Marsh Land Quotes

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

If ice can burn," said Jojen in his solemn voice, "then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is one.

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

Up and down," Meera would sigh sometimes as they walked, "then down and up. Then up and down again. I hate these stupid mountains of yours, Prince Bran." "Yesterday you said you loved them." "Oh, I do. My lord father told me about mountains, but I never saw one till now. I love them more than I can say." Bran made a face at her. "But you just said you hated them." "Why can't it be both?" Meera reached up to pinch his nose. "Because they're different," he insisted. "Like night and day, or ice and fire." "If ice can burn," said Jojen in his solemn voice, "then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is one." "One," his sister agreed, "but over wrinkled.

Nothing from the ocean is meant to survive on land forever.

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

Midway between land and water, freshwater marshes are among the most highly productive ecosystems on earth, rivaling the tropical rainforest.

I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.

You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn’t occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it’s a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya's shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog.

Once they got there, it wasn’t a pretty landing. With the oars damaged and the foresail torn, Leo could barely manage a controlled descent. The others strapped themselves in below—except for Coach Hedge, who insisted on clinging to the forward rail, yelling, “YEAH! Bring it on, lake!” Leo stood astern, alone at the helm, and aimed as best he could. Festus creaked and whirred warning signals, which were relayed through the intercom to the quarterdeck. “I know, I know,” Leo said, gritting his teeth. He didn’t have much time to take in the scenery. To the southeast, a city was nestled in the foothills of a mountain range, blue and purple in the afternoon shadows. A flat desert landscape spread to the south. Directly beneath them the Great Salt Lake glittered like aluminum foil, the shoreline etched with white salt marshes that reminded Leo of aerial photos of Mars. “Hang on, Coach!” he shouted. “This is going to hurt.” “I was born for hurt!

to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone. Except for the huge reeds in the marshes, it had no trees for timber. Here, then, was a region with "the hand of God against it," an unpromising land seemingly doomed to poverty and desolation. But the people that inhabited it, the Sumerians, as they came to be known by

Looks like it’ll be ’bout eight hundr’d dollars total—put the land free and clear.” Kya walked out of the courthouse with a full deed in her name for three hundred ten acres of lush lagoons, sparkling marsh, oak forests, and a long private beach on the North Carolina coastline

As you go down the water,’ he said, ‘you will find that the trees will fail, and you will come to a barren country. There the River flows in stony vales amid high moors, until at last after many leagues it comes to the tall island of the Tindrock, that we call Tol Brandir. There it casts its arms about the steep shores of the isle, and falls then with a great noise and smoke over the cataracts of Rauros down into the Nindalf, the Wetwang as it is called in your tongue. That is a wide region of sluggish fen where the stream becomes tortuous and much divided. There the Entwash flows in by many mouths from the Forest of Fangorn in the west. About that stream, on this side of the Great River, lies Rohan. On the further side are the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil. The wind blows from the East there, for they look out over the Dead Marshes and the Noman-lands to Cirith Gorgor and the black gates of Mordor.

It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed lands, and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark line there was a ribbon of clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold the red large moon. In a few minutes she had ascended out of that clear field, in among the piled mountains of cloud.

He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.

I look at those parchments, which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred, is the lawful and sole owner of the lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea, and I dream of those lands, wavebeaten and wild beneath the winddriven sky. I dream, and know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me.

But there in the Lowcountry, the land seemed borrowed from the ocean. With strips of islands separated by creeks and salt marshes, avoiding bridges would be like avoiding snow in Maine in January.

Those looking for serious land moved on, and this infamous marsh became a net, scooping up a mishmash of mutinous sailors, castaways, debtors, and fugitives dodging wars, taxes, or laws that they didn’t take to.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

These haymeadow days were the Arcadian age for marsh dwellers. Man and beast, plant and soil lived on and with each other in mutual toleration, to the mutual benefit of all. The marsh might have kept on producing hay and prairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberries forever. The new overlords did not understand this. They did not include soil, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality. The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest. They envisaged farms not only around, but in the marsh. An epidemic of ditch-digging and land-booming set in. The marsh was gridironed with drainage canals, speckled with new fields and farmsteads.

