Words and images by Donald Dow

Blackwater means water darkened by decaying vegetable matter. Slow-moving water, usually, and sandy beneath the detritus. More though than the color of the water, which is brownish really, and also somewhat reflective due to its opacity, blackwater is indicative of a whole landscape, a unique ecosystem. The cedar swamps of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens produce a few blackwater rivers, like the Tuckahoe and the Mullica, but American blackwater largely refers to the creeks that emerge from the coastal swamps of the southeast, alluvial sandflats covered over with cypress, tupelo, and pine trees, whose forest floors flood in the fall and winter, sweeping debris from the trees and other plant life into streambeds as the waters recede and drain, eventually reaching the ocean. 

Swamps in our collective imagination are barely navigable areas, a remoteness that has little to do with distance and more to do with our reluctance to work slowly through the mud, to deal with the bugs, or to encounter snakes, alligators, and the like. So, in that imagining, because swamps are remote and untraveled, we place in them the remaining magic and lawlessness that we allow our landscapes.

That romanticism of the swamp does not come out of direct experience so much as a refusal to look directly into it. But those who do find that magic and lawlessness there of their own accord and in abundance. Blackwater swamps are enchantingly beautiful, especially in the spring when the forest floor emerges from the water and is covered over again with leafy green and now and again with flowers. The trees leaf out and at times flower and are always filled with light. 

Human rules may claim some effect there. In the American drive to assign ownership to every square foot of land, the government – local, state, or national – generally holds title to these otherwise unprofitable swamps. But who is there in the swamp to monitor and enforce this dominion? There is no enduring presence of human activity, at least not deep up in the headwaters, where travel and habitation become cramped and difficult. This is no small part of the beauty of the blackwater swamp. And on a continent where so many of our landscapes are becoming somewhat homogenized in our imagination and in our experience due in part to their accessibility, these swamps remain pristine and particular. 

The Swamp Paddle

For the past five years, I have been spending as much time as I can paddling small boats through blackwater swamps and creeks and camping on their banks. This has chiefly been made possible by my brother, D., who makes his living as a custom wood boatbuilder in South Carolina. With him, some of his friends, and our brother-in-law K. in North Carolina, I have been privileged to do an annual or biannual multi-day swamp paddle trip down a notable body of blackwater in the Carolinas. 

D. is somewhat of an unheralded genius, a genius that is largely expressed in wood or in boats. K. and I have both built a wooden boat under his guidance and in his boat shop. The biannual swamp paddle is by no means exclusive to wood boats, but they do make a consistent appearance. For the past couple of years, D. has retired his sea kayaks from the paddle. Great for hauling camping gear and the like, they tend to be too long for the tight turns and challenges of smaller blackwater. Instead, he has built wooden pirogues, flat-bottomed canoes that Cajuns in the Louisiana swamps developed from the Native American dugouts. 

The low draft of the pirogues makes them the ideal blackwater boat, at least for smaller water. The lack of a pronounced keel or skeg makes them a bit difficult to handle in a significant current, but that is what makes them ideal when having to deal with shallows or sunken logs. Traditionally poled, their narrow beam means that they can be paddled like a canoe or a kayak – D. uses a canoe paddle in our travels; I use a conventional kayak paddle. Now outfitted with canvas deck covers to repel rainwater and debris from low-hanging branches, and to hold the gear in place in the event of a capsize, D.’s pirogues are a comfortable home for days on the water and an excellent conveyor of gear. K. has also retired his modified wooden canoe, but in favor of a sit-on-top fishing kayak with gear lashed on with bungie cords. To each his own. 

This year we were determined to do three nights and four days on a blackwater river, starting at the swampiest end and paddling downstream until the water became too wide and too populated by other boaters to be enjoyable. We have done many two-night trips, but we were ready we felt for a longer trek, the challenges of which would be in part physical but mostly with issues of food storage: you can only bring so much ice in a small boat, and that ice only lasts so long in 80-degree heat. Because we are in boats, weight is not as much of an issue as it would be backpacking, and given that we do not need to justify every single ounce, we try to avoid those awful, freeze-dried pouch meals as much as humanly possible. We instead try to eat with as much enjoyment and flair as we can, which means strategizing against spoilage. We felt ready for the challenge, but it was not to be. 

