Swamp Bones

    "The sound of water says what I think." 

    - Chuang Tzu 

    About an hour into our swamp trip, the lilies started narrowing and the faint oily current began to slow, that current that carried with it the lifeblood of the marshes that ebbed and flowed and lived with the tide, leaving in its wake with the ebb all of the slimy mud and roots that drank deep of the swamp's indifference and embraces. Wetlands are one of the most underappreciated ecosystems on Earth. Mountains and coastlines are beautiful, awe-inspiring, well written about. But swamps are where life happens, where millions of amphibians and fishes and insects that are crucial for life on Earth dance their dances, copulate, and hatch, spreading their crucial progeny far and wide from the womb that is the swamps. 

    

    Max and I were exploring new snakehead water, paddling our kayaks far into the marshes where the red-winged blackbirds sang and circled. Kayak fishing has become a sort of trade-off, where I exchange back pain in my cheap red sit-on-top for the opportunity to explore all kinds of new water, a trade-off that I never refuse. But a few hours in, while Max had a bowfin launch out of the water trying to eat his whopper plopper and I missed one snake, we felt as though we should have been seeing more. We hopped out onto a set of abandoned railroad tracks, stashed the kayaks, and set-off down the hot summer rocks and tracks for who knows where. 

    We found some good looking water, some beautiful swamps that drank the incoming tide oh so gleefully and bloomed in purples and whites in return. We fished it, had very little movement. I found a bunch of bleached white bones, from whitetail deer, possibly some egret or other large bird, and some fishes as well, including a snakehead spine and the jaw of a bowfin that I found accidently through the sharp pain in my foot when I stepped on it and it went straight through my rubber wading shoe. I gathered bones in a sort of reverse burial, taking samples to bring back to work so that they can be displayed for the sparkly-eyed and swamp-curious. Birth and rebirth, all thanks to the courtesy of wetlands. 

    As the sun began to set, the two of us worked our way back through the emerging sounds of frogs. A bald eagle perched up on a tree at the exact point of convergence between marsh and main-river channel. A cast was made by the same point I missed my fish and a snakehead's black and undulating dorsal fin appeared behind my frog for a split second until the fish popped and inhaled the bait. I waiting the painfully long second and set the hook, had it on for a second, before my line snapped. Bites are hard to come by in the dog-days of summer, making that one hurt enough that I sunk how little I could in the belly of my kayak. Red-wings blessed all around me. Swamp bones rattled in my cooler bag.