Roman Centurion's Song" LEGATE, I had the news last night - my cohort ordered home By ships to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome. I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below: Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go! I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall, I have none other home than this, nor any life at all. Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here. Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done; Here where my dearest dead are laid - my wife - my wife and son; Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love, Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove? For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice. What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies, Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze - The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days? You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean To Arelate's triple gate; but let me linger on, Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon! You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines. You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but -will you e'er forget The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet? Let me work here for Britain's sake - at any task you will - A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill. Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep, Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep. Legate, I come to you in tears - My cohort ordered home! I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome? Here is my heart, my soul, my mind - the only life I know. I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

Time and time again I am astounded by the regularity and repetition of form in this valley and elsewhere in wild nature: basic patterns, sculpted by time and the land, appearing everywhere I look. The twisted branches in the forest that look so much like the forked antlers of the deer and elk. The way the glacier-polished hillside boulders look like the muscular, rounded bodies of the animals- deer, bear- that pass among these boulders like loving ghosts. The way the swirling deer hair is the exact shape and size of the larch and pine needles the deer hair lies upon one it is torn loose and comes to rest on the forest floor. As if everything up here is leaning in the same direction, shaped by the same hands, or the same mind; not always agreeing or in harmony, but attentive always to the same rules of logic and in the playing-out, again and again, of the infinite variations of specificity arising from that one shaping system of logic an incredible sense of community develops… Felt at night when you stand beneath the stars and see the shapes and designs of bears and hunters in the sky; felt deep in the cathedral of an old forest, when you stare up at the tops of the swaying giants; felt when you take off your boots and socks and wade across the river, sensing each polished, mossy stone with your bare feet. Felt when you stand at the edge of the marsh and listen to the choral uproar of the frogs, and surrender to their shouting, and allow yourself, too, like those pine needles and that deer hair, like those branches and those antlers, to be remade, refashioned into the shape and the pattern and the rhythm of the land. Surrounded, and then embraced, by a logic so much more powerful and overarching than anything that a man or woman could create or even imagine that all you can do is marvel and laugh at it, and feel compelled to give, in one form or another, thanks and celebration for it, without even really knowing why…

Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years. That cannot amount to more than a night of geological time. Perhaps this is why Provincetown is so beautiful. Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one’s ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha’s Vineyard’s fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.   NORMAN MAILER, from Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began.

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother. 5.

I picked up The Hobbit. And I began to read. I was swept off to a green, green Shire in a far, far land, and my soul has never returned. I suppose it never will. Yes, my soul at the time wandered more in the smoking wastelands of Mordor or the Dead Marshes than Hobbiton, but wandering in Middle Earth, was superior to my own world in every way.

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record.

for four centuries. Most before the Civil War. Others squatted on the land more recently, especially after the World Wars, when men came back broke and broke-up. The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog.

from Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I’m not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees.

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.

Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

O Thebes! garland yourself in all the green there is — ivy green, olive green, fennel green, growing green, yearning green, wet sap green, new grape green, green of youth and green of branches, green of mint and green of marsh grass, green of tea leaves, oak and pine, green of washed needles and early rain, green of weeds and green of oceans, green of bottles, ferns and apples, green of dawn-soaked dew and slender green of roots, green fresh out of pools, green slipped under fools, green of the green fuse, green of the honeyed muse, green of the rough caress of ritual, green undaunted by reason or delirium, green of jealous joy, green of the secret holy violence of the thyrsos, green of the sacred iridescence of the dancе — and let all the land of Thebes dance! with Dionysos leading, to the mountains! to the mountains! where the mob of women waits! They’ve forsaken their shuttles, they’ve left their looms, they’ve dropped their aprons and taken up their stations on Dionysos’ mountain!

