Bogged Down

That pond on Alpers Road

 

 …Northwest Indiana’s Kankakee was an extensive swamp-marsh of more than 500,000 acres on a sandy dune outwash plain, in retrospect [emphasis added] called “one of the great freshwater wetland ecosystems of the world….” 

 

      The Kankakee River snaked its 250-mile way through the swamp in two thousand twists and bends, a slow absorbent river punctuated with bayous and edged by riverine forests.

 

-      Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis (Scribner, 2022)

 

When I was a girl growing up on the Illinois prairie in the 1950s, the term ‘wetland’ was not part of our Midwestern vocabulary, and my fascination with any ‘swamp’-like area that caught my eye was not generally shared by family or friends, but our postwar neighborhood outside the city limits of Joliet, Illinois, was filling in with houses on every 40-ft. lot, and while I appreciated -- for their expansive views of sunset and thunderstorms -- fields of soybeans or corn (in alternating years) across the road from my parents’ older home on the westernmost street of the subdivision, it was wildness I craved. 

What we called “the slough,” down the street, was semi-wild but also stinky and, sadly, forbidden – though if it hadn’t been stinky, its water except in flood barely moving and topped with scum and patches of iridescent oil, I’m sure the prohibition would not have been nearly as effective. As it was, however, most of my hunger for wild wetlands had to be satisfied with sightings from car and train windows. 

Every autumn our mother would take us along on expeditions to gather cattails, milkweed pods and bittersweet for indoor fall arrangements (cattails, common as they are in my northern Michigan life, still hold dreamlike associations for me), and on a long train ride to Florida one spring, unable to stop gazing out the window at the romantic scenery flowing by, I made up a story, mile by mile, to accompany the moving panorama, peopling every hummock with strange, dangerous characters that my sister told me years later had given her nightmares.

 

A memorable high school biology field trip involved wading in a creek and discovering and collecting caddisfly larvae, but visits to the Kankakee River were an annual occasion for years, with church choir picnics held at the river shack as they called it, belonging to the choir director and his wife. I didn’t know then that the original 250-mile river had once boasted 2,000 “twists and bends” before, beginning in 1902, being dredged and channeled into straight-line segments, such that its length was reduced to 90 miles. I had no idea the Kankakee Marsh, before its trees had been felled and land drained for farmland, had once been called “the Everglades of the North.” Stop and think for a moment: reduced from 250 to 90 miles in length, stripped of its trees (“oaks, walnuts, elms, sycamores”), and natural flood-absorbing marshes filled in to become farm fields.

 

My strongest memory of the river that flowed past the shack was the sucking, silty, clayey mud that had to be slogged through to reach water deep enough for swimming. When we climbed the ladder to the floating raft, our legs were coated up over the knees in that clinging mud. The water was thick and brown, too, and at the time, and given my age then, I never wondered if the river might once have been different. Now, bit by bit, parcel by parcel, efforts are underway to restore at least pieces of the once extensive wildlife area. Read this to learn more.

In Leelanau

“It is, of course, possible to love a swamp,” writes Proulx, recalling a larch swamp in Vermont that she loved in her early years. And while the fen and bog sections of her book have more to do with peatland destruction, it is the section on swamps that whispers more seductively to my personal experience. Swamp is sometimes a transition zone between higher land and fen or bog, the key difference being that swampland supports trees. There are trees in the Everglades and in the waterlogged wilds along the Suwanee River in Florida, and there are wetlands in northern Michigan where the Artist and I found beavers at work, spied cardinal flower in bloom, or hushed to watch a heron stalking fish or a raccoon washing its hands -- or where a friend and I waded slowly, reverently, into a wonderland of sunlight filtering down through the branches of yet-leafless trees where grassy hummocks held blooming lady’s-slippers as far as our wondering eyes could see. 

 

Scandinavia and Canada are rich in bogs. Proulx tells us that the word ‘muskeg’ comes from Algonkian and Ojibway words, ‘maskek’ and ‘mashkig.’

 

Fen peat forms in groundwater locations where reeds, sedges, cattails, rushes and bog beans grow in mineral soils. The plants around the edge and in the water grow, then perish, season after season, gradually filling up the fen with partially decayed vegetable matter that over thousands of years [emphasis added] becomes fen peat. 

 

-      Proulx, ibid. 

 

In the Yoop

On Saturday evening I pulled a comfort book from the shelf at home (for there are comfort books just as there is comfort food – surely, as a reader, you have favorite comfort books of your own?), Lovely Is the Lee, by the same Robert Gibbings whose Coming Down the Seine I so recently enjoyed, and only a few miles inland from Galway, Gibbings is exploring moorland and bogs, where “Black bullocks munch the heather” and “Wild geese rise from the bog.” The year is 1945, and the old ways are still practiced. Turf, Gibbings tells us, 

 

…is cut with a slane, a narrow spade with an ear at right angles to the blade so that two sides of the sod are cut at the same time from the stepped face of the bog. Each newly cut sod is like a large brick, dark and oily.

