People who hear the word swamp and think of nothing more than a foul stinking place are fools but I pity them. They don’t know what you and I know. I want to take them by the hand and open their eyes to the way the universe expands if you will just put on some bug spray and go somewhere that might not be put on a post card.

Like do you NOT want to hear the music of crickets and cicadas ringing through a hall of cypress trees that are old enough to know god? Have you never felt the ground under your feet shiver from the sheer force of a hundred singing bull gators? Do you know that standing in a marsh that is teeming with thousands of animal lives you will never know or be able to understand all around you will make you feel alive again because your ancestors ancestors stood in the same places and felt small and enormous at the same time? I crouched in the reeds of a Saltmarsh watching a stingray eat fiddler crabs and when I turned to leave I found under my boot a fossilized tooth from an ancient horse dating to the last ice age. Mine was likely the first human hand to hold it.

It’s an absolute tragedy when a person who doesn’t realize that humanity and wetlands cannot be separated says “swamps are gross” and misses out on one of the best ecosystems in the world

Swamp People 

Ready to find fascination in an unexpected place? Read "Swamp People," in which Ashley Stimpson visits all five of the East Coast’s largest, most legendary swamps to witness their beauty in person and better understand America's fraught history with its liminal wetlands.

When I moved from the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic, I was delighted to find that the land here doesn’t end so much as crumble like a piece of day-old cornbread, giving way to those squishy, squelchy in-between places: not quite land, not quite water. These places called to me. Driving by, I craned at them like they were car wrecks. I coveted them like they were glassy black gems. I could feel my bare feet plunge into their cold water as I crossed the threshold from tidy civilization to tangled wilderness. Alice through the looking glass; Lucy in the wardrobe.

What was going on with me, I wondered. Was I depressed? Vitamin-deficient? Had the screens I stare at all day finally broken my brain? On a scale from gamer to Girl Scout, I am firmly outdoorsy—but swamps? Why swamps?