Who calls the Prince of the Mud?' … The snapping turtle snapped. Its head shot out to maximum extension—Eliot wouldn’t have believed anything that big could move that fast. It was like a Mack truck coming straight at them. As it bit it turned its head on one side, to take them both in one movement. Eliot reacted fast. His reaction was to crouch down and cover his face with his arms. From the relative safety of this position he felt the day grow colder around them, and he heard a crackle, which at first he took for the pier splintering in the turtle’s jaws. But the end didn’t come. 'You DARE?' Janet said. Her voice was loud now—it made the boards vibrate sympathetically under his feet. He looked up at her. She’d gone airborne, floating two feet above the pier, and her clothes were rimmed with frost. She radiated cold; mist sheeted off her skin as it would off dry ice. Her arms were spread wide, and she had an axe in each hand. They were those twin staves she wore on her back, each one now topped with an axe-head of clear ice. The turtle was trapped in mid-lunge. She’d stopped it cold; the swamp was frozen solid around it. Janet had called down winter, and the water of the Northern Marsh was solid ice as far as he could see, cracked and buckled up in waves. The turtle was stuck fast in it. It struggled, its head banging back and forth impotently. 'Jesus,' Eliot said. He stood up out of his defensive crouch. 'Nice one.' 'You DARE?' Janet said again, all imperious power. 'Marvel that you live, Prince of Shit!

Gods, whether of Progress or the Old Testament, ghosts of saintly, or revolutionary, ancestors, abstracted moral imperatives, ideals cut wholly off from mere earth and mankind, utopias beckoning from the marshes of their never-never-land—these, and not the facts of social life together with probable generalizations based on those facts, exercise the final controls over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish or the admission of practical failure.

Жираф Сегодня, я вижу, особенно грустен твой взгляд, И руки особенно тонки, колени обняв. Послушай: далёко, далёко на озере Чад Изысканный бродит жираф. Ему грациозная стройность и нега дана, И шкуру его украшает волшебный узор, С которым равняться осмелиться только Луна, Дробясь и качаясь на влаге широких озёр. Вдали он подобен цветным парусам корабля, И бег его плавен, как радостный птичий полёт. Я знаю, что много чудесного видит земля, Когда на закате он прячется в мраморный грот. Я знаю весёлые сказки таинственных стран Про чёрную деву, про страсть молодого вождя, Но ты слишком долго вдыхала тяжёлый туман, Ты верить не хочешь во что-нибудь, кроме дождя. И как я тебе расскажу про тропический сад, Про стройный пальмы, про запах немыслимых трав... Ты плачешь? Послушай... далёко, на озере Чад Изысканный бродит жираф. The Giraffe O, the look in your eyes this morning is more than usually sad, With your little arms wrapped round your knees and body bent in half. Let me tell you a story: far, far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad, There roams a most majestic giraffe Blessed with a handsome build and graceful carriage And a coat painted hypnotic, magical patterns, With which none but the moon above dare compare When her light falls down to be scattered and rocked on the waters, Passing like a blazing sail far out at sea As she runs by, nimble and carefree as a bird in flight. I hear tell the earth has seen many wonderful things When the giraffe hides herself away and the sun sets into night. I know fabulous tales of far off, alien lands, Of a dark maiden, of a young captain’s burning desire, all this I know, But you’ve breathed in the damp marsh air for so long You don’t want to believe in anything but the rain out your window. I still haven’t told you about her tropic garden, with the slenderest palm trees, The sweetest wildflowers, meadows of unbelievable grass . . . Are you crying? Let me tell you a story: far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad, There roams a most majestic giraffe.

