Dark Water

The Coast Guard had never said we could camp here, or that we couldn't. I left a message that we'd pulled out and hoped they wouldn't call back. On the rise near the water where we'd stopped, Helm was stringing a jungle hammock from the thorny trunk of a prickly ash. He cut his finger. Kramer laid out a tent nearby amid Japanese yaupon and hackberry. Two armadillos ran up to him like they'd never seen a human, tussled playfully, and loped off again.

No toilets or water spigots were around. (Hoping to avoid the fate of early settlers who succumbed to fevers, I visited the Water Purification Center at REI on Westheimer. A salesman claimed a $70 Hiker Pro water filter would render the dirtiest slop potable. "It's going to kill everything," he'd said. But apprised of our destination, he paused nervously, halfheartedly pitched the $145 MSR WaterWorks ES and finally conceded that I'd best lug in a few jugs from civilization).

A kitchen was assembled on the beach from the bounty of detritus. Helm laid a slab of plywood across a Dean Foods crate for a table and pulled up two stumps and a completely intact plastic lawn chair. A citronella candle, naked doll with punked hair and head of a teddy bear on a stake formed a shrine to ward off demons. "What's that garbage can for?" Kramer asked as Helm washed off the find. "Trash," Helm replied flatly. "I know, it kind of doesn't make sense."

Venison sausage and catfish hissed on a skillet. The tangled pipes of the refinery hissed, growled and blended with the whine of frogs and insects. The sun set; the dusk fell on the Channel, and lights began to glow along the shore. The bridge shone strongly across the mud flat. Lights and ships moved in the canal -- a great whisk of lights going up and going down. And on either side of us on the upper reaches of the bank were marked ominously on the sky, the glare of gas flares obliterating the stars.

Earlier that evening Helm and I had shambled down the bank past a strand of salt cedar and swashmarks laden with baseballs and tampon applicators and pondered the idea of swimming. In 1998, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group named the Ship Channel the sixth most polluted water body in America. It would have ranked much higher if the study had looked at the ratio of discharges to water volume (the Pacific Ocean placed second). Almost every feeder that we'd passed had funneled out poop from overflowing water treatment plants during recent floods.

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."