Swamp Country - Or How to Love What Can’t Be Avoided

Lake Drummond—Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (VA) Uploaded by AlbertHerring CC BY 2.0

The Hidden and Eternal Spirit of the Great Dismal Swamp by Lee Prior in The Ringer is an article about a singular piece of geography—lost in swamp, peat and trees—and a past largely as hidden. Scarred by canals and spotted with clearings. Being in country worked over since Colonial times, it’s hardly surprising. The nonfiction article traces stories of early native tribes and the later blacks escaping slavery living in its depths, while whites schemed to drain and harvest the timber—allowing for the fact it was the slaves who did the work and the white Colonials who profited.

“After 200 years of heavy logging left the territory at less than a third of its original size, the Union Camp Corporation gifted the swamp to the U.S. government in 1973. For nearly all of its modern existence, the region’s multigenerational history of exploitation, brutality, and resistance has—through decades of distortion and purposeful erasure—been largely hidden from view. Many of the area’s residents are direct descendants of the people who populated, toiled in, or commodified the swamp. Together, they form a community wrapped in conflict over the ways in which the truth of the past and its obfuscation continue to shape the present.” from The Hidden and Eternal Spirit of the Great Dismal Swamp by Lee Prior

The swamp was three times larger than today. It straddles North Carolina and Virginia, just above the peninsula jutting to the southeast toward the Outer Banks. The perimeter overlaps farmland, and vice versa. At the center lies Lake Drummond, a shallow body of water with no obvious single source of water.

“The refuge… today consists of over 112,000 acres of forested wetlands. Outside the boundaries of the refuge, the state of North Carolina has preserved and protected additional portions of the swamp through the establishment of the Dismal Swamp State Park. The park protects 22 square miles of forested wetland.” From Wikipedia article, Great Dismal Swamp

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Vacationing in 2011, we were indirect witnesses to a fire in the Great Dismal Swamp that burned for nearly four months. A swamp on fire seems a curiosity, but straitened drought conditions had dried out the swamp’s peat bogs to the extent that a lightning strike caught the peat on fire. Smoldering peat that had been built to a depth of feet was producing a foul smell akin to coal smoke. A fire so massive that it was seen by satellite. The smoke tracked to the southeast, like a gray cloud blanketing the Outer Banks—some ninety miles away.

“The Lateral West fire is likely to produce a great deal of smoke over the coming weeks. Peat fires burn deep in the soil, making them very hard to contain. High temperatures, low humidity, and difficult terrain will make this fire even more difficult to manage. Fire fighters estimate that the fire will be contained on August 31. As of August 9, the Lateral West fire has burned 2,000 acres.” from Fire in Great Dismal Swamp, Virginia, NASA Earth Observatory

Days passed and the smoke remained. It was hard to shake the notion climate changes weren’t the larger cause of an east coast drought so sustained, even if a lightning strike initiated the fire. Four months of slow burning peat. Like the scale of a swamp large enough for escaped slaves and native Americans to live hidden lives in the swamp’s interior. Both were apocryphal tales nonetheless true.

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Between the town of my birth, Sumter and Columbia, the state capitol lies the Wateree Swamp, a smaller cousin to the Great Dismal Swamp. Wetlands and former wetlands abound in that part of South Carolina. Not quite the low country of the coast, but not so different.

From Lake Wateree, a manmade lake, the course of the Wateree River flows through a series of wetlands, Betty Neck, English, White Marsh, Wateree, and Fork Swamps to the river’s junction with the Congaree River. The rivers all seem to mosey in those parts. Feeding the swamp, the Wateree River meanders to the Congaree River just above Lake Marion. The Congaree gets a good bit of its flow from the same swamp.

Smaller than the Great Dismal Swamp, yet with the same attraction for those seeking to live free and other border dwellers, refugees always living on the margins. Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion, guerilla fighters in the American Revolution, sheltered from the British dragoons and remain local heroes. Good game hunting and fishing, long as you don’t go getting lost.

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These places exist in the imagination as dangerous—where only villains dwell—tales for telling quietly around campfires with the dark trees pressing in. Superstitions working overtime. The trackless wilderness, the outback, places where wolves and bears do their predatory worst. Beyond safe society’s control. It’s all of a piece.

When a novel calls for a scene of dubious character, swamps are a go-to location.

