Thursday, June 05, 2008
What's so great about swamps? Curtis Badger tells you in his latest book
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
Curtis Badger told his real estate agent that he was in the market for “50 acres of worthless swampland.”
I know. You have a bridge you’d like to sell him. Forget it. Terms like sap, chump and naive don’t fit Badger. He was dead serious about buying a swath of swamp, hopefully not far from his Eastern Shore home.
The author of a number of books on natural and human history, Badger is a connoisseur of swamps. He likes their aroma after a rain; their ability to evoke mystery, their kinship to criminals, pirates and others of ill repute. He writes about swamps and his quest for one of his own in his latest book, “A Natural History of Quiet Waters: Swamps and Wetlands of the Mid-Atlantic Coast.”
Badger always has been a cut above most of us in the outdoor writing business. He goes beyond reporting at what depth the crappie are hitting and who bagged the big buck. His work is more than writing, it is literature.
My favorite Curtis Badger book has been “Salt Tides: Cycles and Currents of Life along the Coast,” and I am flattered that I am mentioned in his “Virginia’s Wild Side: 50 Outdoor Adventures from the Mountains to the Ocean.” But I believe “Quiet Waters” is his best. It and “Salt Tides” are nature classics that merit more attention than they have received.
You might think you could pick up 50 acres of worthless swampland for a song, but Badger found that not to be the case, at least not in the mid-Atlantic.
“Worthless swampland is now known in real estate circles as ‘waterfront’ and is priced accordingly,” he said. Add to that, there isn’t as much of it as there once was.
What’s so great about swamps?
“A swamp is a landscape that can’t decide what it wants to be,” Badger writes. “It’s not water and it’s not land, but a little of both. Most swamps are too wet for hiking and too woodsy for boating.”
Much of the book addresses the question: just what is a swamp? Badger offers both scientific explination and practical application.
“If the earth was a human body, swamps would be the kidneys, the natural filters that remove impurities from the water and then recycle it into the aquifer or waterway in a cleaner state,” Badger explains.
Let’s admit it, we have abused swampland like an alcoholic has abused his body, and the earth is poorer for it. We have drained them, poisoned them, dredged them, filled them, polluted them, farmed them, and channelized them.
On a recent sun-splashed afternoon, my wife, Katherine, and I visited Badger and his wife, Lynn, and son, Tom, who graduated from college a week earlier. We were there to see the swamp.
The Badgers have built their new home in a cove of Pungoteaque Creek, near the village of Malfa on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The creek is an arm of the Chesapeake Bay and affords the Badgers unlimited possibilities of twisting access for their canoe, skiff and center console. Why have more boats than cars? Well, there is more water here than land. Their setting is peaceful and enticing, although neither 50 acres nor worthless.
The centerpiece of the Badgers’ swamp is a brackish pond that is patrolled by scores of dragonflies, which he calls the signature insect of swamps. No Dismal Swamp here, but the Badgers are rightfully proud of the beautiful, remote setting.
Badger’s book invites us to appreciate simple, yet special, things, such as dragonflies and the place they call home. If we love them, we are more likely to protect them, which is what “A Natural History of Quiet Waters” is all about.
