It had been a fiasco until I got my balance and began to feel the water. Without my friend in the other seat of the double, I would have flipped a dozen times. But the quiet isolation on a liquid artery through the middle of the city was something I never forgot. Here, the canoe paddling was different, but the isolation had the same feeling.

I made it into the tree canopy just as the storms first drops started pattering through the leaves. It was several degrees cooler in the shade tunnel, and I drifted while putting on an old Temple University T-shirt. It was also several shades darker on this part of the river, even more so with the sun slipping under storm clouds. This is an ancient river, running north through a flooded cypress forest before widening out through the mangroves and then flowing east out to sea. Inside it is a place of quiet water and the smells of wet wood and vegetation.

A mile in I slowed at a narrow water trail marked by two old-growth cypress trees. Fifty yards west, through shallow water and thick ferns, I pulled up to a platform dock attached to my stilt shack. I tied the canoe to a post and gathered my fishing gear. Before climbing the stairs I carefully checked the damp risers for footprints. I do not get company out here. No one else comes to my door.

Inside the single room it was dim, but I have so memorized its simple layout and content that I can find a matchbox with my eyes closed. I lit a single kerosene lantern and the glow grew just as fat raindrops start pinging off the tin roof.

When I first moved to this isolated place the rattling noise of showered tin had kept me awake for hours, but over the months the sound had turned somehow natural and sometimes I welcomed its heavy noise, if only to break the silence. At my potbellied wood stove I stirred some coals, started some kindling, and set a fresh pot of coffee to boil.