Dark Water

We entered a narrow oxbow between Brady's Island and what must have once been Harrisburg's downtown. The site was given over to a shipyard where a thickly fouled barge rested and sparks dripped from the torches of welders. We passed a shipwreck, crossed a low bridge and stopped at an old house sandwiched between dry docks and a jumble of oil pipes. I climbed up to it and wiggled an ancient glass doorknob that was jammed on with an oversized rusty screw. A sticker on the window said, "A supporter of the Texas State Firemen's Association."

Fire of any sort in the inlet was now prohibited by signs proclaiming, "No Smoking. No Open Lights. No Visitors." As we were heading back toward the main channel past a dozen oil spigots arching out to the water like egret gullets, the Coast Guard called. They'd momentarily lost sight of us on their cameras and also wanted to confirm once more that we were indeed paddling all the way to Morgan's Point. "You know that's 20 miles?"

"Yeah, I know, we've got plans," I replied, not mentioning that we intended to camp overnight in the middle of the security zone at an abandoned munitions dump.

"All right," the captain said. "We'll keep an eye on you."

Exiting the inlet alongside a diesel barge, we inhaled the powerful odor of aerosol. In 1990, a Panamanian freighter dumped napthaline near this spot and a spark from a welder ignited the Channel like the Cuyahoga. Three sailors were burned. Two years later, a truck punctured a pipe at the nearby Rhone-Poulenc Basic Chemicals Company, releasing a toxic cloud of sulfuric acid over the water and sending 30 workers to the hospital, including a man who passed out and fell from a 15-foot platform.

Ahead, next to the 610 bridge, four-legged cranes were positioned on the wharves like Imperial Walkers awaiting Ewoks. Rhythmic metallic thuds from a giant maul echoed beneath the span. As we left the bridge behind, the first gas flare of the day burned off the starboard and the first moving vessel, a tug-pushed barge, plowed by. Helm's flimsy craft easily took the small wake. But three minutes later a 25-foot Coast Guard Defender was speeding upchannel towards us, kicking out rollers.

A hundred yards out I noticed the boat carried an M-60 machine gun. Fifty yards out the crew tripped a strobe and siren. A lob away they dropped throttle and turned at us sharply. The waves surged forward. Helm angled to take them head-on. "They are going to swamp us," Kramer said. We pitched into them and they slapped the gunwale but didn't top it. Helm was still floating too. "Is the leader of this group here?" a crewman yelled out as Helm's kayak rolled in the chop. "Yes, sir," Helm answered, pointing at me. "He's the leader of this group."

"We have a permit number," I blurted, "and I've been in communication with the office." We crabbed amidships and grabbed the orange hull. The young officer was wearing a pistol on one leg and a knife on the other. "I can't believe they granted you a permit, not with these kind of boats," he said. "Have you been through here before in these boats?"

I admitted we hadn't but talked up Helm's prowess, read off the permit number, handed over my driver's license and prayed.

"Call the unit, verify that for me," the officer said to a comrade.

At the aft of the canoe Kramer was face to face with the female pilot. "Getting toasty out here, isn't it?" he said.

The officer handed back my license. "You guys are," he paused, "clear," he said, pausing again. "Um, be careful; I tell you what, I've seen huge, huge deep draft ships coming through here and just really wiping things out, so, be careful. How far are you guys planning on going?"

"We're going to Morgan's Point," I said.

"You gotta be kidding me."

"You can give us a pull if you want to," Kramer told the pilot.

"We're going to be pulling out along the way," I said. "It's a two-day trip."

"You guys are camping somewhere?"

"Probably."

"Oh, my God," the officer said. "I've never even ran across this."

Our two little boats pushed on for nearly an hour, past the hissing pipes and foamy sluices and whistling men of the Valero Refinery, through the noisome rain of a wharved freighter's bilgewater and the formidable wake of a honking double barge and mats of basketballs, anti-freeze jugs and Cheetos packets, bottoming out on trash in the treeless infinitum of industry. It was hard to believe that along this very stretch in 1837 James Audubon found the ivory-billed woodpecker "in abundance." Sweat stinging our eyes, we hoisted our sore bodies out onto the paved mouth of Sims Bayou and rested in the horrible sun. "What do you think about the morality of throwing trash into the Ship Channel?" I asked Helm as I unwrapped a granola bar. "Well, that's a good question," he said. He paused and added: "I can't believe we're doing this."

Somewhere around here, a chain stretching across the channel from bank to bank some 100 years ago prevented larger vessels from passing upstream without paying a toll. But only fatigue was holding us back and we labored past the former homesite of a black man who lent his floor to the Texian army to build a raft and pursue Santa Anna across the bayou. The land is now Lyondell-Citgo, more or less. Downstream was the town of Buffalo, commonly known as Pokersville after the cardsharks there, esteemed by Houstoun as "about as far advanced as most places in Texas" in 1843 and now roughly fixed by us as CenterPoint Energy.