really shocked until the Harris County medical examiner arrived, casually pried open the corpse's mouth and peered in. As we approached York, the bayou welled up with bubbles, inspiring Helm to discuss his own experience working for the very same medical examiner's office 15 years ago. "The examiner was talking about going to eat catfish with his wife," Helm recalled, eying the bayou for a foot or hip. "And a buck-naked hot chick was lying there with a bullet hole in her head."