The Old Man and the Swamp by John Sellers

Author:John Sellers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Finding nothing else of note while circling the lake—there goes my theory (and pants-soaking fear) about snakes growing on trees—we decided to decamp to the cabin to rest. Once we’d made it back inside, my dad draped a damp towel over his head to cool off and sat down on the lower mattress of the living-room bunk bed he’d be sleeping on. Disappointed with the number of copperbellies we’d spotted on our first short excursion, he said that he would like to go out again before it got dark, but it was obvious that he needed a breather. I must have been feeling much better than he had about what we’d already accomplished. Despite the menace of mosquitoes and biting flies, and the threat of heat coma, it hadn’t been so terrible to walk around a serene lake, and we’d even seen a few snakes, too. Of course, I would have been much happier to have rested on such modest laurels than to have contemplated what lay ahead. That’s because, later, we’d actually be going to the swamp where my dad had found his first colony of copperbellies, the one I’d failed to discuss with him for many years. I had few clues about what it might have even looked like. I was picturing a terrain that was impossible to navigate, in which huge, squawking, carnivorous birds swooped in from overhead and man-eating plants lined the non-path.

But a half hour later, we began a trek into the woods beyond the lake, and really, it was a fairly easy march up a forest service road and straight down a hill through dense, low-sprouted plants that, when kicked, emitted swarms of mosquitoes that thankfully disliked DEET even more than I did. The swamp at the bottom of the hill was tiny, maybe forty feet wide. The main chunk of that width was blocked from our initial vantage point by clusters of scrub brush— buttonbush, I would later learn—but we could make out the swamp water from where we were standing. If we were truly going to find out what had happened to the snake population in Hillsdale County, my dad suspected that the answer would lie within this small but all-important swamp. The site of his most memorable discovery as a herpetologist, the swamp held special meaning for him—and probably only him. To my dad, this excursion was a bit like two lovebirds revisiting the site of their first date. And I guess that made me the proverbial third wheel.

It had been a long time since I’d ventured this deep into the woods—not since the Braveheart incident fifteen years before, in fact. Now I was looking out on a swamp while standing shin-deep in mosquito-infested forest floor. It was an experience that could have been off-putting to anyone, but especially to a dude who, ten hours before this very moment, had been stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I’ve been living in New York City for nearly two decades now, and

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