With the river in flood and the areas lakes dozens of feet above pool, if I'm going to find clear water around here I'd better head for Spring Valley Wildlife Area and the swamp. With a pair of knee high rubber boots and my camera I head out. Even here the water is high, along the bike trail muddy river water is lapping at one side while the other has the gin clear water of the marsh lapping at it. But the acres of flooded vegetation and cattail marsh act as a giant filter and except where my boots disturb the thick black muck the water is aquarium clear. The back side of the marsh is under water, muck and water cover the trails and no one has been there since the rains started weeks ago. This is of course where, safe in my tall boots, I head...
The swamp is lovely and truthful in a way that belies classic beauty. Not beautiful in the sense a meadow with a feeding moose is or with the beauty of a sunset kissing mountaintops. But instead beauty in a small setting, the perfect square foot teeming with life.
The swamp feels alive. Even smells alive like a wet dog just inside out of the rain.
Except for the water there is little clarity in the swamp. All is rustle, glimpse, and splash. The best way to see anything is to slow down, stop, insinuate yourself into the landscape and let life come to you. Sit quietly on a log with your feet in the muck and watch an open pool. After a bit the eyes of frogs appear on the surface, small birds flit thru the brush. After a long time a snake or a muskrat might swim across the pool. The Earth is a water planet, the TV doesn't call it the blue planet for nothing. And here in the swamp that water wells up out of the land, bubbles to the surface and is filled with life. If you can sit on your log long enough, all day and evening perhaps, dozens of small dramas, life and death struggles, play out before you. Every step I take in the swamp, I must tell myself to slow down, notice everything before taking the next step. For every step opens up tiny windows thru the cattails and willow. Two inches to the left brings a sora into view. Another step and a turtle slides off a log, startled by two steps too close togethor...
