IN THE MAGAZINE

Photo by Ed Murphy

AMERICAN EROS - PART 1

From the Hypothermic to the Hypothetical

BY LORD WHIMSY

It made little difference when the icy water finally reached my crotch; anything of mine living in that vicinity had already yelped in alarm, scrambled up into my torso, and perched itself safely atop my liver, chattering like a castanet. The last time my he-rig had seen that part of my body was when I was a fetus. After hours of wading through frozen swamp water in rubber boots and iced-up trousers that required occasional cracking to allow for movement, all I could feel was my arthritic right knee, the briar cuts on my face, and a growing anxiety about the location of a trail that was supposed to be to our east.

But I digress…

It was a breezy, clear January day; the temperature was in the low 20s, and the wind chill was about 7 degrees. We started out that morning from an 18th-century graveyard adjacent to Wharton State Forest in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey and made our way northward up the sandy trails that run through the oak and pine forest on the southwest edge of the Great Swamp (the cartographer’s words, not mine). It was a wet, mild winter, so many stretches of trail were flooded. I would try to cross on my toes or seek higher ground, but eventually the ice and freezing water poured down into my boots. My feet were numb for the rest of the day (finding blue toenails on a foot that happens to be your own can be a bit unnerving). My friend Mike, who sells antiques in New York, was wise enough to wear his neoprene waders, so he was pretty comfortable—for a while. Being a heretic, he also brought along a GPS device. I enjoy the challenge of on-the-fly navigation and dead reckoning—which is to say I’m a twit—so I just brought my beat-up USGS topographic map and compass. (In my own defense, I did bring a spare compass. Glows in the dark, too.)

After we cleared the Beer Can Zone common to most state forests, very little in the way of human evidence was seen. Not even hunters seemed to venture in that deep, which hinted either at their laziness, our stupidity, or both. Herds of whitetail deer were everywhere in this relatively open area, and several very large bucks crossed our path. We also came across acres of puffy, pale green thorn lichen punctuated by clusters of bright red British soldier lichen and wintergreen berries, which we ate along our way. Tra-la-la.

After a couple hours of skirting the swamp’s western edge, we decided to head eastward into the Great Swamp by making our way across an open expanse of flooded grassy swale, which was covered in a crust of ice that struck our legs with every step as if we were constantly hitting our shins against a coffee table for an hour. As we slowly negotiated the deeper parts of this wide body of water with varying degrees of success, we saw a bald eagle wheeling in the sky above us. (No, it’s not a clumsy metaphor—just a really beautiful bird. Enjoy it—these are the moments, my friend.)

We eventually made our way across the wet, grassy expanse toward the tree line and into the dark tangle of the Great Swamp. The outer edge was so choked with saplings, briars, and brush that it was hard to stand up straight. It’s important to keep close when going through these areas; even in winter, the vegetation here is so dense that a person only 20 feet away can disappear from view.

The undergrowth opened up slightly as we approached the larger trees of the swamp’s interior; other than the creaking trees and the distant trickle of a nearby spring, everything was still. Startling shafts of light and shadow, caused by the dense stands of Atlantic white cedars that soared upward and formed a swaying canopy 100 feet overhead, gave the place the air of a cathedral—albeit one with a knee-deep, spongy green floor of star-shaped sphagnum moss.

We were there that day to find the most ancient part of this swamp; my botanist and historian friends at Bartram’s Garden, the oldest surviving botanical garden in North America, had been told that stands of giant 300-year-old cedar trees still existed in its most remote regions. I neglected to ask them where these rumors came from: I know a useful pretense for an expedition when I see one, and that was enough for me.

When scouting a new part of the Great Swamp, there’s really no way to predict what kind of progress will be made, as the terrain can vary greatly. Reaching this part of the swamp took us longer than we had anticipated, and by this time we were well into the afternoon and too far in to turn back. This was worrying, since the swamp’s dim interior darkens early. Even in winter relatively little sunlight reaches the swamp floor.

In order to get back home, we had to traverse the entire breadth of the swamp and reach the Atsion-Batsto trail on the eastern side, which would eventually lead us south to where we started, and from there to Kitchen—that fabled, faraway land of dry clothes, hot food, and coffee. (Ever been to Kitchen? Nice place. Diner isn’t bad either, but Diner’s just Purgatory for those waiting to get into Kitchen.)

Over the winter, I had made several previous treks into other areas of this swamp (I’ll tell you about the derelict crane and the crazy blue crayfish some other time), but this eastward trek took us through the most difficult terrain I had yet encountered. Soon, our efforts were no longer centered on seeking out ancient stands of cedar: We were focused on trying to find a quick way out, of which there was none. By the time we realized that we had stumbled into a potentially dangerous area, it was too late. In every direction was blowdown: acres of haphazardly fallen cedars stacked several trunks high in unpredictable states of decay, occasionally disintegrating under our feet as we trod on them. In some areas the cedars formed a kind of tangled canopy suspended several feet over frozen water, deep muck, sharp stumps, thin ice, and dead trees as big as telephone poles that were brittle from the cold and would topple if you leaned or pushed against them. With no solid ground below us and the branches of the fallen trees often preventing us from traveling underneath them, we were forced to clamber over the trees themselves, carefully traversing from one to the next, trying not to fall. This made for excruciatingly slow progress. At one point, we traveled only 100 yards in one hour. For a while, we felt trapped; we were no longer hiking, but spelunking—alternating between climbing and crawling. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that passage in this particular area varied from the merely impassable to the utterly impossible.

Because of our harried pace, both of us took plenty of hard spills: At one point I tripped, fell forward, cracked my back, and felt a small shelf of ice on my mustache fly off my face, making a comic “ploop” into the black water below. When I stood back up, my back felt better, and I could breathe easier. It was strangely refreshing. Mike may have found the cold, acidic water seeping through the fresh rips in his neoprene waders equally brisk and refreshing, but being the quiet type, I supposed he was savoring the joy of the moment privately.


TO BE CONTINUED
AMERICAN EROS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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