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Call of the Congaree The antidote for civilization. By Rick Bass It’s no news that the Sunbelt’s population has exploded over the last 15 years, but I was astounded by all the shrapnel in Columbia, South Carolina. There for a three-day literary festival, I spent my free time wandering a maze of strip malls, stoplights, and fast-food restaurants punctuated by old brick houses whose yards bloomed wild with vibrant azaleas, camellias, and pear blossoms—a brilliance and fragrance that was saddening for the juxtaposition. Creeping through traffic, and witnessing every available woodlot being knocked over and bladed for construction of another store or parking lot, I was struck by the notion, perhaps unreasonable and earth-fairyish, that my deep discomfort was coming not from my own crowded spirit but from the soil itself. Some part of me was picking up on the emanations from a distressed earth—the red clay, visible in cuts almost everywhere I looked. Just when I was yowling about how much I missed the forest, and how unsettling I found the karma of all that new-cut clay, the swamp rescued me. English professor Keen Butterworth and his wife, Nancy, made plans to whisk my daughters and me 20 miles to Congaree Swamp National Monument, home of the last virgin forests of loblolly pine and bald cypress in the state: land that had been saved by its own ungovernable reckless biological passion—wild low swampland emerging from the spillage of the exuberant joining of the Broad and Saluda Rivers, at whose confluence is birthed the Congaree River, which sprawls for 60 miles until mingling with the Wateree River, thence to form the Santee, which searches for, and finds, the Atlantic. Like one creature wild in love with the shape of another, the Congaree River’s currents reverse and flop and twist, seeking the swales and bellies of the land, changing course often—leaving pools of oxbow lakes in a patch of verdant woods, then abandoning a trough and sauntering laterally, serpentine, to carve new ones. The Congaree floods on average about ten times a year—gathering nearly all of the rains in the mountains of northwestern South Carolina and western North Carolina—swallowing, absorbing, filtering all that liquid. The great waves and sheets of floodwaters pulse through the swamp, depositing in their sojourn the richness, the funk and rot and marl, upon which the immense forests then grow in organic bounty. Loblolly pines, 300 years old and measuring more than 15 feet in circumference and 150 feet tall, tower over the high hardwood canopy of giant sweet gum, black gum, sycamore, oak, hickory, elm, and sugarberry, forming dense groves of the coolest shade. This is one of the only places in the world where giant loblollies dominate in such a mix. Where a giant tree falls, a slash of light is introduced into the previously darkened forest. New species scramble to drink in the rays and convert them into a lower-canopied forest, still nursing on the great muck of time and floods. Red mulberries, red maples, and American hollies leap into these new columns and strafings to form a second, less stately vaulting, quickly slowing any sunbeam that attempts to make it all the way to the swamp floor. By the time any light does reach the ground, it has a quality like no other: cleansed and purified by its passage through countless translucent sheaves of green. The understory plants that suck on this soft green-and-gold glow are as specialized and beautiful as jewels: spicebush and papaw, strawberry bush, water elm, dwarf palmetto, ironwood and switch cane; holly, green ash, and swamp chestnut. In all, there are approximately 90 known species of trees in the Congaree, many holding the state or national or world record for size. Thank God it is too mired and muddy, too wild and glorious, for us to get our roads into it, to grind this masterpiece to pulp. I’m not sure what it is about wilderness that touches my ragged heart so deeply. Perhaps it is the gentle comfort provided by its almost overwhelming efficiency of design. Or perhaps it is the delicious specificity of the wild world’s beauties, particularly in a landscape as rich and varied as a swamp. But whatever the reason, upon sighting the Congaree I’m in love with the world again, my eyes widened with awe and alertness. We step onto a boardwalk and enter the leafy woods as if into a warm green swirling dream of light. Cypress trunk flutings and druidlike knees rise everywhere, and mud turtles paddle clumsily through the tannin-mirrored waters. Butterflies swoop, rise, and fall as if conducting the notes to some inaudible melody. I feel at peace watching them, and it pleases me just to lean over