Wadboo Creek

When K. and I arrived in South Carolina at the end of May for our trip, we came hours in advance of a huge coastal rainstorm that would keep us pinned in D.’s house for two of the days that we had hoped to spend on the water. Ordinarily, rain is not much of an obstacle, as you can just cover up and grit it out, but heavy rain can mean unpredictable waters, and hard gusts of wind are hard on small boat travel. So better to wait it out. Rain means rising water, though, and rising water means opportunity. As the season progresses and the water levels in the swamps recede, the waterways become increasingly shallow, and some of the skinnier creeks become outright impassable. We had two days left on our schedule, and there was a brief paddle that the rain might have made available that ordinarily would not be that late in the year: Wadboo Creek. 

Wadboo Creek is in the Frances Marion National Forest just north of Charleston. The forest is a beautiful and unique place, known among botanists for its variety of wild orchids. The Lower Wadboo Creek is an easily navigable creek for your average fishing boat, and in warmer weather is heavily trafficked. But few make it far up the swamp. There is a blazed paddling trail that wends its way through the most navigable streams of the swamp, but for much of the year it is too shallow. D. had paddled up in that direction from the lower boat launch before, camped, and then tried to make it up into the swamp before finding the swamp impassable and turning back to the campsite. One of the swamp paddle regulars had attempted to paddle down the upper portion, only to find himself and his companion stranded so far in the mud that they had to drag heavy boats for miles to get out. We felt we ought to give it another try. 

There is no water gauge in the swamp to alert you when the water is high enough to paddle: the nearest measure is in the large manmade canal upriver from the Wadboo’s tailwaters. Our only option if we wanted to paddle the creek was to load up, drive to the launch, and see whether were confident we would not end up getting stranded. 

We loaded boats on two vehicles and headed out in the late morning, all geared up for a two-day paddle and fairly sure we would not be discouraged. The straight, flat highways turned rural quickly, though the expanding ring of new construction was encroaching on the countryside – empty shells of warehouses, car lots, fast food drive-throughs, and the like rising out of the roadside grass like mushrooms. Along the way, D. and I had some confusion about whether we had the right GPS coordinates for the launch site. We entered and re-entered searches into the maps app as we neared our destination, at one point making a wrong turn down a dirt road that D. bailed on when we passed the second sign warning us we would be shot if we continued. I am not sure if I would assign those cautions to a rural mindset or one more oppressed by the encroaching suburbanization. We found the pull-off for the national forest shortly thereafter and went to scope out the launch. 

The sky was overcast, and the air was cool for spring but moist and pleasant. The trailhead was in a mixed hardwood forest that as we walked down the path quickly became less diverse as it transformed into a cypress swamp: bald cypress and water tupelo trees soon dominated the overstory with sweetgum and some red maple and poplar in the understory. The ground was a uniform wet brown of leaf detritus over rich mud with grasses and other forb-layer plants. The plant-life was an almost uniform shade of fresh, spring green: the palette was not varied, but it was very lush. After a couple of hundred yards or so the trail became a nicely maintained boardwalk that quickly rose to six feet or so over the forest floor, and then after a good bit we hopped down a brief series of lowered platforms that brought us to the put-in, about a quarter mile in from where we parked. 

Given the height of the boardwalk, and that there were a few platforms we had to hop down to make it to the ground, it was clear that more water could have been passing under that boardwalk. Looking at the ground, the trees, and the water that was there, it would not have taken that much, not more than a couple of feet, to flood the entire forest floor. The water was far less than either of those measures, but enough to paddle out, that much we could see. Would there be enough water to keep us afloat for the rest of that day and the next? It was not clear how to tell. 

When K. joined us, we marched our gear and boats over several trips from the vehicles to the launch. K. and D. went to drop off K.’s car at the pull-out while I sat on the deck of a pirogue and waited. Ebony jewelwing damselflies were everywhere, their dark wings harmonizing with the wet bark of the trees and the dark of the forest floor, while their emerald bodies clashed with the dominant shade of the forest’s green and highlighted their presence. A few large, gorgeous wolf spiders worked their way through the leaf litter. I heard a repeated buzzy, high-pitched chirp on the same note and began scanning the lower canopy for prothonotary warblers, and there they were – several drops of lemony sunlight skimming through the leafy ends of tree branches. 

