A man opens the door just a crack, staring at me guardedly. I ask him if he remembers talking to me. I'm the guy who wanted to rent his Pirogue, and maybe he could take me out for the day and introduce me to the backwater of the Chacahoula Swamp, at the center of the Atchafalaya, America's largest wetlands.

Jon slowly opens his door, and after a few minutes of chatter, invites me into his home. We sit between an alligator skull donning a pair of sunglasses, and several stacks of paper each towering in the air. "I've been busy with my hydrogen research," he says. He says he is getting closer to a way to separate hydrogen from oxygen cheaply. He points to the stacks of papers: organization before computers.

Odd perhaps, that this bearded old man thinks he may be solving the world's energy problems. But he also thinks he knows how to keep Louisiana from sinking. And not only that, but he can do it cheaply . And at least in one instance, the Governor listened.

But Jon says, "The government of Louisiana is the most corrupt in the United States."

He pauses and explains, "That last governor, Edwin Edwards he's in jail now for unrivaled corruption. And you know what, I guarantee you when he comes out of jail, if he would run for office, he'd get elected again. That's the way it is down here. That's how stupid people are in this state. That's why I'm leaving Louisiana."

Not only had Edwards been involved in a massive racketeering, extortion and fraud scheme , but Louisiana legislators had been up to their knees in corruption literally going back to its roots as a French territory. I was surprised to find that Jon's statement about Louisiana was not a bitter exaggeration.

Jon has been in two motorcycle accidents. The most recent involved swerving off the road to avoid a nine year old on an all-terrain vehicle. So he walks slowly, still recovering. We stroll out to his outboard.

Rewind 11,000 years and we’re coming out of the ice age, and the glaciers have totally flattened out and created the American Great Plains, and thus the birth of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi drains almost half of the United States, as well as parts of Canadian Great Plains. The water from thirty-one states all ends up flowing into and out of Louisiana, either through the Mississippi itself or through distributaries like the Atchafalaya River.

The Atchafalaya Basin, which contains the river, is a hundred and fifty mile length of wetlands, the scar tissue of the Mississippi's old route to the sea.

Fast forward to today, and we're speeding down the bayou in Jon's skiff. We duck down under the highways, raised just a few feet off the bayou. And then we're screaming down oil company canals, dredged for so many years as a means of controlling thousands of miles of oil pipelines.

And then, Jon takes a left turn into a waterway covered in gray Spanish moss and gray barren trees and the black water of winter. This area is called Tiger Bayou.

A bayou is a Louisiana French word which means ‘sluggish,’ and no word better represents these miles of connected natural canals of slow-moving water, the vast swamps between them, and the salt marsh connected to the Gulf of Mexico. The bayou system extends beyond the Atchafalaya Basin, but nowhere encompasses the idea of the bayou more than Atchafalaya.

Even before Louisiana started sinking, Jon explains, the bayou country was imperiled by introduced species. An entire bayou corridor we pass by is choking under the wrath of a plant called the water hyacinth.

In 1884, one enterprising individual thought he could beautify the swamps by introducing a curious plant from Venezuela that bloomed like a lily and brightened the water.

"Four years later," Jon says, "most of South Louisiana's water was covered by the water hyacinth."

The plant floats freely, and so we pick some up and eat its roots. We'll be eating things from the swamp all afternoon. Since I forgot my lunch, I take a few extra bites of anything he pulls from the dark water.