Dark Water

And yet we'd worked so hard to get to the heart of this place that it might have been foolish not to know it. I'd waded in, held my breath and plunged into the darkness. "It tastes salty," Helm had said.

Through the night I felt incredibly clean, almost as if I'd scoured off a thin layer of skin. My arm later sprouted a weeklong rash.

In the morning I stumbled out of my tent and was attacked by giant mosquitoes. Helm said his jungle hammock had been useless against them; they'd bitten him through the nylon. To escape the swarm I walked down the shore past a marooned buoy and a purple basket flower growing alongside an oil pipeline. I saw the fresh tracks of crabs, raccoons and a solitary coyote. Helm caught a banded water snake in his hands.

At 8:48 a.m. Helm heaped the trashcan with the last of our rubbish and we left it there and stemmed the tide towards Galveston Bay.

The Alumacraft labored beneath the teat-like hawses of giant ships. Anchors protruded from the bulges like pierced nipples. We dragged ashore again onto a beach of castoff televisions. Huge tug wake crashed in. "You-all could have made it," Helm said, "but I would have been swamped."

The parade of vessels was nearly constant; we were entering the infamous zone of shipwrecks. In 1986, the tanker Vardaas slammed into a dock here and crushed 12 pipelines, spilling 1,600 gallons of chemicals. A month later a gasoline barge exploded nearby and blocked the entire channel for three days. Just downstream in 1998 the 250-foot Floreana sank. And down from there the Ievoli Splendor collided with a barge two years ago and spilled 2,000 gallons of fuel oil.

I wondered if the Channel was really a navigational improvement over what it used to be. "This is the most remarkable stream I have ever seen," wrote early settler Nicholas Clopper in his journal in 1827. "...The water being of navigable depth up close to each bank, giving to this most enchanting little stream the appearance of an artificial canal in the design and course of which Nature has lent her masterly hand; for its meanderings and curvatures seem to have been directed by a taste far too exquisite for human attainment."

Pushing through waves between a dock and a moored ship, we turned and sprinted out across the channel towards the San Jacinto Monument. "I blew my wad," Kramer wheezed. Our boats had crossed the outer limit of the Security Zone.

The long bulkhead of the park was lined with fishermen despite an all-species fishing advisory for dioxins. They were the first people we'd seen so close to the water all day. We climbed out by the snout of Battleship Texas near a man dragging a blue ice chest through the weeds. He opened it to reveal a trout, a drum and ten redfish. But wasn't he worried about the fishing advisory? "It's just crabs and catfish," he supposed. "If they live here, it's good."

Farther down in a small embayment a man yelled at us from the shore as we nearly hit his crab lines strung from dead trees in the water. He yelled again. I looked up to see a massive freighter speeding around a bend. Helm was out of sight. The wake crossed a headland coming towards us and arched into the tallest waves we'd seen. There was no time to flee ashore. We turned up into the first plunger. The canoe knifed down into the second wave, sending water splashing over the prow onto my feet. We jacked in this way up and down taking on water until the waves melted into chop and the man on shore cheered.

Moving on, we skittered around the idling Lynchburg Ferry and joined with Helm and the mighty San Jacinto. It was here in 1937 that 17-year-old H.L. Ward, possibly the last person before us to paddle a large part of the route, hitched his canoe to a splinter on a wooden barge and rode it all the way to the Turning Basin to look for a job. The barge captain noticed him there and made him paddle back.

The ships put on speed in the wideness of the river. We rolled on following sea for two hours past islands of yucca and Indian blanket and multicolored gas pipe.

Beneath the lofty span of the Fred Hartman Bridge, Helm climbed out of his kayak and rested next to a column. Stepping out of a johnboat at the same spot in 2002, a man in camouflage pushed a cardboard box up to the pillar. A tugboat captain saw him and called the Coast Guard; the Coast Guard called the FBI; the FBI called a bomb squad. It turned out the man in camouflage was a hunter. He had also wondered if the box contained a bomb. "They opened it up, and inside was a dead cat," Captain Richard Kaser, Commanding Officer of the Port of Houston, told me. "And on top of the lid it said, 'Bill was a good cat.'"

I'd begun to accept a fragile sense of relief. Beyond the bridge the chemical plants thinned and gave way to patches of green. Speedboats zipped past kicking up white spindrift. The Coast Guard checked in. They called me "General Josh."

But paddling into the shimmering light of the bay, I still didn't feel like I was in command of this place. Back up the river, a plume of smoke rose from the shore and over the city -- its darkness blending into the afternoon haze.