EVERY visitor to Caddo Lake on the Texas - Louisiana border seems to come away with a profoundly personal impression. Anglers prize Caddo, the only naturally formed lake in Texas, for its trophy bass; canoeists rate its twisting, interlocking bayous among the most challenging to navigate.
Environmentalists cherish its 26,000 acres as a rare, if not singular, wetlands environment. Caddo is more of a large bayou, composed of many smaller waterways. It is home to over 200 species of birds ; hundreds of kinds of mammals, reptiles and fish; and countless plants, most prominently the towering baldcypress — some as old as 400 years — that erupt from its surface like limbs of drowned giants.
But what struck me about Caddo Lake the first time I saw it was the powerful suggestion of the supernatural that it evoked. Honestly, it’s kind of a creepy place.
Spectral shapes shift in the mist that rises from its cilantro-colored surface; ghost stories seem to ooze from its forested shores. Spanish moss dangles like serpents from cypress branches; spooky tales lurk behind the wary eyes of egrets and rabbits.
Natural beauty by itself can stop you dead in your tracks, but Caddo also works on the primal circuits. It sticks with you.
That, perhaps, is why my wife, Ann, and I return every few years to the lake, which sits about 15 miles west of Shreveport, La.: to make sure that what we saw the first time really existed; and maybe to figure it out, learn from it, even befriend it.
For John Winn, 48, one of the lake’s most prominent guides, Caddo has been a lifelong companion. “In a way, this lake raised me,” he said, piloting his shallow-draft Go-Devil boat through the cypresses, which in early spring were equal parts dead graying foliage and new green growth. “Most everything important I’ve ever done has been on this lake.”
Among Caddo’s many mysteries is its genesis. The lake was named for the Caddo Indians, who settled in the area in the early 1600s. There are two theories of its creation: The Caddo Indians held that it was formed by an earthquake and flooding; other, more recent histories say it was the result of the Great Raft — a huge logjam in the Red River, which in the early 1800s forced enough water into Big Cypress Bayou to create the lake.
At the same time, the bayou became deep and wide enough to handle big steamships, which began heading up the Mississippi from New Orleans , then northeastward on the Red River and all the way to the hamlet of Jefferson, 15 miles west of the lake.
As the 19th century progressed, Jefferson became Texas’s second-largest port after Galveston , a jumping-off point for goods headed for the fast-developing West. The town boomed, and the lake was a favored hideout for criminal elements drawn to all the new money — leading to the claim that, during this era, there was a murder a day in the area. Maybe it is the ghosts of these murderers and thieves that give the lake such a preternatural spookiness: what happened at Caddo, stayed in Caddo.
Sometimes, the legends around Caddo cross over into the popular imagination.
“I get requests all the time for Bigfoot tours,” Mr. Winn said, stroking at a gray-and-black beard. “Fine. But I’ve been out here all my life. I know places out here that the fishes don’t know about. I’ve never seen Bigfoot.”
Mr. Winn turned the Go-Devil down one of the lake’s 42 mapped and marked “boat roads” in search of the animals that definitely inhabit the lake. A spring cold snap seemed to be keeping the alligators out of sight, but we saw plenty of turtles and frogs, hawks and vultures soaring overhead.
The most interesting thing we saw was a beaver dam — a good five feet high and half again as wide, banked up against a cypress tree — looking every bit as solid as an Allied bunker. “These beavers back in here will get to be 70 pounds or so, and it’s all muscle,” Mr. Winn said. “There’s not much that can stand up to one except maybe for a gator, and even they find them too tough to eat.”
Like a lot of ecological treasures, Caddo has been rather routinely abused, first by that steamboat traffic in the 19th century, then again, beginning in 1910, when prospectors built the country’s first “over-water” oil rigs to tap what was hoped to be infinite reserves in East Texas.
In the last 20 years, Caddo has been assaulted by more-contemporary culprits, including mercury and other pollutants from past industrial excesses. So far, with the aid of several environmental organizations, the lake’s defenders have kept much of the vicissitudes of the 21st century at bay. It is one of 26 areas in the country designated for protection by the Ramsar Convention, a 1970s treaty that seeks to protect wetlands by asking participating nations to designate, put to “best” use and, if necessary, completely protect certain areas.
By JIM ATKINSON