We move slowly through the cut, the water dark and smooth as oil as we try to avoid hidden obstacles beneath the surface. Trees rise on either side, bare, pale trunks standing in silence with their roots sunk deep in mud. Somewhere behind us lie the coast, the wind, the world, but here it is just water and trees, a place that asks for little, only that you pass through quietly. The photo shows our friends gliding ahead on one of the blackwater rivers of North Carolina, where the water runs black from tannins released by decaying plant matter in the swamps upstream.
