Discovery — Spring 1996

My wife, Katie, and I moved to Mobile shortly after we were married. It was hard for me to make that move. I'd always considered myself a country boy and never imagined that I'd live in a city. But now there were more important things in my life than what I'd not imagined. To make me feel better, Katie suggested we build a workshop in the backyard where I could store my Stauter boat and continue my woodworking projects. One of the rooms in our new house was set up as my writing room.

I soon adjusted to city living. I had my new workshop and a new job and new mortgage payments to keep me occupied. I had my writing room with all of my comforting books, and my fingers were settling into the keyboard again. I even joined a Mardi Gras society and involved myself with other social groups. My mother grew up in Mobile and it wasn't long before I mended lost connections and fell in with the children of her old friends.

My new life distracted me from my old ways for a while, but after a year I became restless for the water again. My Stauter was freshly painted in the workshop and I felt secure in my job and paying the mortgage. The pleasant spring weather only made matters worse.

I thought I would take up fishing again. The closest place to launch from my Mobile house was the causeway, near where Mr. Stauter used to make the boats before Hurricane Frederick destroyed his workshop. But it would take too long from the causeway to motor all the way south to the familiar fishing grounds of my childhood. I decided to head north and see the lower delta for the first time.

I pulled the Stauter out of the workshop and invited my first cousin Alexander to go with me. We stopped at Mac's Bait and Tackle, another old causeway business that has since fallen victim to a hurricane. We bought a delta map, spread it on the counter, and asked the store owner about good places to fish. He suggested Chuckfee Bay, but I think he chose this spot because I was already guiding him toward it with my finger. Even on a map, it is the most interesting body of water in the delta. Almost in the exact middle of the swamp, it lies ovular, a nine-hundred-acre lake that can only be entered from the south. Around this lake is a maze of creeks that mostly lead nowhere, meandering through the swamp.

Navigating the delta can be stressful. Most places are too shallow to run a boat and the water is so murky that you don't know you're in trouble until the motor starts chewing black sludge and drags you to a stop. After auguring out of that situation, you learn to go slow and stick to the middle of the rivers. You don't know exactly what river you might be on without studying the map carefully, and some creeks are as big as rivers and some rivers as small as creeks. A map is never completely accurate.

But we learned these things that day and made our way up the Tensaw River, through Crab Creek, into Raft River, and finally north to Chuckfee Bay. From the moment I saw it, I knew I had to own a camp there.

I remember seeing a few camps on the south bank, most of them rotten and leaning, all of them deserted. But these camps fascinated me — the thought of someone getting all of that lumber up there and actually building something livable in such a remote place. That afternoon the bay was silent like a deserted party. We idled along the bank and stared at the structures. "I've got to get a camp up here," I told Alexander.

"How do they build these things?"

"I don't know, but I could take that little camp there, jack it up, and fix it. Wouldn't it be the coolest thing ever? To have a camp out here?"

Alexander nodded, but I knew he wasn't feeling what I felt. Not many people do. I was talking about a twelve-by-eight box cabin we were passing. The porch had fallen into the mud and the plywood sides were curling off. The landing to it was nothing but stripped, spindly, creosote fence posts. It must have been years since anyone had been there.

The next day I used a tax map to look up the owner of the property where the small shack was. I was surprised to see how little private land was in the delta. The state and conservation groups owned most of the swamp. My campsite was one of four on the largest of these private sections and was listed to a James Corley.

Mr. Corley was in the Mobile phone book. I called him and asked about a lease. He told me that a timber company had been representing his land illegally for years and he was almost through getting the matter settled. If I could be patient, he promised to have a plan in place soon whereby I could lease from him. At the time, I reasoned that those abandoned camps I'd seen were a result of the legal issues he'd described. But I didn't know much about the delta then and I'd tell you differently now.

It was a coincidence that one of my good friends at work, Carter, had a camp in the delta. I'd heard him talk about it before but never gave much thought to it just like I'd never given much thought to fishing up that way. But now I'd seen the place and I was very interested in where his camp was relative to the old shack I was trying to lease. When Carter told me that his camp was also on Chuckfee Bay, I couldn't believe my fortune. It turned out that his family owned one of only two more parcels of private land on the west bank. Alexander and I had not motored that far down, so I couldn't picture it, but Carter invited me to go up there with him the next weekend.

It was late in the spring and the air was cool and the sky so blue it made my scalp tingle. We launched Carter's Stauter that Friday afternoon at Cloverleaf Landing, a fishing camp located down a mile-long red clay road, due east of Chuckfee Bay on the Tensaw River. From there, one can cut about a mile off the boat ride to Chuckfee.

