Certain

This roughly 25,000-acre plot has been underwater for centuries. Some of its bald cypress trees, which are the most conspicuous component of the lake, have been found to be up to 400 years old. Caddo Lake formed as “a gradual buildup of fallen trees that started in the 1600s,” Rios explains. Over the years, due to spring floods, the sides of the Red River eroded, causing more trees to fall into the current and accumulate downstream. This naturally formed dam became known as the Great Raft. “In the early 1800s, the Great Raft eventually disrupted the flow of the Red River enough that it caused the water to spill over into Louisiana’s Cypress Valley, which formed what is now known as Caddo Lake,” Rios says.

It is a place, seeing it that February morning, that looks like it is in mourning. I try to understand it, to think of things or places I already know that might help to explain it. There is a group of sculptures in Bologna in Italy by Niccolò dell’Arca that represents the mourners gathering around the corpse of the dead Christ. The harrowing work is said to be the first depiction of wind in sculpture, the figures’ clothes moving dramatically—underlining their desperate grief—while keeping still. This lake and its trees put me in mind of them.

The great forest of cypress trees on Caddo Lake also resembles a lost army on the march. This is especially true when there’s more space in the water and you can see the full length of the trees in reflection. Then they appear to be long, thin, ancient limbs striding toward you. The feeling, in general, is one of movement—that the trees will advance the moment you look away from them as if they are playing a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps with you. Turn around again—can you be certain those trees are in the places they were before? They are something like the trolls depicted by Norwegian painter Theodor Kittelsen, who lived out on a fjord and was said to be genuinely frightened of the folklorish creatures.

What trees these are! What magical trees. Cypress oil is used to treat sores, burns, liver diseases, and malaria. It keeps away mosquitoes in the summer; it will not countenance them on the lake. Its roots keep growing, making “knees” for supports, so at any point you may see these knees all about—and how like human knees they are. And these knees, incredible as it sounds, pull up out of the water and are slowly absorbed into the trunks. There is something intimate about the trunk taking its limbs into itself, like an embrace.

What we have here is an ancient army, or ancient spirits, on the march.

“Most places you hike through the trees, but here you can paddle through them,” Rios says.

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To see the lake properly, to gain a better understanding, we go out on a pontoon boat under the guidance of Captain Ron Hollomon, who runs Captain Ron’s Swamp Tours with Jean Rhodes-Werneke, who is also from England. She moved from Manchester in 1993. “To say arriving at Caddo was a culture shock would be an understatement,” she says. “The second day after I arrived, my stepdaughter and her husband took me on a boat ride around Caddo, and that was it. I was hooked.”

Captain Ron is an encyclopedia of the place. We move off the landing stage and head into the cypress forest. In a couple of minutes, all is different. The curtain has lifted, and we’ve gone in, deeper and deeper. Then the curtain closes behind us.

Like the streets of Venice, narrow passageways of water are contained between vertical structures on either side, endlessly repeating themselves. How do you navigate such a place? How can you ever hope to read it, to prevent yourself from getting lost? Our guide knows his route expertly, and numerous markers give us safe passage. But what would happen if you went off this marked path, if you got lost in the twisted avenues of trees? People have found a way, we are told, by putting odd things here and there, human objects stuck within the knotty roots. For years, Captain Ron tells us, people have navigated by this particular signpost: a plastic bucket labeled “Mrs. Tucker’s lard.” This object, seemingly a piece of garbage, is a very necessary signpost, a personal marker to someone traveling this monotonous terrain. It’s a way for a person to state with some certainty, Here I am, and feel confident, if only in the short term, of their future.

It is very gray—gray on gray on gray. Gray of the trees. Gray of the moss on the trees. Gray of the mist coming from the lake. Sometimes a lighter gray, sometimes darker. But always gray. “A complete gray out,” Captain Ron says.

On occasion, he says, you might see a flash of red or brown among the gray. That would belong to the creature called the North American mink, an apparently unwelcoming animal that our guide describes as singularly vicious—in his words, “Satan’s little buddy.”

The swamp is green, we are told somewhat despairingly by our guide, in the summer. There are lily pads, fireflies, life, and noise. But now in late winter, color is forbidden, as if you found yourself in an illustration from an old book. But it is not just the lack of color, or the monotony of the haunting landscape, that contributes to the eeriness of our journey. It is the silence—and the stillness.

During Prohibition, moonshiners would make and store alcohol out here on boat landings. They felt safe doing so because on the lake in the winter, in the still silence, you could hear anyone coming even from a long distance away. If anything makes a sound, you will hear it. If you make a sound, everything will hear you.

The ubiquitous moss is like snow, like icicles. Soon it felt like we too are wearing this Spanish moss. Captain Ron has a handful of it, and he gives it to us to pass around so that we might all feel it and have a better connection to the place. And oh, it is so soft! No great surprise then that the moss has been used to stuff mattresses and pillows. To think of your head in rest so close to that moss, of the moss entering your dreams.

When there is some wind, even the slightest breeze, the light moss moves and so all around you the trees are swaying. There is a feeling of movement and life.

“Who’s there?” I am tempted to shout, quoting the first line of Hamlet, famously a ghost story. I cannot help but think of it out on the lake.

“When it gets dark, the mood changes,” Captain Ron says. You can see the stars with perfect clarity. You can watch the Milky Way looking up from the shallow water. You can hear the screech owl. Once, he informs us, he listened to the long and harrowing screams of a hog struggling for life as it was pulled into the lake by an alligator and drowned. Later, I’m told of a past Halloween event where a person dressed up as a ghoul to scare the tourists on their boat tours and had suddenly disappeared, only to turn up a little later on a separate boat because he’d seen the orange eyes of alligators in the water coming to find the cause of commotion.

But the alligators are asleep when we are there, and the fish have all left for the winter. There is only this great purity of gray. We stay out for just a couple of hours, but what an odyssey it has been. As we leave the gray curtain, a single shot of blue soars over the boat in the form of a great blue heron.

Later, after the tour, we sit at Big Pines Lodge trying fried alligator for the first time. It tastes to me like a delicious cross between chicken and squid. Rhodes-Werneke shows me on her phone a recording someone has made of a strange floating orb, a sphere of light floating around on a summer’s day. What is it? Who could say? And yet it is there, persisting—a round twinkling thing, like a fairy, or like something we don’t have a name for.

It has been an unusual, inspiring getaway, a step away from time, to see this other Texas. But soon we are back on the long, and I’m afraid uninspiring, drive. Farther and farther away from the border we drive, farther from the end of Texas, toward its center. I have in my pocket a small vial of cypress oil Captain Ron has given me, along with a clump of Spanish moss.

Visiting Caddo Lake, especially I suppose in the dead season, is like slipping off the map, as you travel slowly, quietly amongst ancient wetlands. Letting the silence work upon you, taking in the haunting shapes of the moss-covered trees, allowing this damp, magnificent, creeping nature to work its way into you.