"Made it," he said.

My hand disappeared into his.

"Good directions," I said.

We sat up at the kitchen table in his house. His family moved here from St. Martinville, 15 miles away, in 1939, when Greg was a kid. Back then it was just a ramshackle hunting and fishing camp deep in the woods on the edge of the swamp, and it wasn't much more even now. Greg and his brother spoke mostly French—or rather, Cajun French—just like the other waterborn, waterbred Cajun kids, all of them like some disappearing swamp species that hasn't yet acquired webbed feet or gills. First Greg's brother and later his own children all left the swamp behind and moved to big cities. Greg and his wife divorced in 1989, and Greg only recently remarried. His second wife, Kathy Martin, is a blues singer and tarot-card reader from New Orleans who learned to read cards from a six-foot-five Bourbon Street transvestite named Morgana.

Greg spread out the maps of the Atchafalaya, pushing aside a sizable alligator skull and several slices of fungus-eaten cypress used as hot pads for all that burning bayou cuisine that he had already told me any self-respecting Cajun male made himself, and carefully penciled our route across the swamp.

"Figure it'll take two, three days."

We went to bed after three, got up at five, loaded his aluminum canoe into the bed of his rusting pickup, drove down the levee, and slipped into Bayou Benoit before dawn.

I had ignorantly imagined the Louisiana swamp as godforsakenly muggy, buggy, and hot. But on this particular morning, the water was cold and black and the air was chilly and the bugs were apparently too stiff to fly. We paddled hard down Grand Bayou into Lake Fausse Pointe Cut, partly to push some miles beneath the bow before the sun came up, but also to stay warm. The skin of the water was shivery and taut. Only when the sky started opening up did the water change, smoothing out and harmonizing in blue hues.

"This is the magic time," said Greg.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when we disappeared into the depths of the Texaco Location Canal. It was overgrown and unused, just like hundreds of other canals dredged through the Atchafalaya like a hatchwork of highways after oil was discovered in the 1930s. Huge platforms were built throughout the Basin to support the massive machines that pumped out the crude until it was almost gone. The big companies started selling off their fields to contractors who squeezed out the last of the oil and left many of the platforms behind. We passed several that day, most rotting and abandoned, but Greg hardly seemed to notice them, as though they had been here so long they belonged in the swamp.

We broke back out into sunlight on Jackass Bay. Here were the giant stumps with their long, fateful shadows, and occasionally a forlorn crawfish trap shipwrecked on protruding cypress knees. After checking another cage Greg pointed with his paddle to a dry waterline eight feet up one of the stumps. "That's how high the water was once," he said, "but they won't let it in here anymore. Half the crawfishermen already got out. Even Roy Blanchard, who used to be the best in the Basin. Now he works as a janitor for a hotel on Highway 10."

The entire Atchafalaya Basin has turned into an auxiliary spillway for the Mississippi River. The nation's largest waterway comes wriggling down from the north, turns left at the corner of Mississippi and Louisiana, diagonals southeast through Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and lolls on out a delta shaped like the head of an alligator. But rivers, not unlike most humans, prefer to take the line of least resistance, and the Mississippi knows this circuitous course is not the fastest way to the sea. For hundreds of years it has been leaking more and more of itself into the Atchafalaya Basin, and it would probably have taken the shortcut decades ago—veering right rather than left just north of Baton Rouge, breaching the silt bars, pouring full-bodied into the Atchafalaya distributary, and rushing straight down to the beach—if the Army Corps of Engineers hadn't stepped in.

"The Mississippi was too important to be captured," Greg said. "What would happen to Dow Chemical and Texaco and Union Carbide and Georgia-Pacific? They all need the Mississippi. First the Corps built levees—and more levees—wherever the river was threatening to spill due south. But the Basin was still needed as an overflow valve, so locks were put in. In flood years they open the gates and fresh water flushes through the Basin and the crawfish and the fishermen flourish. But in low-water years most of the water is kept in the main channel.

