05-18-08: Swamps: Celebrating Albermarle's natural wonders

(c) 2008 Elizabeth City Daily Advance

By Robert Kelly-Goss, Life Editor

Driving through this region for the first time, seeing swamps bank the highways, somehow made me nervous. They looked eerie in their own way, the deep green water topped with cypress stumps, turtles and glowing green vegetation.

I had been living in the marshes of the Outer Banks and hadn't really immersed myself in what I would eventually refer to with fondness as Swampland. I remember, not too long into my first summer, complaining about all those bugs and how hard it was to get rid of them.

"Well," a neighbor responded, "you did move into the middle of a swamp."

A swamp? I'd heard of the Great Dismal Swamp, but it was miles down the road, in Camden County, right? Well, not exactly, I would soon learn.

Swamps had always fascinated me and while I'd been around them, I suppose I'd taken the old real estate joke to heart and stayed away from property in or near them, until now.

Europeans first explored the Great Dismal Swamp in 1728, led by Col. William Byrd.

George Washington first visited the swamp in 1763 and suggested draining the vast expanse of wet wilderness to connect the Chesapeake Bay with the Albemarle Sound.

And slaves traveling the Underground Railroad in search of freedom would find refuge in the swamp. They would build communities in the backwaters of the vast expanse of water, dirt and vegetation, successfully hiding from bounty hunters who would return them to slave owners for a price, if they were caught.

And there are the literary giants that have been inspired by the swamp. Irish poet Thomas Moore inspired a generation of people to explore the dark and dangerous waters with his poem, "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp," written in 1803. Author Harriet Beecher Stow wrote about it, as did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Frost.

The story goes that Frost, just having dropped out of college, went to visit his love but was rejected. Eventually, he made his way to the Dismal Swamp, with suicide on his mind. Getting lost and nearly taken by the swamp, something is said to have happened to jerk Frost from his daze, eventually leading to help.

Help, if attempting to navigate the swamp is necessary, many have reported. Celebrated North Carolina author and Elizabeth City native Bland Simpson once told me in an interview for a symposium on the swamp how easy it can be to get lost in the canal.

As a young boy, Simpson became captivated by mysteries and lore surrounding the Great Dismal Swamp. Back in the 1950s, when Simpson lived in Elizabeth City with his mother and attorney father, the swamp's outer edges stretched as far as the town limits. Simpson said the swamp was a "big bugaboo;" a dangerous place to be respected but not challenged.

"You were always warned not to go there," he said.

Don't go in the swamp was a familiar refrain. Sometimes, he was told, people don't come out. It's a relentless wilderness that even today attempts to swallow the occasional tourist as witnessed by a New York police officer several years ago whose only saving grace was his cell phone.

Simpson, however, would eventually enter the swamp. He would become intimately acquainted with the lore, the people and the wildlife that make up its history.

While working on a novel, Simpson had an idea. Write a book about the swamp, its history and most importantly, describe its interior.

Touted as a combination oral and natural history, "The Great Dismal: A Carolinian's Swamp Memoir," is Simpson's tribute to a place he grew to love not only as a child, but as a writer, intimately relating what he clearly views as a significant piece of not only North Carolina, but personal history.

Once Simpson decided he would write the book, he contacted the late Jerry Frazier — "a timber man" — and Fred Fearing in hopes of developing a network of sources that could begin to fill in the stories that would make up his adventure. From there, Simpson would begin to make his way into the swamp.

"Not on foot," he recalled. "There's sandy roads all through there and you could drive and since I was working on a book I was able to get a search permit."

The thing about going into the Great Dismal, Simpson said, is a person can easily get "turned around." From all the old timers he spoke with about living in and around the swamp, no one would ever get lost, rather just "turned around;" a euphemism for being lost.

And no one wanted to get lost in there.

"Shelton Rountree, who was a wildlife officer from Suffolk, Va., he told me he went into the woods and hadn't gone more than 150 yards and he got turned around," Simpson said. "It was a gray day with no sun or shadows to guide him."

Rountree would have to work carefully to take himself out of the swamp that day. Simpson said the wildlife officer took several hours to wind his way back out of the wilderness area.

"Everything looked the same," he said. "He knew that if he guessed wrong it would be 15 miles across."

And that, in a very small nutshell, is Swampland. Swampland is a place made possible by a great, watery wilderness, and made famous by the people and storytellers that love it.