the boardwalk and feast upon the fallen giants clad in emerald moss, already in full rot, sinking slowly into the marsh’s embrace. I need the real and the specific. Watching the hallucinogenic yellow butterflies move in all dancing directions across that black water, it seems that a thousand or more scents and odors are rolling past in waves of invisible current: sunlit pine needles and poison ivy along with alligator snapping turtle, magnolia, and great blue heron. Odors I’ve never smelled, and scents that stir my brain with their elegance, their complexity, their wild fragrance. Spent jasmine blossoms cover the boardwalk as if tossed by onlookers at some extraordinarily joyous wedding. False chameleons, some as green as swamp moss, lurk on the edges, having just crawled out of the swamp (those that have been lying in the sun longer are already boardwalk-brown), and my daughters delight in racing after them hoping to capture one. Occasionally they’ll get their hands on a lizard, but will lose it through the cracks of their fingers, breaking off its tail in the process, as called for by nature’s design. At first the girls are horrified at the transformation as the imperfect, stump-tailed survivor scampers off into the swamp. Who would have dreamed you could break something as durable as a living, breathing animal into parts as one might a plastic toy? Even when I tell them that’s how it’s supposed to go, the surprise remains illuminated in their faces. Thank God for these wet and rank places, where our momentum cannot yet carry the machines of our habits as well as our imagination; where we must still stop the car and get out and walk, if we are to go in at all. As we amble, Keen reminisces about how it was, almost 25 years ago, during all the tussle over saving the Congaree. One of his students got all fired up and dropped out of school to bring local environmental groups together to fight for this vast swamp. Some people need these shreds of funk to continue being strong and fully joyful in the world. Knowing that, do we pave them over anyway, or allow these little swamp foxes the last vestiges of wild country as God intensely and intimately imagined, designed, and created before the engines of our economic growth came prowling down the lane? Whatever it took to protect this odoriferous shady swamp of a place was worth it. Not for one hundred trillion dollars could you build such a place, or re-create such a heaven, were it to vanish. How rich are these woods? How to measure the bounty, the surplus, they yield to us? Not just in terms of sediment given over to agricultural production, or water filtration, or absorption of carbon dioxide. Such models exist, and show how our swamplands and deep shady forests more than "pay for themselves," as they always have. But I have no interest in such rationales. I want us to learn, even at this late date, to set aside these last wild places as acts of faith and duty, not as economic payoff. We can look nowhere without seeing seething life. Box turtles wander by, their skulls dappled with multiflorate oak-leaf patterns, and a black racer, as long as a man or woman is tall, hurtles across the boardwalk like a wavering javelin hurled. Red maple seeds, crimson as cherries, with their intricate fingerprint whorls, are scattered technicolor everywhere, and beneath one great maple tree, we spy a huge blacksnake lying motionless, shedding its skin—eyes milky blue and unseeing. A butterfly fans its wings just out of his reach, safe for the time being. Farther on, something electric-blue scampers through the leaves, something neon and iridescent, and yet alive and organic—not electronic and manmade. This creature is something directly of the earth’s making, original and irreducible. In the flash we can tell that its color is far superior to any we have yet produced or even imagined. The creature stops and looks back at us, panting. It’s a blue-tailed skink, about as long as an adult human’s finger. Its dark eyes are but the size of pinheads, and its tiny ribs heave from its flight. The sight of it reaches far into me, and the last of my discomfort fades and disappears. All I can know, in the presence of that tiny and improbably blue creature, is peace and inexplicable gratitude. The skink catches its breath, tucks its head left and right, looking like the tiny dinosaur it is, then scoots off into the leaves and disappears. So astounding was its brightness that even after it is gone, it seems that we can see it for days. Rick Bass is author of more than a dozen books, including The Book of Yaak. His latest work of fiction, The Hermit’s Story, will be published this summer by Houghton Mifflin. Split-Level Swamp? Bio goes here Up to Top |