Sumer, the land which came to be known in classical times as Babylonia, consists of the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. It has an area of approximately 10,000 square miles, somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts. Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and its soil, left to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone. Except for the huge reeds in the marshes,

In recent years scientists have discovered that coastal wetlands—salt marshes, but also mangroves and saw grass meadows—store a quarter of the carbon found in the earth’s soil, despite covering only 5 percent of the planet’s land area. That means that an acre of healthy coastal wetlands will clean far more air than an acre of the Amazon. “They sequester about fifteen times more carbon than upland forests,” Beverly tells me. “But how effective are these ecosystems when they have been dammed, diked, culverted, or drained? That’s what we’d like to know.

am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen móna, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sléibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine ploughgull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fish-tailed mud-piper, the crúiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheatcrake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill-bantam and the pilibeen cathrach.

You know,’ he said, ‘there are things that won’t do for Newbury Street—things that are out of place here, and that can’t be conceived here, anyhow. It’s my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won’t find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn’t Boston—it isn’t anything yet, because it’s had no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they’re the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts— the ghosts of beings highly organized enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw.

Youth of Cromwell [Quoted in French] The family soon lost its wealth. He retired to a small estate he possessed amidst the marshes of Huntingdon. The barren, rough and morose character of this shore district, the monotonous horizon, the muddy river, the clouded skies, the meager trees, the infrequent cottages, the rude habits of the inhabitants, were such as to make the young man’s nature concentrated and gloomy. The soul of a land seems to enter into that of man. Often a lively, ardent and profound faith seems to emanate from a poor and dismal country; like country, like man. The soul is a mirror before it becomes a home.

Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence. Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding back. Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog. High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks , and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

Progress? Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had better be decided sixty years hence. And, just what has happened to the obscure valley of Marsh Creek, is happening today, on a larger scale, all over the land. It is the same old story of grab and greed. Let us go on the "make" today, and "whack up" tomorrow; cheating each other as villainously as we may, and posterity be d—d. "What's all the w-u-u-rld to a man when his wife is a widdy?" This is the moral: From Maine to Montana; from the Adirondacks to Alaska; from the Yosemite to the Yellowstone, the trout-hog, the deer-wolf, the netter, the skin-hunter, each and all have it their own way; and the law is a farce—only to be enforced where the game has vanished forever.

Above the roar of pounding waves, Kya called to the birds. The ocean sang bass, the gulls sang soprano. Shrieking and crying, they circled over the marsh and above the sand as she threw piecrust and yeast rolls onto the beach. Legs hanging down, heads twisting, they landed. A few birds pecked gently between her toes, and she laughed from the tickling until tears streamed down her cheeks, and finally great, ragged sobs erupted from that tight place below her throat. When the carton was empty she didn't think she could stand the pain, so afraid they would leave her like everybody else. But the gulls squatted on the beach around her and went about their business of preening their gray extended wings. So she sat down too and wished she could gather them up and take them with her to the porch to sleep. She imagined them all packed in her bed, a fluffy bunch of warm, feathered bodies under the covers together.

Above the roar of pounding waves, Kya called to the birds. The ocean sang bass, the gulls sang soprano. Shrieking and crying, they circled over the marsh and above the sand as she threw piecrust and yeast rolls onto the beach. Legs hanging down, heads twisting, they landed. A few birds pecked gently between her toes, and she laughed from the tickling until tears streamed down her cheeks, and finally great, ragged sobs erupted from that tight place below her throat. When the carton was empty she didn’t think she could stand the pain, so afraid they would leave her like everybody else. But the gulls squatted on the beach around her and went about their business of preening their gray extended wings. So she sat down too and wished she could gather them up and take them with her to the porch to sleep. She imagined them all packed in her bed, a fluffy bunch of warm, feathered bodies under the covers together.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

It was now 1952, so some of the claims had been held by a string of disconnected, unrecorded persons for four centuries. Most before the Civil War. Others squatted on the land more recently, especially after the World Wars, when men came back broke and broke-up. The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog. Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws—not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes. Ancient and natural, like those hatched from hawks and doves. When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.