 

-      Gibbings, Robert, Lovely Is the Lee (Dutton, 1945

 

An experienced slanesman could cut four tons of raw turf in a single day, which then had to be spread to dry, stacked, and finally thatched with straw “against the weather.” Gibbings, as does Proulx, notes that much material culture of previous ages is uncovered in the cutting of bog turf: bronze and obsidian implements, wooden dishes, canoes and paddles, clothing made from wool, skin, or leather. 

 

The title for today’s post came to me, however, in addition to my reading, by way of a figure of speech. We say we are “bogged down” when we are stuck, as in mire, unable to move forward. The Cambridge dictionary gives examples as examples using the expression “Let’s not get bogged down with individual complaints” and “Try not to get too bogged down in the details.” A related figure of speech is “swamped,” meaning overwhelmed, as if one is flooded. There is also the Slough of Despond, which Proulx mentions, from the classic Pilgrim’s Progress. All felt appropriate in this shortest month of the year.

Because February is a difficult month for me, with day-by-day anniversaries of the Artist’s final weeks of hospitalizations and surgeries, the emotional gamut we ran from confident hope to his final days, his last birthday. Images and sentences and remembered feelings from that time swamp my dreams and solitary hours. I don’t want to say I am permanently bogged down, only that --- what? I don’t want to profane it by trying to put it into words.

 

As you know, though, I have a dog, and there is no crawling into a hole and playing dead when one has a dog. No, the dog has to go outdoors, and so the dog momma has to get dressed and go out, too, and this discipline my companion imposes on me is a life-saver. 

 

"Let's get the day started!"

Following springlike days, we had a heavy, wet snow that quickly became slush, only to harden to cement when the temperature dropped. Then the temperature dropped further, and more snow came overnight Friday, this time the light, fluffy stuff beloved of cross-country skiers. Single-digit wind chill. And Sunny Juliet discovered something new in her Michigan world: ice on our little no-name creek. She tried it, but it was not strong enough to hold her weight. Luckily, the creek is shallow. Only her feet got wet. And the dog momma didn’t want to stay outdoors for an hour in the cold wind, anyway.

Sunny exploring frozen creek...

...where she broke through the ice

And yet we went out again in the afternoon and again the next morning and again the following day, morning and afternoon, because this is our life, and it’s what we do. We wake up and get on our feet and go out into the world.

And now, did I write myself out of the swamp? Or was it my HappyLight that did the trick? The patches of blue sky and beautiful cumulus clouds we had before grey skies returned? Or my lovely little companion, always so happy be outdoors with me, whatever the weather, always full of energy and enthusiasm even when I might be short on both? Maybe all of those contributed to an afternoon happier than the dark morning had been. There is no way we can live two different lives at the same time, in some kind of sci-fi controlled experiment, and know for certain which is preferable or better or more true. One life, each moment of it a gift to do with as we will….

She says, "Be happy! We have each other!"

A Different Kind of Summer

Different in What Way(s)?

 

Somehow a new blog post hasn’t been coming together for me this past week. I started one around the theme of “Falling Down on the Job” (since I was having so much trouble accomplishing the job of writing a post), but though I cranked out several sections, wandering around among local and personal job-related topics, what I got down into a file seemed uninspired. 

 

My heart wasn’t in it, I guess. As is true for my puppy, Sunny Juliet, my attention has been rather scattered of late. Other than my bookstore and my reading, I focus pretty exclusively on Sunny Juliet and my flowers. 

 

“Who will we meet today?” the Artist used to ask sometimes in the morning at the start of a summer day. Our Northport summer last year was about the busiest we’d ever seen, with books and paintings practically flying out the door, and in the course of any business day we would have countless conversations, some with old friends, but many also with people we’d never met before. Long, interesting talks sometimes took place only in the Artist’s studio, others stayed in my bookstore, and still others spilled back and forth between our separate spaces. Right next door to each other all day, however, we might only have five minutes together on some days while at work. The separateness of our days gave us a lot to share in the evenings, relaxing during supper on the front porch or taking a slow county cruise out for ice cream -- though sometimes we were too tired to talk much, and that was all right, too. 

