The Water Hyacinth

If you’ve ever boated down a Louisiana bayou, you’ve seen the water hyacinth. It’s everywhere, hardy spade-shaped tubular leaves upturned, blanketing the still black waters between the cypress stags and tupelo trees, clogging up narrow passageways, catching on the plastic blades of kayak paddles. An invasive species, native to Brazil and originally introduced to the Louisiana wetlands at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair, it was prized for the exceptional beauty of its blooms. However, the water hyacinth has since taken over the lowland swamps, a nuisance to anyone interested in piloting even the skinniest vessel through the shallow brackish water.

Thanks to its waterlogged estuary environment, the water hyacinth can’t be controlled by traditional methods like pesticides, which work like soap to break down the protective compounds on a plants’ leaves, coating their entire surface with poison. Unfortunately, such pesticides have the same affect on amphibians, insect larvae, anything wet-skinned and alive that may be on the premises.

So the water hyacinth thrives, the bayou’s thick, profligate ground cover, tangled black roots clumping together beneath the water’s surface. Looking out across the surface of the water from my plastic kayak, I try to imagine the swamp without it.

I can’t.

I have been an anxious person for most of my life. Even at my happiest, laughing and smiling and chatty, engaged in joyful activities with friends and loved ones — even then, I tend to be simultaneously grappling just under the surface with some worried, invasive thought.

I can’t say for sure if this habit of the mind is native to my bloodline, or was introduced at a young age by my parents, also chronic worriers. At any rate, the tendency has taken hold of my brain with alarming tenacity. My anxious thoughts clump together, making it hard to navigate any straightforward course of reasoning without extraordinary patience and muscle.

I’ve tried the traditional methods of mind control: Soothing music. Yoga. A cup of hot tea. Guided meditation and brisk jogs and alternate nostril breathing. While these measures often do manage to clear out a little pocket of open space in my mind, they just as often prove tedious and partial. The worried thoughts grow back. Or I try to continue on my way and find myself mired in a completely new set of thoughts just moments later, cursing my luck, stymied and frustrated, tired and blocked.

I have never even tried to imagine the life of my mind without these thoughts.

On the morning of Saturday, October 21st, as I paddled a tandem kayak through Shell Bayou with my guide, Owen, and about a dozen of my classmates from school, I worried about a conversation I’d had with my fiancé, Chanel, a couple of days earlier.

On the surface, I seemed calm and engaged, quizzing Owen about the landscape. Beneath the surface, though, I was working over and over and over the content of my disagreement with Chanel. This will destroy our relationship, I thought. This thought quickly gathered a clump of busy, related thoughts all around it. I am a bad person, I will never find love, I am doomed to be alone.

Meanwhile, I paddled with Owen into dimmer, more narrow passageways in the bayou. We ducked beneath the burnt-grey beards of low-hanging Spanish moss. The open waterway shrunk down to a fifteen-inch passage of water, shallow enough for the bottom of our vessel to catch the mud in places, crossed with fallen logs and hemmed in on each side by dense patches of hyacinth and alligator weed. Here, the sulfurous bacterial scent of the swamp hung thick. Disturbingly large mosquitos materialized, alighting on my neck and shoulders and ankles as Owen and I grunted and shoved and forced our way through the watery thicket.

Back in open water, Owen and I had established a rhythm, syncing up our paddle strokes on each side of the boat. Here, however, so impeded by foliage, we lost our groove. Our paddles struck and crossed. Sorry, sorry, we kept saying. The going was slow. Clumps of the water hyacinth came up with my paddle on the fore stroke, dripping stinky water all over my shoulders.

I lifted the paddle and worried: I shouldn’t disagree with Chanel. I dug it in: I’ve ruined her life. I forced the kayak forward: I always ruin my partners’ lives. Repeat: I shouldn’t, I’ve ruined, I always. Shouldn’t. Ruined. Always.

Just then, a clump of hyacinth snagged on my paddle, and I had to forcefully shake it off.

“This fucking plant.”

