Jayakrishnan's Reviews > Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

I am a big fan of films set in the wilderness - like Sorcerer, Apocalypse Now and Deliverance. There is an allure to hidden lakes, thick unassailable forests and prairies. On the one hand, I think the attraction towards such places represents a longing for childhood. But they also represent a dark side of my psyche. I have often fantasized about my life as a man on the run from the law and how the swamps and forests would provide refuge from the world. I have also felt that I should read about the flora and fauna of swamps and bogs. I kept putting it away because I am not a big reader of non-fiction. I was hoping that some crime fiction writer had written a novel set in the swamps and I would stumble upon it. I saw this book by Barbara Hurd on a Goodreads list and ordered it one night when I was drunk. I did not realize I had ordered it and was startled, a month later, when I received the message from Amazon that the book was out for delivery.

The book was a pleasant surprise. It was everything that I had wanted in a book about swamps and more. It is not a book that simply describes the flora and fauna of swamps. That is there, but it also connects swamps to human experience, imagination and religion. Not just that. Barbara Hurd is a fantastic writer. This is a woman who really loves swamps and she has thought deeply about her experiences in them (Finzel Swamp and Cransville Swamp). She is a total romantic and though she does get carried away with her love for swamps at times, her writing is revelatory and profound:

“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”

She informs us about a number of interesting characters in swamps:


Skunk Cabbage: it is a plant that can melt snow because it can maintain an internal temperature that is 20 degrees higher than the surroundings.

Spring peepers: There is an army of these frogs in swamps and they create a hell of a lot of noise during mating season.

350 year old crocodiles

The bog turtle - reptiles that have survived for centuries and changed the least. Hurd attributes their survival to being able to switch between both the wet and dry lands.

Pitcher plants - a flesh eating plant with sticky secretions in its leaves. Insects that get stuck in the leaves have no means of escape.

Bladderworts- another flesh eating plant with underwater bladders that can trap water fleas and mosquito larva.

Larch trees - a coniferous tree that drop their needles every fall. Hurd is enamored by the beauty of these trees and their fallen needles.

Sea cucumbers - they eject their innards when an enemy tries to catch them and then drift away to hide somewhere and regenerate themselves.

Like I said earlier, there is more to this book than mere descriptions of flora and fauna. Hurd relates her personal experiences as a child and adult to the swamps and bogs. She talks about how swamps are often associated with the criminal and the dangerous. How it provides shelter to refugees and the persecuted. She provides examples from American history to bolster her argument.

Many religions and cultures associated swamps and bogs with decay and sickness. But they also buried their dead in the swamps. What they did not know was that the acidic water in swamps prevented the growth of microorganisms that helped the decomposition of the human body. So the buried bodies would never decompose. She gives the example of the corpse of Tollund Man, discovered in a Denmark bog, with his face and whiskers intact.

I have only mentioned the parts that interested me the most, in this review. There is a lot more in this small book filled with dense prose written with a lot of love, hard work and imagination. I read it while on holiday, getting sun burnt in a pool. I recommend it.