Canoeing in the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin of Louisiana on Saturday, I had the strange feeling I was paddling in familiar waters. Just a week earlier, I was kayaking on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Hey, it’s possible.

When the US Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza Spillway north of Baton Rouge, sending flood water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River, the level of waters in the basin – a huge swamp mostly but not totally uninhabited and an important vacation spot for fishermen and boaters – began to rise.

Where I was paddling my rented canoe, at McGee’s Landing just off Interstate 10 east of Lafayette, we were only about 4 miles from the Atchafalaya River town of Butte LaRose.

There, the river is nearly a week from the expected flood crest at 24 feet, 6 inches. One resident told me that a foot either way would make a big difference in how his house weathers the flood torrent from the north.

So far, at McGee’s, the water has risen only about 4 feet since the Spillway opened. The wait has begun, and no one seems to know how deep the water will get.

Calm and canoes at McGees Landing

In the meantime, canoes and kayaks ($8 an hour, $35 for the day) glide out of McGee’s as if nothing is happening upstream. The only problem is keeping an eye on what might be just beneath the surface – that and the low-hanging cypress tree branches where the red wasps of spring are awake and ready to swarm if you brush against their homes.

We did not disturb any wasps. My tour group of five canoes paddled for two hours around bald cypress, pond cypress, water tupelo, button bush and water hyacinth. We heard cricket frogs, green tree frogs, and the squawking of black crown night heron. We saw prothonotary warblers, northern parula, great egrets, snowy egrets, green heron, and anhinga.

Nobody seemed to be in any hurry to escape the waters rushing south.

Our guide, a local resident, already was looking for the silver lining after the flood.

“All that water moving through here will bring great fishing to this region next year,” she said.

Land of survivors looking for tourists

That’s the kind of statement you expect in Louisiana’s hard luck Cajun country, a land of survivors whether the dangers come by hurricane winds from the Gulf of Mexico to the south or by floods raging down the Mississippi to the north.

“Send travelers,” said a tourism official at Crawfish Town USA, where the grocery store sold, among other items, a small alligator dressed and ready for grilling, with head, for $65.

“In between the storms, we’ve got plenty for them to do,” she said.

David Molyneaux is editor of TheTravelMavens.com