 

This year is very different. There are still conversations during the day, out in the world, but the puppy and I have a pretty nonverbal relationship. Sunny Juliet can be vocal, of course, when she has a point to make, but my admonition to her to “Use your words!” only reminds her that she is supposed to nose the bell hanging from the doorknob, not bark, to let me know she needs to go outside. And in general my chatter to her is unremarkable. Telling her over and over that she’s a good girl and that I love her is not exactly small talk, but it’s certainly repetitious, while my stories about her “daddy” or her predecessors (Peasy and Sarah and Nikki) can’t mean much to her at all. Obviously, I’m really talking to myself….

But she always listens.

Book Stuff

My front porch book at present is Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. The book has been a bestseller since its first market edition in 1880, but if it opened a lot of minds, it certainly failed to change policies. Everyone on the political spectrum, it seems, finds something to love and/or something to hate and fear in George’s ideas. Fascinating reading, nonetheless. I’m almost ready to say I don’t want to discuss economics at all, even narrow questions like affordable housing, with anyone who hasn’t first read Progress and Poverty. 

 

…When we speak of labor creating wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. …In producing wealth, labor, with the aid of natural forces, but works up, into the forms desired, pre-existing matter, and, to produce wealth, must, therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces – that is to say, to land. The land is the source of all wealth. 

 

And thus George traces economic depressions back to material progress, because it is progress that increases the value of land, which in turns leads to land speculation. Land is withheld from production, forcing prices for available land up, checking production, finally throwing people out of work, when demand for goods must fall because though people still desire to buy, they have not the ability to pay.

 

In the bathroom (doesn’t everyone have at least one book in the bathroom?) I have In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus, an edition with a lengthy and entertaining introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon (author of, among other things, The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery prize winner, in the year 1922) and delightful illustrations by same. Any book with van Loon illustrations is a book I will pick up and begin to read – wouldn’t it have been wonderful to receive illustrated letters from him? -- and it’s about time I got around to reading Erasmus, anyway.

 

I’ve been reading Empire of the Summer Moon off and on at bedtime for what seems like forever because, I must confess, I have set it aside numerous times for something else. My latest detour (Friday night) was a 1953 nonfiction book by Robert Gibbings, a wood engraver as well as a writer, whose books display both talents. The most well known is probably Lovely is the Lee (I say that because it is the Gibbings title I most often see among used volumes), but the one that came into my hands this past week is called Coming Down the Seine, and obviously, were my own Artist still with me, this is a book we would have been reading aloud to each other. The Seine! Magic memories!

 

These were tranquil days in the boat. There were mornings when, casting off at dawn, I drifted through long cool shadows, watching the sunlight on the trees creep down to meet the water, hearing no sound but the tremolo of the aspens, seeing no one but a chance sportsman and his dog. There were noons with cooling breezes when the forest rang with bird song and the river was a sheet of moving glass. There were nights when, looking skywards, the passing clouds seemed like new continents and islands marked on the inside of a mighty globe.

 

Neither is everything description. There are digressions into history and observations on what an artist must know.

 

I incline to think that one of the earliest and most important lessons to be learnt by any art student is the recognition of those qualities most suited to his particular medium, or alternatively of the medium most suited to the qualities he wishes to express. 

 

As a wood engraver, Gibbings finds little he can use in the “lavender haze above the water … typical of many dawns.”  Precise lines and contrast of light and dark are what an engraver needs. He tells of refusing a commission once for a stone carving because the subject “could only have been carried out in bronze.” 

 

Gibbings, an Irishman, author of many river books, is buried on the banks of the Thames, another river David had a chance to explore years ago. All in all, I can’t help feeling it not quite fair that we never had a chance to enjoy this book together, but such is life.

 

The library has been presenting their summer author series this month, and I’ve gotten to the second and third events. Betsy Emerson talked about her book, Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, and the next week Karen Mulvahill interviewed Gregory Nobles, author of The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. The fourth and final event in the library series will be next Tuesday, with Soon-Young Yoon and her book of memoir essays, Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the U.N. Quite the stellar line-up this season! And it looks as if I may get around to a book launch come September, so stay tuned for exciting developments on that front. 

 

About Jobs

 

Here’s a question unrelated to anything in the rest of this post, a leftover from the post I’m not publishing. Have you ever quit or walked out on a job? If so, why? What to you makes the difference between a good employer and working conditions and something unbearable?

 

The Artist Remembered in Arizona

 

Before I left to start back to Michigan at the beginning of May, one of the owners of Source of Coffee, our hangout in Willcox, Arizona, asked if I would bring in one of the Artist’s hats so they could have something to remember him by. This past week the coffee house posted a photograph of the resultant memorial, the work of hatmakers Josh and Theresa – and I need to get a more complete reference for Josh and Theresa’s business. Must add to that to my to-do list.... But I love, love, love that our friends in Willcox are thinking of David and remembering him with love!

Dana in background; presumably Theresa in foreground