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Colorful and lively personal essays about life in the wilds of Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw River Delta
 
Among the Swamp People is the story of author Watt Key’s discovery of the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. “The swamp” consists of almost 260,000 acres of wetlands located just north of Mobile Bay. There he leases a habitable outcropping of land and constructs a primitive cabin from driftwood to serve as a private getaway. His story is one that chronicles the beauties of the delta’s unparalleled natural wonders, the difficulties of survival within it, and an extraordinary community of characters—by turns generous and violent, gracious and paranoid, hilarious and reckless—who live, thrive, and perish there.
 
There is no way into the delta except by small boat. To most it would appear a maze of rivers and creeks between stunted swamp trees and mud. Key observes that there are few places where one can step out of a boat without “sinking to the knees in muck the consistency of axle grease. It is the only place I know where gloom and beauty can coexist at such extremes. And it never occurred to me that a land seemingly so bleak could hide such beauty and adventure.”
 
It also chronicles Key’s maturation as a writer, from a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer with no formal training as a writer to a highly successful, award-winning writer of fiction for a young adult audience with three acclaimed novels published to date.
 
In learning to make a place for himself in the wild, as in learning to write, Key’s story is one of “hoping someone—even if just myself—would find value in my creations.”
 

Where nature meets history—explore Alabama’s hidden river legacy.

The Tensaw River introduces one of the American South’s richest and most fertile natural features. Author Mike Bunn is director of Historic Blakeley State Park, which is nestled in a prominent bend of the majestic Tensaw River. Reading Bunn is like sailing with a knowledgeable captain along the river’s natural and cultural byways as he offers a treasury of stories and facts that illuminate the river’s astonishing flora and fauna and the sweep of human history along the river’s ageless, meandering waterways.

Forming the eastern boundary of the expansive Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the Tensaw has had little industrial development. Left largely undisturbed, the river still flows free and bountiful into the grand estuary of Mobile Bay in ways and along vistas that would be recognizable to Native Americans centuries ago and to pioneers who arrived before Alabama became a state.

Bunn’s unforgettable stories in The Tensaw River trace the construction and occupation of the Bottle Creek site, an important mound complex built by Southeastern Native Americans a millennia ago. Nearby Blakeley is a spectral antebellum ghost town whose lost memories also tease the imagination. During the Civil War, the boom of artillery fire in the battle that sealed the fate of the city of Mobile echoed along the bends in the Tensaw.

Located near popular Gulf Coast travel destinations, the Tensaw’s forty-one-mile-long “Forgotten Cultural Heritage Corridor” is a gateway to the enchanting beauty of—and humankind’s enduring relationship to—the landscape of the American South.