David M Carroll

Swampwalker's Journal

Available here.

Excerpt from Swampwalker's Journal:

"June 15.  I enter the swamp at noon on the third consecutive day of the year's first turning to high heat and humidity, one of those breathless 'Panama days,' as I call them, that I can relish once I lizard into them.  It is a little over 90 degrees in the shade, and the humidity is close to 90 percent.  Through the red maple canopy I get occasional glimpses of almost hurtful sky light and blinding sun, reflecting from cumulus congestus clouds, majestically ascendant, glaring, crisply edged white domes and towers that may well mass into mountainous cumulonimbus formations, the thunderheads of late-afternoon storms.

A swamp is a wetland forest of tall trees, living or dead, standing in stillwater pools or in drifting floods of water or rising from seasonally saturated earth.  In contrast to the open-to-the-sky worlds of aquatic beds, marshes, and wet meadows, and to the often dense but low-storied shrub swamps, a swamp is typically a vaulted, often enclosed place, with high columns of tree trunks and ceilings of leaves.  By specific definition a swamp is a wetland in which trees (woody plants twenty feet tall or taller) make up at least 30 percent of the vegetative cover, with the tree canopy partly or completely closing out the sky.  Soils in swamps range from saturated to semi permanently flooded and are usually rich in organic matter.  In many swamps, wetland shrubs form a second canopy in the densely shaded understory.  Beneath the shrub layer there are commonly third and fourth layers composed of herbaceous plants and ground cover, respectively.

As wet as the season has been, standing water has begun to fall away from the swamp I walk and wade.  A young green frog, looking like an enameled pendant of gold-flecked malachite, with inlays and leafings of tourmaline, bronze, amber, and jet, is set in a mysterious mirror of shallow water.  It, too, seems an ornament of some swamp artisan's design, amber and jet, greened with the light passing through the leaves of high maples, fronds of low ferns.  I do not find the steamy, low-lit ambience of this edge-of-summer swamp stygian.  I am in no netherworld but one of light and the living, however hushed, however shaded and subdued it may be."

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