The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar—a very different and most secret and dire matter)… the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate—meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, bindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet.

In their drunken preoccupation with the project at hand and mere locomotion, they did not look behind them. There the night-smog was thicker than ever. A high-circling nighthawk would have seen the stuff converging from all sections of Lankhmar, north, east, south, west—from the Inner Sea, from the Great Salt Marsh, from the many-ditched grain lands, from the River Hlal—in swift-moving black rivers and rivulets, heaping, eddying, swirling, dark and reeking essence of Lankhmar from its branding irons, braziers, bonfires, bonefires, kitchen fires and warmth fires, kilns, forges, breweries, distilleries, junk and garbage fires innumerable, sweating alchemists’ and sorcerers’ dens, crematoriums, charcoal burners’ turfed mounds, all those and many more…converging purposefully on Dim Lane and particularly on the Silver Eel and perhaps especially on the ricketty house behind it, untenanted except for attic. The closer to that center it got, the more substantial the smog became, eddy-strands and swirl-tatters tearing off and clinging to rough stone corners and scraggly-surfaced brick like black cobwebs.

Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York. This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage

EVERY MORNING SHE WOKE EARLY, still listening for the clatter of Ma’s busy cooking. Ma’s favorite breakfast had been scrambled eggs from her own hens, ripe red tomatoes sliced, and cornbread fritters made by pouring a mixture of cornmeal, water, and salt onto grease so hot the concoction bubbled up, the edges frying into crispy lace. Ma said you weren’t really frying something unless you could hear it crackling from the next room, and all her life Kya had heard those fritters popping in grease when she woke. Smelled the blue, hot-corn smoke. But now the kitchen was silent, cold, and Kya slipped from her porch bed and stole to the lagoon. Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

After centuries with an empty womb, my mother bore both my sister and me within a span of five years. My father was fading by then—he was centuries older than my mother. But Fionn did not consider my mother a worthy successor. The crown should go to the eldest child, he said—to my sister, Helena. It was time, he thought, for a new generation to lead. It did not sit well with my mother, or with many of those in her court—especially her general, Pelias. He agreed with my mother that Helena was too young to inherit our father’s throne. But my mother was still in her prime. Still ripe with power, and it was clear that she’d been blessed by the gods themselves, since she had been gifted children at long last. So it was just as it had been before: those behind the throne worked to upend it. The image shifted to some sort of marsh—a bog. Fionn rode a horse between the islands of grass, bow at the ready as he ducked beneath trees in bloom. My parents often went hunting in the vast slice of land the Daglan had kept for their private game park, where they had crafted terrible monsters to serve as worthy prey. It was there that he met his death.

The marsh was guarded by a torn shoreline, labeled by early explorers as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because riptides, furious winds, and shallow shoals wrecked ships like paper hats along what would become the North Carolina coast. One seaman’s journal read, “rang’d along the Shoar . . . but could discern no Entrance . . . A violent Storm overtook us . . . we were forced to get off to Sea, to secure Ourselves and Ship, and were driven by the Rapidity of a strong Current . . . “The Land . . . being marshy and Swamps, we return’d towards our Ship . . . Discouragement of all such as should hereafter come into those Parts to settle.” Those looking for serious land moved on, and this infamous marsh became a net, scooping up a mishmash of mutinous sailors, castaways, debtors, and fugitives dodging wars, taxes, or laws that they didn’t take to. The ones malaria didn’t kill or the swamp didn’t swallow bred into a woodsmen tribe of several races and multiple cultures, each of whom could fell a small forest with a hatchet and pack a buck for miles. Like river rats, each had his own territory, yet had to fit into the fringe or simply disappear some day in the swamp. Two hundred years later, they were joined by runaway slaves, who escaped into the marsh and were called maroons, and freed slaves, penniless and beleaguered, who dispersed into the water-land because of scant options.