I was fascinated by the equipment Carter loaded from the truck into the boat: a Q-Beam, a shotgun, jerricans of gasoline, rubber boots, crates of food, sleeping bags, a duckbill pole, a trotline, whiskey, and a cooler of beer. By the time we were ready to shove off, there was just enough room in his fourteen- foot skiff for each of us to squeeze in. I sat there, feeling far out of my element. I'd always considered myself an expert when it came to wilderness adventure and ingenuity, but suddenly I felt dwarfed by all of the gear and the swamp jungle that lay ahead of us.

I'd only been into the lower delta one time, that day with Alexander, and we'd come from the causeway to the south. The trip in this time was from the east, via river. I sat in the front of the boat while Carter steered the tiller drive from the rear. It was a twenty-minute ride through a maze of rivers that I was sure I would never be able to retrace. I learned later that we had really been on only two rivers, the Tensaw and the Raft. All of the others were large bayous and creeks.

We entered Chuckfee Bay and skimmed down the south bank, passing my shack that still lay quietly fallen into the mud and waiting for me. We passed one other abandoned camp before we pulled up in front of the Delta Shelta, the Carter family's camp. It was built in the same fashion as the others I'd seen: a square, one-room structure, six to eight feet above the swamp on pilings with a dog trot out back leading to a small generator shed. A six-foot screened-in porch ran the length of the front. The enclosed living space was about four hundred square feet, sided and floored with pine planks and covered with a tin roof.

We tied to the dock and began unloading gear. I was still fascinated by this swamp that had always been so close and yet contained so much that I knew nothing about. Even the way Carter secured his boat, simply taking a few rodeo-like wraps around the piling, was fascinating. On the bay you have only a few seconds to leap off the bow and secure the painter with a bowline knot before the waves and wind yank the line tight. Here, the boat sat where you left it and occasionally drifted with the breezes like a leaf on a pond.

The inside of the cabin held two army bunks with mattresses still in the plastic. I learned this was not because they were new but to keep the insects out. Against one wall were a counter and a sink. In the center of the room was a picnic table with bench seats. The place smelled of aged pine and kerosene and the urine of small animals. It was the most perfect place I'd ever seen.

After we unpacked the gear, we sat on the porch drinking beer. Carter told me that his uncle actually owned the camp and that the two of them did most of the work keeping the place up. Carter said he used to spend more time in the delta before he went to college, but now he only made it up occasionally in the spring and fall. He liked to run catfish lines and jugs. I asked about the jugs and he was surprised that I'd never heard of that technique. He explained that you tied hook and line to a milk or Clorox jug, baited it, and threw it out in the bay. Using binoculars, you watched for the jugs to bob or move against the wind, signifying there was a catfish on the line. Eventually, when you finished your beer, you drove out and retrieved the fish.

Carter also mentioned how much it annoyed him when high- speed bass boats rocketed past the camp. The narrow channel running the south side of the bay is not much wider than a two- lane road and passes only a cane pole length from the end of the Delta Shelta dock. I agreed with him that these flashy boats seemed alien in Chuckfee Bay.

Carter told me that Mr. Stauter had been raised in the delta not far from us. His family used to have a farm with cows and a few other animals. They would commute to the city using the boats they built to trade and purchase supplies. I was fine with the part about the boat building and even the part about living in the delta, but I couldn't get past the cows. I imagined them hopping through the mud like horses in high snow. And Carter has been known to get away with saying the most outlandish things with a rock-hard poker face.

"Cows?"

"That's what I heard."

"Where?"

"On Raft River. There's high ground over there."

I took another sip of beer. Swallowed. "Crap."

Carter gazed out over the bay. "You know what I'd like to build?" he said.

"No."

"I want a hydraulic lift like the kind they have in mechanic shops."

"Car lift?"

"Yeah. I wanna fabricate a steel box on the top and fill it with old bike frames. Install it out in that channel. Whenever one of those sons of bitches comes by at sixty miles an hour, I can press the button and lift it into his prop."

We laughed at that for a while. It was soon dark and the sound of the frogs cheeping from the miles of swamp was almost deafening and the bay lay like a flat of mirror under a starry, moonless night. The scenery before me only reconfirmed my commitment to build my own delta retreat.

First Night

After my trip with Carter, I planned the rebuild of my new camp. A twenty-year lease was finalized with Mr. Corley and now the rest was up to me. I decided to enlist five more members to make the expenses easier on my wallet. The first person that came to mind was another coworker I'd known since childhood, Larry Stevens. I knew Larry liked the delta and would be interested enough to pull his weight. The second person I called on was Alexander. Even though I knew the delta was probably not his thing, I wanted him to be a part of it. After rounding up three more buddies, I had the initial six members of the Swamp Camp.

We all donated lumber and supplies and hauled them up in our Stauters. Then we jacked and leveled the camp. After pulling up some of the old dock pilings we replaced them and reconstructed the landing. Alexander even came up once and we spent a day building a small generator shed in the fashion of others I'd seen in the area. This consisted of a catwalk out the rear of the camp that led to a small three-by-four frame structure walled and roofed with sheet tin. Into this we chained an inexpensive Home Depot generator and wired it to a single bulb.

The camp was an art project to me and each load of lumber in my boat was just more paint. While the novelty of it all wore off for the other members after a few months, I remained obsessed with the project and thought about it every day. During the week I walked out to my workshop in the evenings and arranged my boat for the next trip up. Sometimes I prefabricated things in my backyard, just to be making progress. When the weekend came, I toted it all into the swamp. Sometimes I had help, sometimes I was alone. It didn't matter. And slowly, the old camp began to stand up again and take shape.

My brother Reid came with me for the first overnight trip to the camp. It was early June and so hot that we didn't leave until late afternoon when it started to cool off. We sat on the porch and drank beer and shot at grasshoppers with a pellet pistol. They are the biggest, blackest grasshoppers I have ever seen and I've heard them called Lubber Grasshoppers. I'm sure they are found other places besides the delta, although I don't recall having seen them anywhere else. The marsh grass teems with them, and their weight bends the blades and they thud when hitting the mud. They don't fly and fish won't eat them. I've never seen a baby one and I have no idea where they come from. They appear every year like spawn of the mud. I have never heard of anyone being bitten by one of these giants, but I don't care to hold them. The one time I did pinch one between my thumb and forefinger, I thought I felt its heart beating between a rib cage. As far as I can tell the only use for them is for targets and practical jokes. There is nothing more satisfying than placing a few of them on the chest of a napping camper and sitting back for the show.

As darkness settled over the swamp we started the generator and the single bulb came to life inside the camp. Then we got out the Q-Beam and passed it over the bay. Orange eyes dotted the surface as far as we could see.

The mosquitoes were out in force and we decided to move into the camp for relief. This was a mistake. The camp was still missing the bird boxes at the top of the walls, and the front and back doors had half-inch gaps around the frame. There were just as many mosquitoes inside as out. But mosquitoes weren't the main problem. It seemed that every species of swamp insect for miles had decided to make a pilgrimage to the mysterious swamp light. The camp, seen from the outside through the windows, resembled an aquarium of insect fury. The spiderwebs in the camp grew so heavy that they sagged and tore loose of their moorings. We unscrewed the bulb until it went out and plugged in an oscillating fan. Then we spat the bugs from our lips and recoated ourselves with insect repellent.

"What you wanna do now?"

"I've got a Monopoly game."

"Can't see anything."

"We can just drink some more beer."

"Okay."

After a few minutes I decided to use the restroom. I had recently built a commode in the generator shed, across from the generator, which was chained to the floor. This contraption was nothing more than a small seat with a hole in the top and a hole beneath it in the floor. Simply a way to get some privacy.

I found that using my restroom was like a taste of Hell. As you sit there in the darkness and go about your business, not two feet from your face the generator screams full-bore, leaping at its chain. And the sheet tin walls only act to deliver this sound like crashing cymbals. But I sat there trying to be optimistic. I finally reasoned that the gas fumes were keeping the mosquitoes away, but the intense heat soon canceled this out and I could take no more torture. I felt around on the floor for the toilet paper and found it. I lifted it and it felt heavier than usual. Upon inspection with my other hand, I discovered it was nothing more than an oil wick. I pulled my pants up and walked out of there bowlegged.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothin'."

"How was it?"

"Pretty nice. No mosquitoes in there."

"Maybe we should sleep in there," my brother joked.

We took sheets and sprayed them with insect repellent, then lay beneath them, covered like corpses. I could hear the mosquitoes, hovering over me. Eventually the fumes got to me and I made a breathing hole. I felt predators tickling my lips as I sweated and waited for daylight.

"Reid."

"What."

"You asleep?"

"No."

"Mosquitoes gettin' you?"

"Yeah."

"Hot?"

"Yeah."

"What you wanna do?"

"I guess get up and drink more beer."

We woke the next morning — or rather came out from beneath our insect repellent wipes — to the sound of bass boats tearing by. Sometimes if there was a fishing tournament, the boats made it as far as Chuckfee Bay. With the horsepower they had on the things, I'm sure it was nothing to jet up into the bay, toss a few times, and jet out.

My mouth tasted like I'd been gargling gasoline and my skin was sticky from sweat and insect repellent. My hair felt like greasy straw. I opened the cooler to grab a Coke and freshen up with ice water. There was no ice left.

Our first night in the delta was long and unpleasant, but I was captivated by this jungle, croaking and cheeping and sweating and pulsing for miles in all directions. I'd certainly found a place man was not meant to be, much less spend a night in. I felt like I'd gotten away with something, jacked up over the marsh in our safe little wood box. I was proud of myself.