When D. and K. returned, we launched the boats with little fuss and began following the current downstream through the swamp. We followed the water trail blazed with small yellow metal signs, which was helpful to some degree, as there were frequent choices of which flow of water to follow. The water was shallow, barely half a foot deep at points, and without the signs it was hard to have faith that the rivulet chosen would still be flowing once you came around a bend. But flow it did, and the swamp was rivetingly beautiful. The canopy closed in over our heads, and the sky remained fully overcast the entire day, and yet light still suffused the leaves in a soothing green glow. All along, the buzzy chirp of prothonotary warblers kept us company.

The prothonotary warbler is not precisely a rare bird, though it is a bird whose population is of concern and a bird that requires some effort to go see: they are almost exclusively found in southeastern wetlands at the northern, breeding end of their migration, and those wetlands are in increasingly short supply. Inside the blackwater swamp, though, in the late spring, prothonotary warblers are as thick as robins in your local park. They would be the dominant birdlife we would encounter for the next couple of days and, in the daylight, the dominant sound, along with woodpeckers, of the swamp. They are a brilliant, almost luminescent yellow except for their wings and back, which are blueish-gray, and their jet-black eyes, beak, and legs. Occasionally, we would see a burst of yellow downstream shoot from the trees on one bank to the other, though mostly they remained at the margins of sight, flitting out along and above the water at the extremities of the tree branches, mostly but not always just under the cover of the leaves. 

You will find, of course, all manner of waterfowl in a cypress swamp, from anhingas and cormorants to night herons and wood ducks. This trip, it was the little blue heron that we saw in relative abundance as they stalked their prey from thick branches and fallen logs near the water’s surface. These are a small heron, hence the name, in a rich purplish blue, once again the name. Their young are all white and look very much like those other white herons we call egrets. We may have seen some egrets on this paddle, but given the number of little blue herons we were encountering, I suspect it was the juvenile little blues who we were startling into flight before we even knew they were there. 

Obstacles and Marvels 

Water tupelos and bald cypresses are swamp trees by nature and share a common feature in the swollen, pyramid-shaped, and buttressed base of their trunks. The cypress distinguishes itself from the tupelo at the water level most significantly through the presence of its knees – knobby protuberances almost like flexed roots with thin peeling bark that surround the bases of the mature trees. Cypress knees are an immediate signifier of blackwater swamps, and an enduring mystery for botanists and dendrologists, who cannot tell us why they exist. The knees are an expression of verdant majesty for the swamp enjoyer, and a major pain in the ass for the paddler. Though no larger in diameter usually than your fist, if the knee rises in your path in a narrow stream of otherwise free water, it is an immovable obstacle to your boat. 

Cypress knees are sometimes frustrating, but by no means the worst obstacle. The next worst would be shallow water or sandbars. Sometimes shallows are unavoidable, but it is best to do so if you can, so scanning the water for lighter patches that indicate sand rising above the blackish detritus at the bottom is key. Most of the scanning, though, is for subtle hints on the surface of the water that indicate a barely submerged log or mesh of branches blocking your progress. And sometimes there is no need to scan: you see the log lying across the waterway and you can see downstream past the log where you need to go and wonder how you are going to get there. Entirely, partially, or not at all submerged, it does not really matter: a log in your way is the worst. In a waterway with a swift current, they can even become dangerous, particularly strainers – unsubmerged logs with branches trailing down into the water. Paddlers can become trapped against strainers by rushing water, and that water can quickly capsize a captive boat and drown the paddler. The Wadboo current, though, was slight enough that obstacles were not a danger, just annoying and exhausting. 

There are a few ways past an obstacle. Sometimes you can back up and paddle furiously at the obstacle, hoping to use momentum to carry you over, but more often than not you then just find yourself stuck halfway. If there is some water running across a shallow or a well-submerged log, you can do a paddler’s scoot: raise the arms, making sure the paddle is not going to get caught in rogue branches or the like, and shift your hips sharply forward; repeat until you have cleared the obstacle. If this is going to work, you will usually know after half a dozen or so thrusts. If that does not work and you have managed to get at least some of the boat over the log, you can remove your legs from the boat, place your feet on the log, and carefully stand or squat above the boat to edge it along, retaining some grip on the boat so you can re-enter as gracefully as possible. And if neither the scoot nor the squat is going to work, you need to admit to yourself that you will just have to get out of the damn boat. With luck you can pull or lift the boat across the obstacle while standing in the water, and then as you get the boat free, plop yourself ass-first into the cockpit and resume. Sometimes you have to haul the boat up on the bank and portage around the obstacle, which is no easy task when your boat is laden with camping gear. 

