Books/Among the Swamp People
Nonfiction · Adult
Among the Swamp People
Twenty years of weekends in 260,000 acres of wetland: a cabin built out of driftwood, and the people who live and work out there.
The book
Second in size only to the Mississippi River Delta, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta — the swamp — consists of almost 260,000 acres of wetlands just north of Mobile Bay, formed by the confluence of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. There is no way into it except by small boat.
Watt found it in his twenties, leased a habitable rise of ground deep inside it, and built a primitive cabin out of driftwood to serve as a private getaway. He has been going back most weekends for twenty years. This is the account of it: the delta’s unparalleled natural wonders, the difficulty of surviving in it, and an extraordinary community of characters — generous and violent, gracious and paranoid, endearing and reckless, often within the same afternoon.
It is also the story of how a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer with no formal training as a writer turned into one out there.
It is the only place I know where gloom and beauty can coexist at such extremes.
Details
- Publisher
- University of Alabama Press
- Audience
- Adult
- Subject
- Regional nonfiction — the Mobile-Tensaw Delta
- Companion
- Bay Boy, on the bay side of the same life
Where it turns up in the fiction
The same water, told sideways.
Three novels drawn from the years spent out in it — the storms, the cabins, and the business of getting home.
Terror at Bottle Creek
A category-three storm, an ancient Indian mound, and a boy holding on to a tree.
View book →Hideout
Somebody else’s camp, deep in the woods, with somebody else’s boy living in it.
View book →Alabama Moon
Built on the same hard-won knowledge of how a person actually lives out in the trees.
View book →Read next
More from the same water.
Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
