The Swamp Stares Back
I’ve kept some plants alive and it’s made me wonder about the meaning of it all
I’ve kept three plants alive in my house for months. One even looks like it might be thriving. Full disclosure, another looks like it is struggling. The plants represent someone I want to be: grounded, thriving, caring. Someone who grows things. I want to be the fairy that flowers sprout in her wake. No erosion here spreading from my all too human feet.
I’ve tried over the years to learn more about the natural life around me. I know the names of a few more birds and plants but it’s easy for my gaze to be pulled away and for those words to get lost in the miasma of everyday life. I can only seem to leave bent and broken, trampled, stalks behind me.
In my attempt at greening my world I try to include my son. He tags along on walks and hikes, but, I have to admit, my husband is better at this. He brings our son out to camp where they spend hours “getting ready for hunting camp.” Some of this “getting ready” is sitting on the tailgate of his truck in the hardwoods, sharing snacks and staring out at the trees.
My family’s camp is, I think, 4 square 40’s. The land ranges from swamp to a ridge where sugar maples grow. There are trails all over and I have never gotten lost. It was our playground when we were kids. Recently I was on a side-by-side ride with my son and niece and I had to stop because this land didn’t deserve to be passed over.
We were in the swamp where the trees are thick. It’s here that I think Bigfoot could exist. There’s a prickling at the back of my neck of eyes watching and I turn and see trees. The roots, trunks, and branches of cedars twist and bind together making secret spaces.
A crick runs through the swamp and when it freezes it’s a glossy ice that we skate over in our boots. Which my son and niece did that day in the woods -though that day, the ice wasn’t thick enough and they would start to sink (the water is not deep, at most we would get water-logged boots). It is the mud that could eat you. Thick and black, it can suck at boots, at tires, at a Barbie Dream Boat that was shoved under the mud to spite a sibling and then never saw again. But now, in the winter, the water in the mud pushes out in pretty crystal formations. It crunches beneath boots and is a reminder that we, humans, can’t not leave a mark. Erosion is a part of nature, yet, am I not helping it along?
I look at my son and see something similar, not erosion, like a wearing away, but change. He is a little bit of a mystery, a question mark, like every other human is to me. I look at him and see more trees obscuring my view, especially as he gets older. Sometimes I wish he was a plant that I could water and turn to the sun. In some ways parenting is like that. I provide the basic essentials: food, water, shelter. But there is everything else. Since the start of the new year I’ve had this weird heavy feeling in my chest, a prickling at the back of my neck, like unseen eyes watching and waiting. What future are we stepping into? What am I handing off to my son to deal with one day? Am I giving him the right tools? I may be semi-successful at keeping a couple plants alive, but what else?
I stare back into the swamp, not feeling lost, never feeling lost here in the woods that know me. But it’s hard not to notice the feeling of something staring back, even if it’s my anxiety (but it’s Bigfoot, right?).
Later, at home, I revisit Margaret Atwood’s short story “Death by Landscape.” The main character, Lois, remembers a pivotal summer at a camp where her friend, Lucy, disappears in the woods and was never found. When we meet Lois, she’s shed most of the trappings of her life. Her spouse is passed. Her kids are grown. Her house is sold and she lives in a condominium where the walls are plastered with landscapes she collected throughout her life. I imagine them close together, floor to ceiling, like one could step through them. “She does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.”
Lois carries the trauma of losing her friend at summer camp and the wordless condemnation by the camp counselor that she did something to Lucy. Lois then spends her life collecting these landscapes “because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them although she could not have said at the time what it was.”
This is how I feel when I write down moments like this: me in the swamp, looking for something but not sure what exactly. Peace? Connection? Meaning?
Lois avoids the woods for the rest of her life, but I step into the landscape, try to wear it like a coat, imagine everything connected, obscured, tangled, like the trees here in the swamp, the winding creek, the freezing black mud, my own roots invisible, complicated, snaking around it all. They never find Lucy but Lois postits, “Who knows how many trees there were on the cliff just before Lucy disappeared? Who counted? Maybe there was one more, afterward.” I wonder the same when I turn my back on the trees. Whatever stares back reveals itself then, a flash in the corner of my eye that makes me return again and again, trying to peel back those trees, like pages of a book, like layers of lacquer on canvas.
Maybe the idea that I can’t get lost is a lie. Maybe, even on these well known trails, I am lost all the time. I am Lois, stuck, watching, waiting, collecting landscapes to line my walls, until the swamp is inside and there is no outside. Until I am the one staring back. Until, I become Lucy, hiding “in the holes that open inward on the wall, not like windows but like doors.”