July 4, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Annie Proulx’s marvelous “Swamped,” a celebration of her love of the complex world of swamps. Blue herons (one of which fatally stabs a man in the eye), mayflies, alligators, wood warblers, owls, dragonflies, a large bobcat, the Okefenokee Swamp, sphagnum moss, the Great Black Swamp, the Yellow Emperor moth, the Maumee River, the Limberlost Swamp, mangroves – just some of the fascinating creatures, plants, and places appearing in this cabinet-of-wonders personal essay. My favorite parts are Proulx’s accounts of her own swamp experiences. This one, for example:

My most intimate swamp experience came one summer when I lived in a remote and ramshackle house in Vermont with a beaver-populated swamp half a mile down in the bottomland. I went to the swamp almost every day by a circuitous route through the woods, passing a patch of pitcher plants and two or three sundews, across a brook, following the beavers’ tree-drag ruts to an old stick dam. There were trout in this swamp and beautiful painted turtles. I watched the amazing acrobatics of dragonflies with disbelief that they were actually doing what I saw them do. Even when I sat on the back porch high above the swamp I thought I could catch the green smell of bruised lily pads.

Once, after weeks away, I came back to the house in the late afternoon. I had started reading Norman Maclean’s story “A River Runs Through It” on the plane ride home and decided to read to the end before I went inside the house. It was an utterly quiet, windless day, the light softening to peach nectar. I read the last page and its famous final line, “I am haunted by waters.” I closed the book and looked toward the swamp. Sitting on a stone wall fifteen feet away was a large bobcat who had been watching me read. When our eyes met, the cat slipped into the tall grass like a ribbon of water, and I watched the grass quiver as it headed down to the woods, to the stream, to the swamp.

That “I thought I could catch the green smell of bruised lily pads” is very fine. The whole piece is terrific. I enjoyed it immensely.