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If not by accident, I developed a key plot line for Kill Devil, my novel, by instinct. You can only paint so much of a brewing storm by descriptions of a vacation hot spot. Sharks in the water, perhaps—though they’ve been used before—or hurricanes lurking on the horizon, but sunny days at the beach don’t build too much suspense.

I had a character in mind, a person of contradictions, a man of color, wealthy yet somewhat shady, suspicious of motives, a person of impunity and flamboyant to boot—who dwelled apart from polite society, immune to its pull. Thus removed from the Outer Banks’ sunny aura. Outsider, still he attended social events with the white elite who were doing their best imitation of a CGBG nightclub act in the hedonistic 80s. Though if he didn’t live among them, where?

Remoteness was what was needed. Remoteness was where his secret could be hid.

One of the charms of the Outer Banks is its standoff distance from a mainland comprising rural farm country—and coastal estuaries most consider simply swamp. The mainland there strikes me as a studied contrast to the modern age.

Just across Currituck Sound lies one of the larger estuarine areas, named for the Alligator River flowing through it—a river running through it. The perfect hangout for a hidden tribe of natives or possible miscreants.

Blackbeard met his end not too far away—on the backside of Ocracoke Island.

Alligator River lies due west of Roanoke Island, just another pond skip from the Outer Banks. It’s a national wildlife refuge of 152,00 acres. You can view Alligator River from the safety of your SUV, RV or other gas guzzling vehicle crossing Alligator River on US 64. It’s a beautiful glimpse of black water.

“The refuge is one of the premier strongholds for American black bear on the Eastern Seaboard. It also has concentrations of ducks, geese, and swans. The wildlife diversity includes wading birds, shorebirds, American woodcock, raptors, black bears, alligators, white-tailed deer, raccoons, cottontail rabbits, bobwhite quail, northern river otters, red wolves, red-cockaded woodpeckers, and neotropical migrants.” From Wikipedia article on Alligator River

Nyssa aquatica tree, showing characteristic heavily buttressed base with epiphytic ferns

Photo by Paul Bolstad CC BY 3.0 us

If you venture where Paul Bolstad was taking his shot, bring some Off. And epiphytic being similar in nature to Spanish moss—named for Spanish colonials who did no worse but no better than the English, all hoping for heaven on the cheap.

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You need an affinity for black water to be attracted to it. Or have it tattooed on the brain from growing up surrounded by it. Even if lingering in midsummer can prove a challenge.

I spent a few weeks in hell during summer break—though not few enough—timber cruising. I’d describe the man who hired me as a stoic fellow not much into conversation. Other than advising that I needed to wear a long sleeve shirt, hat and jeans. I had no good boots, and he said nothing about my high tops. Dressed to cover as much as possible when it’s 100 degrees and 100% humidity, while still being hit by dozens of mosquitoes. You simply couldn’t kill the mosquitoes fast enough.

Anyone who’d pack water and a sandwich and hike into a burnt stretch of pine has to be—driven to do the job? The man recommended using rubber bands to keep the tics from climbing up legs and arms.

We ate our sandwiches on a fast break and continued.

He was a forester. Paid by a tree company. To walk acres across a burnt pine forest to deliver an inspection report to HQ about what trees were left to salvage. I knew none of this, except watching him eye one blackened trunk, then another and hoping he’d keep going so we didn’t have to measure them. At three feet above ground, you stretch a tape across, note its size in inches—not years—not history. Then move on to the next.

It may not seem possible, but after a while, the mosquito bites didn’t itch so much, except when they were on my eyelids. I’m sure he felt he was doing his Christian duty for ‘the widow lady’ as my mother was dubbed by the southern gentlemen—a politeness of sorts that amused her. Sorta.

After a few weeks, I decided working in an un-airconditioned dress factory was a better gig.

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As a kid in the back seat in an aging Ford—built the year I arrived—times when we’d drive to Columbia on US 76, the Wateree Swamp stretched for years either side of the road, and returning at night, it was an exciting if foreboding sight, all those dark trees, all that blackness. Must have stuck with me well enough to make me recreate the mood. Like the Great Dismal Swamp, Wateree wasn’t a place you wanted to spend nights in, or the mosquitoes might fly away with your skinny butt.

I learned to swim in black water at the edge of Wateree Swamp. Some folks say they don’t like swimming in fresh water if they can’t see the bottom. Me, I expected that just was how fresh water lakes and rivers were—if they weren’t opaque brown from silt like the wide Santee River, they were black. Just the way it was growing up in Sumter. My swim instructor dumped us and watched for the ones who didn’t come up again.

