Electric Swamp
New Fine Art Photography
Swamps get a bad rap. The Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio and neighboring states once covered over 3,000,000 acres of land with an additional 300,000 acres of coastal Lake Erie wetlands. Settlers in the late 1800’s, as they had a tendency to do, saw this globally significant ecosystem and went about their business of draining it, dividing it up, and farming it in neat little rows. Who wants to work in the mud, anyway? Today, due in large part to the double dose of row crops and lack of the multi-million-acre (free) water filtration system, we now have massive algal blooms float across Lake Erie in an ecological echo of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Even the best farmers, and there are many, can’t farm when their soil is eroded.
Based on the opinion of real estate appraisers, land is often valued at its highest and best use, which although at times can be said to be farming, like the row crop farming that destroyed the Great Black Swamp, is most often some form of development. Set aside the fact that an appraisal is really just one person’s opinion at one point in time, the truth of the matter is, we generally believe them. Development has the highest value, and so the economy has spoken. Sounds like something from the 1800’s. Come to think of it, there was something else being destroyed in the late 1800’s, something that once roamed the Great Plains and woods surrounding the Great Black Swamp. Why have we jettisoned the ideas of hide hunting the buffalo from back then, but not the relationship of our food systems to the swamps?
At some point, I don’t know when, swamps got a rebrand. Someone called them a wetland. A wetland evokes a more attractive image in the mind than a swamp. There is land! It is wet! Let’s not mention the mud anymore. Regardless of the marketing, wetlands saw some resurgence through state and federal policy that set aside funding to protect them. The Clean Water Act helped, Ohio’s WRRSP program is a fine example, conservation easements are excellent, and the beloved Duck Stamp became a cultural phenomenon. We’re making progress by undoing the previous progress. Today, wetlands can also be found in National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and National Forests throughout the United States.
There is one thing we have yet to do with swamps, or wetlands, though. With exception to those swamp people of Florida and Louisiana, most of us just put up a border, real or imagined, and don’t much try to live in the wetlands we put so much into protecting. I have seen awesome beach towns with houses built on stilts, I’ve seen wonderful mountain villages and communities nestled in trees. But what I don’t often see, and what I want to see, are communities who live in swamps. I know this is possible, because I grew up in one.
We called it the pond, and sometimes the swamp, and only later did I introduce the term wetland. We loved it nonetheless. In some cases, we even built more of it. By we, I mean the beavers. The pond was part of life. We fished it, we feared it, we canoed it, we watched it, we skated on it, and we drove machinery into it. We did all of this without so much as one stilt on our house. I wonder at this each spring when the rains come and the yard floods and I wonder at this when the latest beaver dam ditch needs taken out. What is the cultural phenomenon that holds us all back from boardwalks and raised structures and flat bottomed boats? It might be geography, maybe I need to see more of the world. But I can’t help but wonder if all the lines we place around wetlands, instead of carving out life within wetlands, has made a bigger impact, has made progress more difficult.
As an adult hunter, I see swamps differently than even when I lived next to the mosquitoes and bats and snapping turtles. Swamps have a life of their own. Their topography varies as much as the mountains and their water levels fluctuate like the Serengeti. Swamps do smell, but now it is an endearing smell. It smells of wet dog and clay silt and shotgun shells. The sound of the swamp whispers at first, a flutter of wood duck wings before first light, the honking of cupping geese and the prehistoric call of a sandhill crane. As the sun rises, the cattails and buttonbush are resurrected, the decoys come to life, and the color returns to our deciduous jungles. Sometimes, right as the sun breaks the horizon, a camera lens can splatter the rays of light like a dappled halo. It brightens the underside of grasses and pokes between the reeds, it is a reminder that beneath all of this civilization, between all of these roads and beyond all of our built and imaginary lines, there is something electric outside our doors. It’s time we plugged in.