Our first obstacle came up in about a hundred yards or so of downstream travel, and we all just humped over it with not too much effort, and then another came, and another. Just part of the rhythm of travel: some required scouting to locate the easiest point or strategizing to determine the best method, and some we just scooted over after hanging in the current for a few seconds. But all obstacles required work. No muddy portages, but working our way into the swamp became an effort from the outset. 

Some of the logs were not obstacles but mysteries: we noticed piles of animal poop on the creek-end of some partially submerged logs we passed – large piles of poop, seemingly formed over repeated visits, and we wondered what animal would make a habit of venturing out so far over the water to do its business. 

The way forward became harder to discern the further we paddled. Multiple forks opened up at times, and there were sudden intersections with large shallow bodies of still water that required us to watch the water carefully to determine the direction of flow and therefore travel. The higher banks of the swamp were thickly populated in among the cypress and tupelo with grasses and dwarf palmettoes, a stubby shrub-like palm. The lower banks, often medians between branches of flowing water, were filled between the trees with some sort of aquatic sedge or wort and wide flats of lizard tail flowers, a foamy white elongated cone atop a series of wide green leaves. Those lower banks began to dominate, the palmettos receding in distance and decreasing in frequency. 

I passed an island between two branches of the stream in which a third small rivulet cascaded over a series of logs and rocks – traveling the same direction and distance as the branches on either side but with a bit more style. Approaching the island, I saw two snakes swim across the rivulet with such extravagant muscularity that I was briefly filled with joy: rat snakes, water moccasins? I could not tell you. As I prepared to slide past the island at the convergence of its rivulet and the stream’s other branch, I saw in passing a handful of river otters rolling in the minor rapids. This brief sight coupled with some later research solved the mystery poops we encountered at the outset: who does that? Otters do that. 

And so the day went on. We glided past wonders, the avenues multiplied, the banks got more low than high, the dim overcast sky began to darken, and the obstacles became more frequent. We were arriving at the key question of a swamp paddle: where do we camp? We were not moving hard through the creek on this trip: more determined paddlers could have done the entire trail in a day if they started out earlier than we did and paddled faster. Our endpoint for that day would be more determined by luck and geography than the finality of a pull-out. 

We rafted up at a wider point in the creek, passed along bags of trail mix, beef jerky, and cans of beer, and resolved to find an answer to the question. The trail had a designated camping spot, and we had GPS coordinates for it. Those coordinates beckoned on ahead, though it was not clear on which branch of the creek we would find it, much less which bank. We paddled on, the sky getting darker, and for a while the GPS coordinates were a ways ahead until they were suddenly a good ways behind, and nothing suitable had emerged. The obstacles were coming so fast and over such shallow water that one by one we were getting out of the boats to negotiate them, and then one by one giving up on floating altogether to drag our boats over the logs and sandbars, stumbling through thin creek beds in the swamp twilight with mud sucking at our feet, swearing, frustrated, irritable, and tired. The creek had ceased to become a waterway and had spread out through the swamp bottom, rivulets becoming puddles, banks becoming stands of trees, and only the faintest of current pointing our way downstream.  

Camp

After a few hundred yards of this, or more or less – impossible to recall, we found a bank high enough that it was dry up top. Its palmettos were shoved over far to one side so that there was some open grass for camping. We beached and set up camp in the wet leaf litter. As the sun set, we could see with the last light that we are not adjacent to anything resembling a creek – just pools and small runs of water scant inches deep as far as we could see in any direction. The high side of our island with grass and palmetto descended on the other into a flat of lizard tail and then trees that were interspersed with areas of mud, cypress knees, and not much else.

Dinner was a frozen lump of pulled pork that we thawed out in a skillet over a camp stove with healthy additions of Scott’s barbeque sauce and ate on some home-baked buns with piles of vinegary coleslaw. It was incredibly delicious. The songs of the prothonotary warblers and the calls and thumping of woodpeckers gave way to the hoots of barred owls. We had been seeing them flying low through the trees as the sky began to darken, and now they were announcing their presence on their own terms. Fireflies began to rise out of the surrounding grasses. A few mosquitoes emerged to harass us, but they seem hardly in earnest, and as the night deepened, they disappeared entirely. 

