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

Adventure with Curl-Crested Toucans by Josiah Wood Whympe

I believe that whatever time you are born into shapes your perception of humankind vis--vis the natural world. I was born in 1935 in still-rural eastern Connecticut. Both my parents were descended from seventeenth-century settlers in North America. In 1935 they were two generations past the transition from independent farming to textile mill work and struggling with a more modern transition from the textile mills to middle-class white-collar lives, yet both families still kept chickens and a cow. My mothers family included furniture makers and artists. They all were amateur naturalists who knew the habits and habitats of birds, insects and amphibians, who could name every wildflower, every tree and the uses of its wood. They had a camp on Lake Quinebaug where my cousins and I learned to swim. They had a private reverence for mossy quiet woods, were always thrilled to see wild hawks streaming north on their spring migrations. My earliest memory is of sunlight filtering through leaves when I was put to nap under a tree. From this family in that decade I was given a glimpse of the intricate complexities of the natural world. I am anchored in that childhood time when to recognize a sassafras bush from its mitten-shaped leaves was the sense of finding a friend in the woodland fringe. I thought I knew something of the world.

As I grew older and read and traveled I learned that the 1930s were years of vile human behavior in a world that hubristically considered itself civilizedyears of economic collapse, a global depression and mass poverty, severe and prolonged drought, gulags, strong-man leaders, intense nationalist demagoguery, ethnic atrocities, deforestation, lynching, gangsters, trafficking. In the ever-continuing name of Progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife. They built dams and drained wetlands. It was the last decade of existence for the ivory-billed woodpecker in the southern swamps. Governments and entrepreneurs straightened and dammed river courses, smothered coastlines with rip-rap, dynamited mountains and gouged deep mines, defiled the skies. Yet my life-start in the middle of this notorious decade, part of a larger time frame that has been called the psychozoic now seems a time-capsule anomaly. Today I can see the period as a harbinger of the awfulness of the present. But in 1938 I was three years old and knew nothing of looming war nor murderous dictators nor exultant profiteers destroying wild places nor pandemics, insurrections or poisonously intoxicant politics.

My compassed childhood rural world was filled with novelties. One day my mother led me through a blueberry thicket to a sudden swamp where she jumped from dry land to a grass tussock, then to another, and I tried to follow. I made it to a quivering clump and looked down into the water. Something stirred up a pale cloud of mud. My mothers arm rose and fell in a descriptive arc. The next tussock was distant and its grass stalks were strung with a zigzag centerline web occupied by a yellow-and-black tigerish spider. If I jumped I would fall into the sinister water or land in the spiders arms. So I bawled, and my mother carried me back to solid ground and we made our journey around the perimeter, and, where possible, into the interior of the swamp, past dead tree snags guarded by raging birds, skirting pools of water lilies whose somnolent musk no perfumer has ever duplicated. Thousands of spider strands laced stems and reeds, attached to half-sunk logs; frogs were everywhere, their pop-up eyes glaring over the edges of lily pads; unseen distant creatures splashed into hiding. It was frightening and exciting. This place, so unfamiliar and strange, was my first experience of geographical Otherness, my first thrill of entering terra incognita. The Polish artist-writer Bruno Schulz touched the moment when he wrote, we manage to acquire images in childhood that carry decisive meanings for us. They function like those threads in the solution around which the significance of the world crystallizes for us. For me this statement is true. I hope it was true for Schulz and that his final thought was of a golden childhood imageperhaps that lambent night described in The Street of Crocodiles when the child-narrator wanders the city lost in moon-daze, but more likely it was the image that haunted him through his life of a cab, with a hood on top and lanterns blazing, emerging from a nocturnal forest when he fell.