I pushed the raft out into the tawny water, got on board, and began poling toward the snag. When I got to the swamp, I saw a small raft and a pole lying on the bank. I wanted to see if there was a heron nest in this local swamp’s dead tree-perhaps even a live heron, perhaps even the remains of a ladder, perhaps even a sun-bleached skull nearby. The heron stabbed him in the eye as he came level with the nest, and the man, his eye and brain pierced, fell dead from the ladder.
I had somewhere read that great blue herons nested in such snags, and that in one swamp a man had brought a ladder, placed it against a tree, and climbed up to look into a heron nest. Far out in the water stood the unreachable hulk of a dead tree-branchless, tall, white, and with a large hole near the top. Saturdays were free time, and I sometimes went to a nearby swamp. When I was ten years old, my family lived in a rented house in Rhode Island. For a few seconds, I once considered hiding in a swamp myself. technology, big swamps are places to get lost, and in the past many people with a reason to melt out of sight-Native Americans threatened out of their territory, runaway slaves, Civil War army deserters, moonshiners, and bloody-handed murderers-have hidden in them. Yet the swamp traveller goes not in a straight line but slouches from quaking island to thick tussock to slippery, half-submerged log.
Although water and squelch are everywhere in a swamp, there are landmarks-downed trees or jagged stumps, a tenanted heron nest, occasional islands of high-ground hardwood stands, called “hammocks” in the South. But a swamp is different: in it, in addition to water, there are trees and shrubs, just as reeds and rushes are the hallmarks of a marsh. Everything undulates, the rise and fall share the same muted palette, and the senses dull. It can be hell finding one’s way across an extensive boggy moor-the partially dry, rough ground and the absence of any landmarks let the eye rove helplessly into the monotype distance. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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