Brian and Avis deliver their stacks and try to refuse dinner, but the waiters bring them glasses of burgundy, porcelain plates with thin, peppery steaks redolent of garlic, scoops of buttery grilled Brussels sprouts, and a salad of beets, walnuts, and Roquefort. They drag a couple of lawn chairs to a quiet spot on the street and they balance the plates on their laps. Some ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trips they used to make to the Keys. Ten years after they'd moved to Miami they'd left Stanley and Felice with family friends and Avis and Brian drove to Key West on a sort of second honeymoon. She remembers how the land dropped back into distance: wetlands, marsh, lazy-legged egrets flapping over the highway, tangled, sulfurous mangroves. And water. Steel-blue plains, celadon translucence. She and Brian had rented a vacation cottage in Old Town, ate small meals of fruit, cheese, olives, and crackers, swam in the warm, folding water. Each day stirring into the next, talking about nothing more complicated than the weather, spotting a shark off the pier, a mysterious constellation lowering in the west. Brian sheltered under a celery-green umbrella while Avis swam: the water formed pearls on the film of her sunscreen. They watched the night's rise, an immense black curtain from the ocean. Up and down the beach they hear the sounds of the outdoor bars, sandy patios switching on, distant strains of laughter, bursts of music. Someone played an instrument- quick runs of notes, arpeggios floating in soft ovals like soap bubbles over the darkening water.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

The Old Issue October 9, 1899 “HERE is nothing new nor aught unproven,” say the Trumpets, “Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed. “It is the King—the King we schooled aforetime !” (Trumpets in the marshes—in the eyot at Runnymede!) “Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,” peal the Trumpets, “Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall. “It is the King!”—inexorable Trumpets— (Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!) “He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre,” warn the Trumpets, “He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will. “Hard die the Kings—ah hard—dooms hard!” declare the Trumpets, Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill! Ancient and Unteachable, abide—abide the Trumpets! Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets— Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings! All we have of freedom, all we use or know— This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law. Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King. Till our fathers ’stablished, after bloody years, How our King is one with us, first among his peers. So they bought us freedom—not at little cost Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost, Over all things certain, this is sure indeed, Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed. Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure. Whining “He is weak and far”; crying “Time shall cure.”, (Time himself is witness, till the battle joins, Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people’s loins.) Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace. Suffer not the old King here or overseas. They that beg us barter—wait his yielding mood— Pledge the years we hold in trust—pawn our brother’s blood— Howso’ great their clamour, whatsoe’er their claim, Suffer not the old King under any name! Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn. It is written what shall fall if the King return. He shall mark our goings, question whence we came, Set his guards about us, as in Freedom’s name. He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware; He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear. He shall break his judges if they cross his word; He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord. He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring Watchers ’neath our window, lest we mock the King— Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies; Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies. Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay, These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay. We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use. We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet, While his hired captains jeer us in the street. Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun, Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run. Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled, Laying on a new land evil of the old— Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain— All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again. Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue— Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew. Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid: Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did! Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read. Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed— All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring. Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!

Tuesday. Hot. That lot from across the marsh have been at it again. Playing a stupid game on their broomsticks. A big leather ball landed in my cabbages. I hexed the man who came for it. I’d like to see him fly with his knees on back to front, the great hairy hog.

In 1951 the first oil rig was installed nearby, and with the rig came “channelization,” the digging of access routes through the marsh. The oil companies were supposed to “rock” each channel—to backfill it—when the rigs left, reducing the movement of water through the fragile marshland that surrounds and supports the bayous. “But they didn’t do that, they didn’t maintain the bayou like they said they would, and now the gulf is at our back door,” I was told in town. Every year, thanks to erosion, the channels grow wider, eating into the land that once comprised Jean Charles.

