Shell Beach is about a forty-minute drive from my home in New Orleans. It’s not really a beach nor does it have much in the way of shells, but it’s where fishermen slap their rods at the water and where kayakers like me can launch to paddle across a canal into a deep fringe of marsh. From here we follow an old river course through the grasses to Lake Borgne, which isn’t really a lake but an inlet from the Gulf of Mexico.
What the area does have is the foreboding relic of Fort Proctor, an impressive brick fortification built between 1856 and 1859 and now sinking and surrounded by water nearly a mile offshore. I paddled out early one recent morning as a wispy mist
