Sound travels on a swamp, especially at night, when the owls come out to kill. As dusk fell one cool March evening over the floodplain forests of the Roanoke River in the far northeast corner of North Carolina, a barred owl’s call echoed through the cypress, putting the lesser creatures of the swamp on notice: The end is nigh.

According to birders, a barred owl makes a sound like “Who-Who-Who-cooks-for-YOU!” I could hear that in the call, but the mnemonic device doesn’t capture the otherworldly timbre of the sound, a full roundness like a French horn layered over a blues singer’s guttural growl. And it doesn’t convey the cold intelligence that simmers in the air even after the owl has gone silent, the lethal detachment of an absolute predator.

Our guide to this remote stretch of Carolina blackwater was Don Gray, a trim, wiry man with long dirty blond hair and a bushy beard graying at the edges. His face lit up at the sound of the first owl cry. As soon as the sound passed, he turned and called back. To my untrained ears, he nailed it. Apparently the owls thought so, too. The next time two hooted back, asking each other “Who’s the stranger?” As night closed in, the cacophony increased. Spring peepers peeped on all sides. Animal screams of uncertain origin sprinkled the darkness. The temperature dropped, and we turned in early to seek warmth in sleep, our tents perched on a wooden platform just a few feet above the saturated earth. I woke up in the middle of the night to an unexpected bright light raining through one side of the tent. I stepped outside and saw the moon hanging low and full behind passing clouds and moss-draped trees.

From the direction of the creek, somewhere in the middle distance, an outburst of honking rose up, like geese, but less nasal, rounder and more refined-tundra swans, readying themselves for their return trip to the Arctic at the first touch of spring. As I stood there in the moonlight, drowsy with sleep, my senses grew sharp in the cold, unfettered by the compulsion to analyze that typically clouds my waking mind. I didn’t have an epiphany exactly, but at that moment, to a Blue Ridge mountain dweller far from home, the exquisite, exotic beauty of the swamp opened itself to me. A day’s drive and a short paddle had landed me in a place that didn’t play by the same rules that apply in the world of rounded summits and sheltered coves. I was out of my element.

The feeling of strangeness washed over me, and then it went. I climbed back in my sleeping bag and had owls in my dreams.

Swamps get a bad rap. On our way back to Asheville, the car my wife and I were driving broke down. We ended up catching a ride with the tow-truck driver, a brawny guy with the soft-spoken but firm demeanor of a soldier or a cop. We started telling him about our sojourn in the swamp, but he stopped us short.

“See, I could never do that,” he said. “I can’t be around snakes. If I see one, I’m gone.”

According to Don Gray, fear of snakes is the single greatest factor that keeps people from experiencing the wonders of the swamps he loves.

“There’s this idea that swamps are filled with slithering, slimy, primitive things that want to suck your blood and eat your flesh,” he said earlier that weekend. “The mosquitoes are playing tug-of-war trying to pull you out of the gator’s mouth. When people talk this way, I tell them, ‘I myself have been eaten 14 times.’”

The point being, of course, that the swamps have never been anything for Don but a place of peace and beauty. Once a hardcore whitewater paddler, Don turned to the swamps after his mother’s death seeking a place for introspection. Over the years, he’s developed a deep affinity for the Roanoke basin and the rich array of plants and animals nourished by the flood cycle that defines the watershed’s natural year. To better share the hidden joys of what has historically been one of humankind’s most reviled landscapes, Don has spearheaded the effort to build a network of wooden camping platforms across the swamps of the Roanoke. Many of these he has built with his own two hands, including the one we camped on the night we heard the owls. (In the week before Kim and I arrived, Don had spent his days wading in waters barely above freezing hauling an eight-by-twenty-four–foot skiff laden with lumber.) With long, snaking boardwalks and twelve-foot–long supports sunk seven feet into the muck, the platforms provide that rarest of commodities in a swamp: dry land.

We started our trip on a warm, sparkling morning at Gardner’s Creek, a feeder stream to the Roanoke near Williamston, North Carolina, deep in cotton country. The put-in, Roberson’s Marina, serves as the jumping-off point for any paddlers who want to spend the night on a platform. It’s there that, after paying your ten bucks, you receive the all-important portable toilet that you place in the walled-off loo every platform provides.

Once our canoe was on the water, the first thing I noticed was the creek’s stillness. We started to paddle what I thought was upstream, but the creek offered so little resistance that I wasn’t sure.

Water in the swamp does move, Don explained, though slowly. When dams upstream on the Roanoke don’t interfere with the natural water cycle, the river floods the cypress-tupelo forests and then recedes, nourishing the ecosystem without drowning it (what locals call the “freshening”). In these still waters, rot lingers. In a warm, wet climate where life flourishes, death also transpires on a grand scale. Piles of dead vegetation decay into the peaty soils that form the swamp’s rich base. Just as with loose tea leaves, the tannic acids from these soils leech into the streams and turn the water a virtually opaque black-hence the name “blackwater.”

Belying the prejudice that swamps are dirty places, these same tannic acids give blackwater anti-bacterial properties. In the Colonial era, English merchants would sail their ships up the Roanoke to fill their tanks with blackwater for the voyage home to ensure their crews had enough clean drinking water to last across the Atlantic.