“I know, right?” said Owen from behind. Then, to the water weed itself: “Go back to Brazil.”

Chanel once told me that early settlers used to spray the whole bayou with arsenic in the hopes of killing off the water hyacinth. I don’t know what the results were on the biosphere as a whole, but I can’t imagine they were positive.

Likewise, I can’t just nuke my thoughts away. Any attempt at total suppression usually results in the deadening of everything else going on in my mind — my humor and creativity, my intuition, memories, the weird unspoken processes by which ideas gestate and co-mingle in the intricate, fragile ways that lead to stories and essays.

My worried thoughts are a part of the ecosystem of my mind. They’re annoying and invasive but that’s my situation. I gotta work with it. And as long as Chanel rides in this kayak with me, she has to work with it, too.

We can’t send it back to Brazil.

When at last the narrow passage widened out, Owen and I paddled our way gratefully through a last few winding, open bends of the bayou. Quite suddenly, the cypress trees thinned out and the water shaded to silver, reflecting the overcast sky. Out there, beyond the tree line, was Lake Maurepas.

Owen and I decided to paddle out to the farthest cypress tree we could find in the open water, and because Owen’s extra weight stabilized the kayak, I was able to reach out and touch the smooth, feathery-looking grey bark of a tree that we guessed was least a hundred years old.

On the way back home, it began to rain. A steady, cold rain. Fat drops. As Owen and I approached the narrows again, this time from the other side, we quieted, plugging into the feel of one another’s breath and movements. Together, we stabbed our paddles into the reeds, push, repeat. When one or the other of us got tangled up, we waited. We re-synced. We plunged ahead. Eventually, we created a sort of momentum that carried us just a tiny bit farther than our exertions would have were we in a boat all by ourselves.

In those moments, being in a tandem kayak was a very, very clear advantage. Behind us, those in solo boats struggled to direct themselves, sweat sticking out on their brows, alone in their fatigue and frustration.

But Owen and I bantered. We joked. For brief moments, we felt like one organism, strong and focused on our singular task. For brief moments, I didn’t think at all. I just rowed, just listened to the tack of the rain against my poncho and watched the water pool and bead down the surface of the elephant ears at the edge of the water.

I just made the passage I needed to make.

And there are moments with Chanel, too many to count, where I likewise feel us hit our stride. I grade papers at the kitchen table while she cooks something big and hearty and filling for me to eat the next week at school. Or we soak together in the bathtub at her house while I rub the arch of her foot, listen as she sighs and the ice clinks against the edge of her whiskey glass. Or when our bodies move together in miraculous concert, when we laugh and kiss and say to one another, I love you.

In these moments, I don’t think much of anything. I just feel happy.

“Hey, look,” I said. Owen and I had arrived near the end of the narrowest section of bayou. On the left side of the kayak, one of the water hyacinths was in bloom. It’s bloom was lavender, shaped like an iris, with a silver-dollar-sized blossom and a yellow throat.

“It’s so pretty,” I said.

Later, on our final passage out of the bayou, I noticed a whole stand of water hyacinths in bloom at the edge of the water, dozens of them purpling a far bank. Owen and I stopped our paddling and coasted by. We gazed at them in wonder. Most of the water hyacinths we’d passed that day had not been in bloom. They were thick and green and alive, certainly, but they were not exceptionally beautiful.

Most of my thoughts are not exceptionally beautiful. The vast majority of them are ordinary: I should exercise more, my hair looks good today, that’s a cool billboard. Some of them, as I’ve said, are invasive and troubling: I’m a bad person, I don’t deserve happiness, my partner doesn’t love me anymore. These are the ones I spend most of my time working to get beyond, to beat back with patient lines of reasoning or just outright ignore.

Every now and again, though, a thought or two of mine will open itself up, a delicate and mesmerizing thing. My mind is like the swamp, I think. These thoughts are like the water hyacinth. Those are the ones I try to slow down for, to carefully observe, to clip and arrange on the page.

And no matter how tired I feel from the effort of moving through all the other invasive thoughts, I always feel happy about the ones that flower.