Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
The air was like glue. Once parked, the family waded through it to look over wooden rails at endless black water and cypress trees hung with moss. They seemed a bit surprised. But then, it’s hard to expect the Okefenokee, no matter how well described, I thought.
Sébastien gazed around at the black water glimmering through trees in all directions. “Laura, this isn’t an étang.”
“It isn’t?”
“Étang is the word for an artificial body of water considerably smaller than a lake, but bigger than your parents’ fountain pool.”
“Oh,” I said. “That would be a pond. I thought it meant swamp. What’s this, then?”
He looked dubious. “Well, I guess you could call it a marais because that’s usually the word for standing water like this, but I’m not sure we have a word for a body of standing water this size in Europe.”
“La Belgique?” I suggested. “Les Pays-Bas? Without the dikes, I mean.”
“Smart-ass. Go explain to my family that this isn’t really a pond, not even to an American.”
Most of his family was leaning over the railing of a wooden bridge, gazing at several very large turtles sunning themselves next to a big log. “What do you put in it to make the water so black?”
“Are there a lot of factories near here?”
“No, that’s natural, from tannic acid,” I explained. “Makes it particularly hard to see alligators, I find.”
“Well, the guide will point them out to us,” someone said easily.
I paused. “The guide?”
“We’re going to go on a tour of the swamp, right?”
“Well . . . I thought we’d go into it a little ways, yes. You can’t really explore the whole thing, or even a fraction of it, in a day.”
“Is it safe to go out in a boat in there? Where do they keep the alligators? What if one of them got loose?”
I opened my mouth and closed it, wondering if I hadn’t quite properly explained the venture we were setting out on.
“Oh, don’t be silly; even if they did get loose, I’m sure the boat will be too big for them to do anything to us,” someone else said.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. The log in the water below them did, too; but since they were all now looking at me, nobody noticed, and I decided not to mention it.
“The alligatorsaren’tkeptincaptivity,” I mumbled very fast and low. “They just swim around wherever they want. And, well. There’s no guide. And, umm, the boats are canoes. Didn’t some of you learn how to canoe at summer camps?”