"But it might change," Greg added. "It might just get better."

Greg and other environmentalists and defenders of the Cajun way of life have been negotiating with the Army Corps for decades. Still, his optimism seemed odd to me, even though I was beginning to realize that that's the kind of man he was. He looked for, and perhaps even saw, the good in people and places and possibility.

Beyond Jackass Bay we slid up into the Range Line Cut, a narrow, almost subterranean canal. You would think that in a swamp the water would all be flat, almost by definition, but conflicting green water was gushing down against us.

"Just never know!" Greg exclaimed joyfully.

We put our backs into the paddles and pumped our arms and the canoe bobbed up and down. I was bent out over the prow, digging hard, concentrating, when Greg shouted, "You ever seen that movie African Queen?" I glanced over my shoulder and he nodded toward the bank and I saw it was moving the wrong way.

We both stepped out of the boat and sank up to our waists in cold-rushing water that knocked us backward. We grabbed the canoe and struggled up onto the bank, thinking it might be easier to line the boat along, but it wasn't. Everywhere the bank was either impossibly slick with mud or impossibly overgrown. We slid back into the swirling green depths and began plowing upstream, thrashing and splashing and slipping, me pulling, Greg pushing, water snakes sweeping around our bellies, razor-toothed alligator garfish shooting between our legs. Without a boat, humans are as fit for water as turtles without legs. Nonetheless, we eventually reached a tiny logjam, portaged up and over, and shoved off onto another expanse of flat brown water and giant stumps.

"Now," said Greg. "Now we're in the middle of the middle of the Atchafalaya." He explained that this was the Red-Eye Swamp, named for the primeval glint in an alligator's eyes.

As if to reward us for having gotten ourselves in here by dint of our own stubborn sinew, birds began sweeping in around us. They keeled between the stumps in the still air, planing just above the water while Greg called out to the birds by name.

"Kingfisher. Anhinga. Turkey buzzard. Tree sparrow."

I pointed toward something orangish.

"Cardinal!" His voice was high and happy. I suddenly knew that the idea of crossing the swamp had been a pretext. Although it was something he would later tell me he was proud to do, something he could tell his grandkids about, paddling across the swamp really meant paddling into it, penetrating that one place on the planet he held in his heart as a refuge.

"Snowy egret. Wood duck. Coot. Look at 'em all."

I was watching the birds and thinking about all the hope they seemed to carry so lightly; still, they were weaving through stumps—sad, monstrous monuments to human plundering.

Before the Army Corps of Engineers (at the behest of business barons from Baton Rouge to Bohemia) shut off the natural spigot and the swamp started silting in and the crawfish started dying, before the oil barons chopped up the swamp and sucked out all the oil and then left, there were the lumber barons. The Atchafalaya was once like the redwood forests. There were a million acres of ancient bald cypress, and loggers came from all over the country to cut the forest down. Everybody believed it would last forever. Every fence, water tank, barge, bunkhouse, and sugar mill in Louisiana was built with old-growth cypress, some planks measuring five feet across. Commercial logging started just after the Civil War, and the last ancient cypress was hacked down in 1930. Every solitary tree, every one not hollow or diseased, was taken—the entire Atchafalaya Basin, levee to levee, clear-cut.

Paddling onward, Greg was still naming birds—"Prothonotary warbler. Pileated woodpecker. Barred owl"—as if we were actually in a forest, as if in his mind he could still see the massive, majestic cypress rising from the swamp, as if he could still see the world wild and rich and innocent and vulnerable the way it was before he was born. It seemed naive. This was the ghost of a forest.

After we passed out of the open water he was silent for some time before telling me that he once wrote a novel.

"But it didn't sell," he said. "The photography books sell. People like pictures because they're pretty, not because they tell the truth."

"What was the title of your novel?"

"The Land of Dead Giants."