Dark Water

At 12:59 we reached the city's largest handling place for the remains of the living, the sprawling 69th Street Wastewater Treatment Plant. Close to the bank loomed seven excrement dryers, towering chromed edifices where centrifuges wring moisture from sewage sludge, 1,200-degree flames sterilize it with heat and roaring vacuum fans suck it up five-story chutes and convert it into fertilizer pellets. From the water it smelled like roasted almonds. An outflow of warm, leached-off water was supposed to be clean enough to drink, though last year the plant was cited by the state three times for "unauthorized discharges." Helm paddled back alongside our canoe. "See any floaters out there?" Kramer asked. Helm smirked. "Bodies or wet chunks?"

Amid all of the casualties and invasions in this stretch of bayou, I'd begun to wonder if anything that originated here remained as more than fertilizer. But around a bend the bulkheads gave way to a thick stand of cottonwoods, home to the bayou's only wood ducks -- a particularly timid native species. As if guarding this last vestige of native wildness, a mullet leaped out of a drift of 40s and slapped Kramer in the face. "Shit!" he yelled, "a fish just hit me!"

A car alarm wailed. The neap tide carried us to a placard standing in the water. The mouth of Turning Basin at last. "Warning," the sign said in bright orange letters. "Do Not Enter."

I told the Coast Guard over the cell phone that we were entering. "Have a safe trip," an officer said. And at that we moved past the forbidding signs and the berth of the Port Authority's M/V Sam Houston tour boat, where on a recent outing I'd apprised the skeptical crew of my plans, adding that I'd call the police on my cell if anything went wrong. "By then," a crewmember said, "it will be too late."

The channel widened and we were engulfed within a deep valley of ancient cement wharves. They were inscribed with cryptic graffiti: tebor, m/t mariposa, the rat pickle pete. We hewed close to them alongside the tires of Caterpillars strung up as fenders that had crumpled despite their size. I considered what this meant should a vessel sandwich our canoe. A skiff only slightly larger than ours floated ahead. It was moored to the towering hull of the Amige and supported a brawny painter in a Swiss-cheesed T-shirt and red overalls streaked with blue. He seemed deaf to our calls.

Beginning here amid the diesel-engine drone of ships, the inert water was a Sargasso Sea of trash. A tool box, soccer ball and Adidas sneaker dotted a film of scoured plastic bottles and wrack. It felt as if we were descending into Hell's third circle where damned gluttons live in rubbish. Barnes would call this a "dead zone." For a year he has examined the movements and inertia of trash in the bayou underworld: "Like KFC, Subway, we document that," he said. A Marine Debris Grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will help him learn how bayou refuse drifts in currents, wind and storms -- and will give him ammunition for confronting the worst litterbugs, such as Shipley Do-Nuts. Some sinners are more criminal than others. In 2003, one of Barnes's trash collectors in the Turning Basin discovered a chrome 18-wheeler gas tank brimming with marijuana.

It was hard to believe the Basin we were seeing could have at one time been a popular spot for wholesome family entertainment. To inaugurate the opening of the Ship Channel in 1914, the city held the first annual No-Tsu-Oh Deep-Water Jubilee, a weeklong carnival presided over by King Nottoc, in which everything was spelled backwards. Flower-decked ships drifted through a Turning Basin that was adorned with streamers, banners and flags. But according to The Houston Post, the floating parade also included a waterborne Zulu grass hut housing 200 howling savages who dunked captive missionaries into a fire-licked cauldron and danced around them waving spears and gnawing on human ribs. Family fun á la Apocalypse Now.

Even now the Basin hadn't been completely purged of its wildness. From the lips of bulkheads, cliff swallows dropped out of mud nests and swooped overhead hunting insects. A fish splashed. "I'm starting to smell salt water," Helm said. We pushed alongside the imposing bluff of another argosy, its flesh-colored paint showing rust where it had been scratched off as if by a nail of Talos. A shirtless sailor high above yelled down a question. "Where the fish at?"

He wasn't the only person watching us. Banned to anyone without a permit for the next 14 miles, the channel was rigged with 32 security cameras; one of them probably swiveled to see us round the moored military cargo ships Cape Taylor, Trinity and Texas. Signs warned, "Keep Clear." Past the gray freeboard the bulkhead crumbled for the first time in a half hour and sprouted sunflowers and goldenrod. For a moment, we relaxed.

We soon reached the mouth of Brays Bayou and Harrisburg. Founded years before the first street was laid in Houston, Harrisburg supported a lumber mill and two dry goods stores stocked by schooners from New Orleans. "They had no use for a jail," the settler Dilue Rose Harris wrote in italics in 1833, "everybody honest." Three years later Santa Anna's Mexican army burned Harrisburg to the ground. The hamlet still hasn't recovered its prominence or peace; two bodies have been found in the area in as many years, including one near the Brays Bayou sandbar where we gunkholed past a maggot-filled catfish and an empty bottle of Mad Dog 20/20.