But as with any natural system, the flood cycle that has enabled the swamps of the Roanoke to thrive over the last millennium depends on a delicate balancing act that doesn’t abide much outside interference. In 2003, Don says, the Army Corps of Engineers used the dam to keep the Roanoke unnaturally high for several months. Under the weight of so much water, the forest began to putrefy. An unnatural excess of decomposing vegetation in the waters sucked oxygen out of the river and led to one of the largest fish kills the region has ever seen.

“Some reports say that 40 percent of the trees upstream are going to die,” Don says. (The Roanoke stretches some 400 miles running east-southeast from south-central Virginia to the Albemarle Sound on the North Carolina coast.) “Those trees can handle the flooding but not for months at a time. The forest needs to pulse.”

The basic topographical fact underlying the way water behaves in a swamp is its profound flatness. Anyone accustomed to the Blue Ridge landscape will be astonished at how different North Carolina can look. Roads stretch to the horizon straight and absolutely level. Small children can’t laugh and giggle as they roll down grassy hills, because there aren’t any to roll down. Even the piedmont that lies between the mountains and the swamp, a part of the state that mountain people dismiss as the land of second-rate hills, appears almost alpine by comparison.

Because of this flatness, gravity can pull water toward the ocean only at a snail’s pace. For paddlers, this means you do all the work yourself. Unlike in the mountains, where creeks and rivers come thundering down steep slopes in cascades of waterfalls and rapids, swamp paddlers have no noticeable current to push them along. There are no rocks to sweat, no holes or hydraulics to suck you under. Paddling the swamp feels more like hiking-slow and measured, with nothing but time to distract you from your surroundings. On the weekend we traveled, the swamp brimmed with wildlife out to bask in the first warm rays of spring. Turtles sunned themselves on fallen tree trunks jutting up from the water. Kingfishers zipped from bank to bank with a noisy chatter. Around one bend, a raucous cackling turned out to be two river otters slithering on a muddy bank. We stopped to stare at a lazy nutria, an invasive rodent up from the bayous of Louisiana with a groundhog’s bucktoothed snout and a tail like an oversized rat’s.

Overhead, the leaves had yet to come out on the tupelos, maples, and alders (even the cypress lose their needles in winter). Still, the forest canopy was littered with green sprigs of mistletoe, which perches in tree branches across the swamp.

That first day on the Roanoke, we took out for lunch at Jamesville, North Carolina. The tiny hamlet’s best-known landmark is the Cypress Grill, an old fish camp cum restaurant that first opened its doors almost fifty years ago. The Cypress Grill’s owners, Leslie and Sally Gardner, added indoor plumbing to the low wooden building when they bought it in 1974. They keep it open from January to April, when the herring and rock are running on the Roanoke. (“Rock” is the local name for the striped bass that make their way up the river from the Atlantic in early spring to spawn).

Whole herring and rock filets go in the Cypress Grill deep fryer and come out light, crispy, and tender. Along the rough-hewn walls, fishermen from Jamesville’s early days stare down from black-and-white photographs. Some oversee huge, squat tubs that brim with herring. Others stand on low-slung boats and cast nets into the river. Behind the cash register, a big yellow sign reads “No Alcoholic Beverages Allowed.”

“In the Boy Scouts, we’d camp anywhere,” says Leslie Gardner, tufts of white hair peeking out from under his trucker’s cap. “We’d catch fish and cook ‘em up there right by the river. Use the water, too. Wouldn’t use it today.” Later that afternoon, I saw why. A sign at the put-in to Conaby Creek, a large tributary near the mouth of the river, warned of dioxins in the Roanoke and in nearby Albemarle Sound, a gift from the county’s paper mill, which is fed by the vast pine plantations that blanket North Carolina’s coastal plain. The sign said no one should eat more than two servings of fish per month from either of these bodies of water, though exceptions were made for herring, shad, and shellfish. (Don assured me that since they live in the ocean most of the year, the rock we just ate are also exempt, and a North Carolina state health official says the warning now applies only to catfish and carp.)

Too bad birds of prey can’t read. As we paddled up Conaby in the light of the setting sun, we watched osprey scan the waters for fish. Further up the creek, a bird with the broadest wings I’d ever seen leapt from a tree at our approach and flew downstream. At first we thought it was a blue heron, but the colors looked wrong. A few hundred yards further, in better light, we made out its unmistakable white head, brown back, and talons: a bald eagle. We continued to follow it until the water trail took us off the main branch and up a small tributary.

The further we paddled, the more the stream narrowed. Spanish moss brushed my shoulders. Cypress knees surrounded us with miniature villages of alien architecture. The swamp forest closed in. It felt comforting, not claustrophobic, and I thought of the early settlers of the swamps, who saw those waters as harbingers of disease. Swamps then existed to be drained. And drain them they did.

Today, the swamp provides an oasis of wildness in a part of America plagued by poverty and pollution. During our visit, we saw roadside signs everywhere decrying the Navy’s plan to condemn 30,000 acres in nearby Washington and Beaufort Counties. They want to use the land to build practice landing strips for A-18 Super Hornet jets. The counties get noise and nothing else in return. If it comes to pass, the cry of barred owls sounding through the night might get drowned out by the screams of fighter planes. But for now the swamps of the Roanoke remain a refuge, a landscape of slowness and silence, a place to meander, look around, or just sit quietly for a while.

For more information on the Roanoke River Paddle Trail, visit www.roanokeriverpartners.com. To book a trip, contact Don Gray at 910-624-0347.