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Pat Conroy captures a piece of black water in his novel, The Prince of Tides. Late in the book, after a long buildup, he finally gets to scenes in tidewater Carolina that portray the environment where ocean and land intersect in those parts.

Doesn’t seem there’s much visual permanence about black water country compared to red rock country, or the Rockies, even the Smokey Mountains, always off-gassing for that famous blue-gray haze. Unlike mountain country, where there’s a clear demarcation between rushing streams and the land they carve, black water country just is. It demands nothing of you. It expects nor wants nothing of you. It just is.

When hiking Canyonlands National Park, you follow the cairns laid by those who’ve come that way before. Otherwise, you’d be better hiring a guide. It becomes a spiritual experience after so many hours of seeing vista after vista with no one else in sight—being humble at each small set of stones confirming that you’re OK to keep trudging. After a while I began picking up a rock or two to rebuild a cairn, adding to their silent conversation.

The Rockies are a humbling sight. It’s hard to miss how small you are in the presence of rock that massive. Black water, the kind you can’t see too far into for all the cypress trees going off into the distance like an Ansel Adams photo, is speaking a similar language, only with maybe more subtlety.

You can drain black water to canals, you can dredge it, clear cut it, about all the ways humans have liked to transform country to profit from it, but what you cannot do is change its basic character.

Driving NC Route 68 down the peninsula to reach the long bridge over Currituck Sound, the stretches of black water in canals alongside are silent rebukes to how that part of eastern Carolina has been ‘civilized’ for human occupation. But step out of your car, walk down an unpaved sandy road back a ways from the highway, and there’s a noticeable change. The tall poles of eastern pine with an understory of wild dogwood, and wandering black water sloughs are not too far off. The ground is spongy, even in dryer seasons, and rainfall seems to lift the groundwater to the surface.

Our mother used to drive us to Poinsett State Park not far from Sumter. Where I learned to swim. On the edge of Wateree Swamp, fed by Shanks Creek. My first up close introduction to cypress swamp. Didn’t think so much of it as a kid, but it planted an image that’s stayed with me since. Like Conroy’s love of the low country, I find it greatly agreeable.

I recall first visiting Hilton Head Island on a college field trip sponsored by a concrete masonry manufacturer. Probably the first time I’d visited that part of the country, if only a couple hours from where I’d grown up. From Clemson in the Blue Ridge highlands to tidewater, across the state in a bus trip of about five hours. Crossing the tidal marshes to Hilton Head, we traversed some of Pat Conroy’s low country. To my mind, the tidewater seemed a slight amount more open water from where I grew up, with sawgrass instead of forest, cypress balds like green hillocks, standing sentinels off in the distance. Hilton Head is just across Port Royal Sound from that great maker of marines, Parris Island.

“Several rivers flow into Port Royal Sound, most notably the Broad River. Other rivers that contribute to Port Royal sound include the Coosawhatchie River, Colleton River, Chechessee River, and Pocotaligo River, among others. Many waterways called rivers in the Sea Islands region are more akin to tidal straits, connecting bays and estuaries and separating islands. Port Royal Sound is connected to other coastal waterbodies via channels of this type… Skull Creek and Mackay Creek separate Hilton Head Island from the mainland, while connecting Port Royal Sound to Calibogue Sound. A waterway called Whale Branch separates Port Royal Island from the mainland, while connecting Port Royal Sound and the Broad River to Saint Helena Sound, via the Coosaw River… The Intracoastal Waterway passes through Port Royal Sound.” from Wikipedia article on Port Royal Sound

It seems somewhat ironic, this interweaving of natural habitat with harsh military training, almost as if a different inculcation could be going on as well—provided the recruits ever look up from their one-hand pushups to take in where they are.

I was so hungry by the time we arrived at Hilton Head, the roasted oysters and shrimp tasted heavenly. Fresh seafood over an open fire was a revelation to a kid raised on Irish cooking.

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Where black water and tidal marshes seem similar is in their remove from the modern world of men. Less easily traversed—less traveled, as Robert Frost termed it. So both kinds serve as refuge from that world for a host of other creatures. As refuge for humans who seek to remain apart from it. And as a place for those just needing a recharge before resuming the race.

Currituck Sound from the Pine Island bird sanctuary—photo by William E. Evans, © 2021