CANOEING WITH THE SWAMP HERMIT

This is a photo of Eagles Pond in the Cache River Watershed.

ULLIN, Ill. -- John Henderson lives in a cabin on stilts that rise out of a swamp. He proudly calls himself "The Swamp Hermit."

"My record is 54 days without talking to people," he says. "Not counting saying `Thank you' to people at the grocery store or gas station."

At night he hears beaver slapping their tails on the water and listens to the deafening songs of frogs. He says he can recognize some of the melodies.

He's also the swamp businessman.

A hand-lettered sign in the windshield of a Honda station wagon alongside the gravel road reads: "For canoes honk from bridge next to fire hydrant. We're fifth cabin back -- Cache Core Canoes.

"We" are the 44-year-old Henderson and his stray dogs -- A Lab named Chili, Bo the beagle and a feeble mixed breed he just calls Old Dog. No one lives in the other cabins.

When you honk, John yells out and comes paddling.

The driveway that leads to Henderson's cabin is like the rest of the region's low-lying areas right now -- flooded. His racks of top-quality red canoes hardly have been touched since the region's rivers began rising.

That's unfortunate. The Lower Cache, erupting with heron wings and carpeted green with skunky duckweed so thick you can hear it separating as the boat slides through, offers a wild Louisiana-style bayou experience only 30 miles from Cape Girardeau.

The Cache River Watershed is home to more than 250 species of birds. Fifty-six of the state's endangered and threatened species can be found within the Southern cypress swamp, which is one of the northernmost found in the United States.

Best of all at the moment, the Lower Cache can still be canoed in high water because the bayou it creates absorbs most of the overflow.

In fact, the canoe trail that winds through the slow-moving water among the cypress and tupelo trees is even easier to follow now, Henderson says.

Finding the channel among the switchbacks from picturesque Eagles Pond to the Short Reach is harder when the water is lower, he said.

Henderson calls this place "The Emerald Kingdom" and the reason is obvious. The barrage of green is interrupted only by the gray tree trunks and the threatening sky.

Early settlers called the area "the scatters" because it alternated between wetlands and dry. "Daniel Boone said it was worthless," Henderson said.

But at the turn of the century, loggers cut down most of the valuable trees in the region, leaving behind only the little-used cypress and tupelo. A movement in the 1970s to drain the wetlands resulted in the establishment of the Cache River Wetlands (see related story).

Henderson is neither a keep-it-pristine environmentalist nor a do-or-die supporter of private property rights. "It's going to take everybody's effort to restore this," he says.

Both hunting and fishing are allowed in the preserve.

Some of the cypress trees in the swamp are a thousand years old -- a few may be as old as 1,700 years. Henderson can show you the state champion cypress, 35 feet in circumference and close to 1,000 years old.

Many of the cypress have been hit by lightning. "If you stand around for a couple of centuries you're bound to get hit," Henderson says.

If he can work out the logistics, Henderson wants to begin taking people out on the swamp at night. "You can't see anything but you sure can hear them," he says.

And he wants you to know that looking at the preserve from the shore isn't the same.

"Once you get away from the bank you're in a whole different ecosystem," he says.

Henderson moved to the river five years ago from Champaign, Ill., where he was a motorcycle mechanic. He'd come down to the Cache River a few times to canoe and finally decided to "live poor" and immerse himself in the arcane beauty and wildness of the swamp.

Usually he calls it a wetlands instead of a swamp because the latter term scares some people off. Whatever it's called, he happily shares it with the copperheads, water moccasins, timber rattlers, bobcats, otters, bird-voiced treefrogs, raccoon, muskrat, beaver, great blue herons, green herons, rare yellow-crowned night herons and three dogs.

"I was pretty citified," he says, "but after I was down here a couple times I realized the true danger started at the asphalt. Down here, nothing really wanted to kill you."