The Swamp
Where was my magical place? The response came as fast as a lightning bug darting in mid summer's gloaming. Mine and Joycie's swamp. A swamp of thick black mud and alder bushes, a swamp where we had a path leading from the edge of the woodshed through to the old, abandoned cabin and the mystery that lay between. When we were kids, Joycie and I had no idea how long that land had been a swamp or how difficult it had been for pioneering settlers to carve a village from swampland. We had no idea where the water truly came from or where it was going. If it had been suggested, it just never occurred to us that the glacial water we intrepidly waded in was on its way to the Bay of Fundy. It would have been completely foreign for us to have learned that the entire place, in which we lived was a watershed.
In the Sunday March 13 CBC broadcast premiere of Sturla Gunnarsson's definitive 2010 documentary Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, Suzuki speaks of a place most of us may be reluctant to attribute as magical - a swamp - perhaps preferring the more accurate fetid, dank, black mud of a stinking collection hole for spring run-off. Bless David for bringing it to our attention.
Allow me to present my own magical swamp. However, you'd be hard pressed to find agreement as to any existing magical qualities. My swamp is located in a depression between two hills in western New Brunswick. My quagmire was chosen as a major stopping point on the St. Andrews rail line in 1858 and, at one time, had a population of 2000 people. Upon my bog my Irish grandfather moved a house in 1928 and three generations saw the raging rush of spring runoff invade the house itself, positioned as it was in the swamp. My marsh is dead centre of the village of Canterbury, New Brunswick.
My swamp is probably just like Suzuki's - with one exception - it still lives. Nothing changes in Canterbury. The Ministry of Natural Resources might apply the definition of freshwater marsh to my swamp, or they could be more specific and call it a shrub wetland, the difference being, the shrub wetland is dominated by a variety of shrubs or alder thickets. The St. Andrews rail line built in 1858 sliced a hamlet, known at that time as Howard Settlement, into four quadrants adjacent to the rail tracks. The rail line experienced a takeover by the C.P. R., and the settlement became the village of Canterbury.
But two little kids wallowing through the fetid, fertile, ebony swamp mud were unconcerned about the origins of the swamp or, more importantly, its destiny Joycie and I both lived in the northwest quadrant sectioned by the rail bed and the main road in which there was a high elevation, locally termed, Scott's Mountain. Joycie's grandfather, George Scott, an astute and thrifty Scot from Northern Ireland, owned a massive parcel of land which included the mountain. High on this mountain and deep from within the bowels of the earth existed a pristine spring that fed the entire watershed. The waters lost none of their intensity of coldness as they travelled down the mountain and spread into a brook, a creek and a stream, and flowed as it did, down and onward to Shogomoc, into Palfrey waters to spill into the Bay of Fundy.
The CPR purchased the property, tapped the spring on Scott's Mountain, ran a pipe from the mountain top , down the mountain, built a reservoir and, across the track, a water tower.
Our family was poor but amazingly I didn't seem to realize it. Every spring my mother armed with blankets and burlap bags stuffed the space under the door frame when the swamp started backing up and pouring into our kitchen. There was a terrific stench created by open drain water pouring beneath the house for lack of proper plumbing and drainage. I knew when we must have gotten more money in the family because the summer I was five, we were able to jack up the house
The following year came work on the swamp - drainage and widening of the brook. My father worked amidst black flies and mosquitoes to drain the swamp. He widened and dug and shoveled to deepen the brook. He removed dead debris, branches, stones and trash.
Somewhere about this same time, my father tapped into the CPR waterline coming from Scott Mountain. Prior to this we had carried water, two pails at a time, from the community Watering Tub.
Joycie and I continued our forays into our magical place but, we were getting older. Other things occupied us - boys, dances, a driver's license, graduation - and as time passed, the swamp sunk further into the recesses of our memories.
Today the swamp is completely filled in, alder bushes sway in the lazy summertime air masses. Gnats, insects and bees move on the air currents, making their daily visits. Patchy asphalt pokes its grayness from beneath grass and weeds, the barest traces of what was once a driveway. The lawn is waist high swamp grasses and here and there a small sapling, if left to grow, will become a strong maple tree. The edges of a rusted culvert peak from beneath a canopy of dead leaves and rotting timbers but, it matters little, as the rushing flowing waters are gone. On a recent return trip, I discovered that nowhere was there any sign above ground level that this piece of property had ever been inhabited. Six decades of human habitation erased, gone.
And I felt lucky. Unlike David Suzuki, our magical place was still intact. Nothing has changed. Not really. I threw my head back and addressed Jack Murphy: "It's just the way you found it, Jack! It looks just exactly the same as it did in 1928. It has all gone back to the land."
And then another thought, an inspiration, "Maybe I'll bring Joycie by here, the next time I'm down. She might like to see our magical place again."
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