Dulcinea could not leave this land. She finally understood how the wind out here made a place for itself in your ear, in your mind, and in your heart, stilling your thoughts, making everything you see one vast wholeness: the swan gliding across the silent marsh, the mossy turtles climbing like ancient men out of the water, their claws gripping the soil with great effort to drag themselves despite the tangled water plants that dragged their yellow-scaled legs back, their ragged beaks parted with effort. She couldn’t think without the Sand Hills wind hushing the great world around her as she pushed herself into its embrace. Maybe a bad thing never died, as the men were fond of saying, and good lived but for a moment. This was a thing she could accept.

I came here in 1906. I had been in Arkansas and sold some land for a nice profit so I thought I’d try my luck here in Oklahoma. I thought maybe I’d manage to buy some land with oil beneath its surface, but it appears that I might have missed the mark on that goal. I bought 40 acres and opened a boarding house since it presented some difficulty for people of color to find lodging in these parts. I could see that many people were arriving here to work in the oil fields and they needed a place to stay, so I figured I might as well provide that service. It was a small property located on a dusty road but it did quite well. Then I ventured out and built three office buildings where doctors, lawyers, dentists, and realtors could set up shop. Later we added barbershops and beauty salons to take care of the tenants. Those ventures proved to be good investments and provided me with the capital to build this hotel. As you can see, we have a rather tame clientele but they pay the bills.

The people who had once dwelled within these lands had not met easy or pleasant ends. She could feel their pain even now, whispering through the stones, rippling through the water. That marsh beast that had snuck up on her last night was the mildest of the horrors here.

It had been like this forever, thought Domenic Jejeune. For a thousand years and more, men and women had been greeted by these same sights and sounds as they worked these coastal marshes. The same play of sunlight on the waters, the same quiet rush of winds through the reeds. The ebb and flow of tides had changed the shape of lands over the centuries, but the essential rhythms of nature, the seasons, the weather patterns, those had remained constant for as long as humans had inhabited this land. From his elevated wooden platform, Jejeune surveyed the coastline in a slow pass, squinting against the light spangles that bounced off the gently rippling water. Not a single element of modern life intruded. No buildings, no wires, no pylons. Just birds, by the hundred, resting on the tidal mudflats, or wheeling lazily in the sky above. And the sound, the beautiful sweet silence, broken only by the crush of the waves and the occasional plaintive call of a seabird. It brought a feeling as close to peace as Jejeune ever found these days. p. 150

Jejeune bent to look out the window again. There was not a single body of land between here and the North Pole. In winter, the storms off the North Sea would be punishing, but in the spring, Sand Martins would patrol these cliffs with dazzling feats of aerial acrobatics. The runnels at the cliff’s edge would blaze with the magnificent deep red marsh orchids. It would be a beautiful, spectacular place to spend your days. p. 267

...her books had taught them how the marsh links the land to the sea, both needing the other.

...but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

hot; his clothes, drenched with sweat, clung to his body; his left boot, which was full of water, was heavy and squelched; there were beads of sweat rolling down his gunpowder-smeared face; there was a bitter taste in his mouth, a smell of powder and the marsh in his nose, and an incessant sound of snipe squelching in his ears; the barrels of his gun had grown too hot to handle; his heart was thumping with rapid, short beats; his hands were trembling with the tension, and his weary legs were stumbling and getting in the way of each other on the tussocks and in the bog; but he carried on walking and shooting. Finally, after one disgraceful miss, he flung his gun and his hat on the ground. ‘No, I must pull myself together!’ he said to himself. He picked up his gun and his hat, called Laska to heel, and left the marsh. When he got out on to dry ground he sat down on a tussock, took off his boots and poured out the water, then walked over to the marsh, slaked his thirst with rusty-tasting water, wet the scorching-hot barrels of his gun, and washed his face and hands. After freshening up, he went back to the spot where a snipe had landed, with the firm intention of not losing his temper. He wanted to remain calm, but it was the same as before. His finger pressed the trigger before he had taken aim at the bird. Things just got worse and worse. He only had five birds in his game-bag when he headed towards the alder grove where he was to meet up with Stepan Arkadyich. Before he saw Stepan Arkadyich he saw his dog. Completely black from the stinking mud from the bog, Krak leapt out from behind the upturned root of an alder and began sniffing Laska with the air of a conqueror. The imposing figure of Stepan Arkadyich materialized behind Krak in the shade of the alders. Red-faced and sweaty, his collar unbuttoned, he walked towards him, limping as before. ‘Well, how did you get on? You were doing a lot of shooting!’ he said, smiling merrily. ‘And what about you?’ asked Levin. But there was no need to ask, because he had already seen the full game-bag. ‘Oh, it wasn’t too bad.’ He had fourteen birds. ‘Nice marsh! I’m sure Veslovsky got in your way. It’s awkward having one dog for two people,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, trying to tone down his triumph. 1 ‘What are they saying?’ 2 ‘Let’s go, it’s interesting.’ 11 WHEN Levin and Stepan Arkadyich arrived at the peasant’s hut where Levin always stayed, Veslovsky was already there.

