Marshland
Last week it rained. An entire week of cold winter rain. It gets cold enough around here, but rarely cold enough long enough to pass over from rain to snow. This is an endearing trait of the mid-latitude mid-Atlantic region. With the university where I work in intercession all the usual amenities, the shuttle bus network, are offline for another two weeks. It's the flipside season for bike commuting, days on end through freezing soaking rain. Today: leadened low unbroken clouds. I'm feeling somewhat overcast, and under-the-weather.
I have a distant memory that comes to me on such days. I may have spoken of it before I can't recall. It is a memory of looking out the back kitchen window of the house I lived in then. A cape cod style farmhouse built around 1820. The house in the bottom center of the picture below. The house was built on a hill so from the back this was a second story vantage point. I climbed up on a foot stool to look out over the kitchen sink. Beyond the yard, beyond the verge of bamboo and brush that abutted the small and tidy stream that flowed there. This was called the Eel River locally, true to name it was full of eels, lamprey eels, horrible science fiction monsters, mouths a concentric spiraling ring of dagger teeth. Beyond these things I saw a vision of an endless world-encompassing swamp, extending as far as I could see.
 This was an image formed before I knew about bayous or bogs. Though, I might have known of cranberry bogs, but this bare sheet of water - over liquified mud, ossified mulch, with only bare black twig trees and speckled birches sticking through was not that. At the time it caused me some considerable surprise and alarm. The solidity of the world, the demarcation of things I never questioned was askew. There are the realms of air oceans and land, within that last water has its limited and assigned places. For years there remained this vaguely disturbing vision; that beyond the ordinary firmament of experience lay a flooded wasteland.
There was continuing mystery to this swampland. I had no accounting for a moment that did not match known reality. I knew the surrounding terrain reasonably well for a first grader, and kept an eye on it thereafter. The entire short length of the Eel river only drained a few square miles of low laying farmland. We moved to another town the next year. I never solved this puzzle. The answer came only now, when I decided to test my six-year-old sense of geography against Google Earth. Now I see, as Google Earth reveals more than any map might, that the Eel river, scarcely inches above sea level, turns just beyond my old house, another streamlet joining it, and runs in a straight line from that window's sight-line out to the Atlantic ocean. Only a little extra rain and the streams spread out nearly as wide as they are long.
It seem odd though, hovering over a 40 year past to gain such an answer. At times Google itself seems to withdraw into the mysteries. Taking the internet, the dry land of sure facts laid out just beyond our fingertips with it. Beyond all this good there is still this indistinguishable void. Our information world is only ordered to a degree and distance. Our sense's debrief of the material world, constructs an ever lesser part of our reality. The paths we march out along in ideological surety shift from firm base to trackless marsh, between what is known and not known without our always perceiving it.
10:36:50 PM  ;;
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