We had been moving slowly but deliberately into the swamp for over five hours, and we had made it only three miles in. We could still hear the occasional motorcycle or loud truck from way out there beyond the swamp. Occasionally, a muted explosion from fireworks in the distance – it was Memorial Day weekend. But those three miles between us and other people were nearly impassable now: we were alone in Wadboo Swamp. 

Other paddles have taken us further into the backcountry and days to get there, and in those cases, as with any kind of backcountry trek, the possibility of a medical emergency – a snakebite, a broken limb, or – let us face it, with a bunch of guys in their 50s – a heart attack – is sobering. On this trip, the feeling was more of a pulling away from the regular run of things and a comfort in what skill or gear would fill the needs or habits that remain. We got there, exhausted but intact and content. My feet were wet because I neglected to bring dry shoes for camp, but there was whiskey in a flask, a campfire, and unhurried conversation. The hooting of the owls moved further off in the distance and eventually became inaudible, and then it was time to sleep.

The morning was gray but warmer than the day before. There was coffee, eggs and sausage, and a small fire of what un-rotted twigs could be foraged. Stretching my legs, I found a prothonotary nest in the hollow cup at the joint in a sweetgum trunk and watched from a distance as an adult male fed a dull yellow fledgling. The noise of the warblers was already all around us. 

Sunlight Through the Leaves

We got started late, but there was no rush. Waiting a bit had allowed the clouds to part, and now some sunshine was filtering down to the forest floor. Now with more light, I could see that the grasses at our feet were a mixture of young, fresh plants exploring the surface post-flood, and I could also see that there was some poison ivy among them. I pulled my wet sandals back on. We broke camp and started walking the boats downstream. Some careful attention to the trail blazes allowed us to keep the boats afloat rather than dragging them over wet ground. The creek bed, such as it was, was now less mud and more leaf litter over sand, and while the water was cool, the traveling was not that bad. We divided and consumed the remaining cold beers as we walked. Our mood was vastly improved, and after a while, the water was forming channels deep enough that we could get back into the boats for extended periods of time. 

As those intervals became longer and longer, we were soon leaving the boats only for the more difficult logs. The forest canopy had begun to open above us as the water became wider and coalesced into a single waterway. Sunlight soon was flooding in. The dominant insect became the dragonfly, and there were occasional butterflies passing through. I have been in blackwater swamps that when they open up to larger water become cathedrals of light, the thin leaves of the cypress filtering and transforming the sunlight into a diffuse green-world majesty that the blackwater reflects upward and out. Cedar Creek, which runs through Congaree National Park, is one such place, and the parts of Lynches River way upstate in South Carolina would be another. Wadboo was a smaller chapel of light, less grand but no less solemn or exquisite. 

Right now, writing this, there is nothing I want more than to float along and bear witness to it again. That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption. 

Soon there were large flats of pond lilies floating along the sunnier banks, and the composition of the forest shifted away from the cedar and tupelo. Now there were swamp willows down at the banks whose witchy branches bent up and out over the surface of the water, beeches and oaks a bit taller and further back, and then the towering loblolly pines behind them. We could see the purple spires of pickerel weed flowers in thick bunches on banks up against the trees, and instead of the warblers I was hearing wrens and titmice. I spotted a ruby-crowned kinglet making its way through some willow branches. Then the guttural throb of an outboard motor at a distance, and another, and then the sound of voices, and before long we were part of the summer holiday boat traffic that grew denser as we approached the landing where we would pull out. 

The pull-out was smooth and uneventful. We hauled the boats onto the thin pier for kayak launches, unloaded, and lugged the boats and gear — damp and a bit muddy like ourselves — up the hill to rest in the mown grass at the edge of the parking lot. While not full, the parking lot was busy, fishing boats and kayaks moving in and out of the water and groups of people gathering or splitting up at the top of the boat ramp. D. and K. drove off to get D.’s work van that we left at the put-in. I reassembled a camp chair and sat down with our gear to watch dragonflies, bees, and skippers flit about at their various purposes in the clover flower rising above the grass. 

Donald is an amateur naturalist, a writing instructor, and a university administrator at Rutgers.