Beyond the Earth

October 31, 2010

No-Name Swamp

It is in vain to dream of a wildness
distant from ourselves.

There is none such.

It is the bog in our brain and bowels,
the primitive vigor of Nature in us,

that inspires that dream.

This and all quotes today are from Thoreau’s Journal
of August 30, 1856,  as he recalls a walk at Gowing’s Swamp
in Concord, Massachusetts.

Jackie and I wanted to meet today to take a walk, somewhere, and it was Halloween. Could we pick a place suitable to the occasion? I suggested the bog we visited back in the hot days of July, and that there were tamaracks there. Unique among conifers in this area, they are not evergreen, but their needles die and fall in late autumn. They should be turning now -- there wasn’t much time left to see them.

So today we returned to that swamp. It’s just a six-mile drive up the road; you park the car and walk about 200 feet – and enter another world !

Consider how remote and novel that swamp.

Beneath it is a quaking-bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda polifolia, Kalmia glauca, Menyanthes, Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium oxycoccus, plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees.

It would be as novel to them to stand there as in a conservatory, or in Greenland.

As you first step in, the ground gives  - gravity is different here.
It's even not ground anymore - you are beyond the earth.
You walk upon a floating moss carpet of unknown thickness; beneath that - who knows how much water?

 

In July, everything was green and lush.

Today – every plant had changed color. It was truly a Halloween landscape:

With orange trees

Ghostly growths

Spooky spider-webs

And creepy branches

Though I do think the tamaracks are beautiful. These trees are thin and spindly, but if you look closer, you can sense their exuberance.

Then, suddenly, the season changed – a brisk north wind off the lake brought a low, pale cloud overhead – all at once, it was snowing.

Little pellets of snow were hurled down in handfuls – I burst out laughing as they hit me on the head. Looking back, I saw Jackie laughing, too. Now we were in Greenland!

As suddenly as it began, the snow-pellet shower ended. The clouds parted, and the sun shone weakly, just enough to light up the tall cottongrass.

We walked over to the edge of the bog, near the brook channel. The moss layer is thinner there, and each careful step we took made suction-cup noises.


Time, meanwhile, had inexplicably moved on to the Christmas season - everything now looked red and green:

Spruces all spruced-up

Bog Rosemary – Thoreau’s beloved andromeda 

Leatherleaf (also named andromeda in Thoreau's day) had turned scarlet, and was everywhere.

Pitcher-plants reclined on maroon moss beds

And like jewels, hidden here and there, single plump cranberries dangled at the ends of  impossibly-thin stems. Thoreau suggested they be called “swamp pearls.”

I tasted one.

Better it is to go a-cranberrying than to go a-huckleberrying.

For it is cold and bracing,

leading your thoughts beyond the earth …

It feeds your spirit,

now in the season of white twilights,

when frosts are apprehended,

when edible berries are almost gone.

Let not your life be wholly without an object,

though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, 

for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry
that you will have tasted,

but the flavor of your life to that extent,

and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy.