There were many terms in the Delta to describe wet swampy places. A deadening was a drowned hardwood forest. A bayou, pronounced bayo, was a stagnant or slow-moving body of water connecting to a larger body of water. An oxbow was an old meander abandoned by a river that had changed course, and it often had cypress trees in it. A true swamp was bigger than any of these. And a true Deltan didn’t use the word flood. When rivers overwhelmed the levees and inundated the land, that was “high water”—not a natural disaster, but something within the range of expectations.