Is there a middle way between hope and despair? It is the unconditional yes to the given of life that our needs are sometimes met and sometimes not, that life is not always predictable, that things do not always come out the way we want. Between the extremes of hope and despair there flies a wise owl. He is the one that lands not in the marshes of wishful thinking nor in the desert of despondency but on the tree of life, the reality of how things are in the human world. We can sit with him on any branch of mindfulness. There we feel a sense of divine balance and we realize that our unconditional yes was how we aligned ourselves to it.

I'll try. The Big Bang banged, a naked singularity. Lots happened in the first three minutes; I forget just what. Then eons passed: galaxies condensed and sprang away from one another like disenchanted lovers, at speeds proportional to the square of their distances, something like that. At last one solar system materialized, a nuclear family with planets nine. Earth's geology transpired; life; biological species evolved; Eocene, Pleistocene -- you know. We crawled out of the water, some of us, into the marshes, out of the marshes, some of us, onto dry land, and human history took place. Classic antiquity, Dark and Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment; then Modern Times, now about done. F. S. Key. E. A. Poe. Us. How'm I doing? I love you.

The water was still, as no wind was blowing, and it reflected the sky and the stars that stole out, with such distinctness that the boat seemed to be swimming in the sky, among black tatters of clouds, these being the streaks of land that broke the horizon and the reflection.

The Beverly Hillbillies?" Roger says. "Yeah," I say. "Call it therapy for the sleep-deprived." "Really?" He shakes his head. "A bunch of hicks jumping around acting stupid?" I stiffen. My acquired Yankee accent may sound like his, but I don't appreciate it when people from up north move south for the warm weather and then disrespect southerners. I recite the thesis from my freshman television studies paper. "Listen, Roger, The Beverly Hillbillies is based on a classic archetype: the stranger in a strange land." "Oh yeah?" he says. I lean against the kitchen doorway and hook one pink slipper over the other. "You see, the viewer identifies with the residents of Beverly Hills, who live by the rules of the 'regular' world. But Jed and Granny and Elly May reverse our expectations. We end up empathizing with them because our own cultural norms prove cold-hearted and illogical." "This is so interesting," he says, checking his watch. "Yes, it is, Roger, because we have come to understand that the naïve but kind 'hicks' are wiser than those who consider themselves sophisticated and smart.

Revelers in green stumbled from pub to pub as I drove away yesterday from springtime in Washington, a collage of the organic and the man-made--- redbud and sidewalk, dogwood and car. Small trees in the easement showed feathery pink blossoms. I've left the delicacy of spring for a hot, sodden green, the cruise control carrying me south through Virginia and the Carolinas, Georgia, and farther on toward the place where Florida's panhandle curves in and resort beaches fade into a coastline of dense and mangrove and fingerling waterways. Slightly inland from the Gulf sits my hometown of Tenetkee, where the water transitions slowly to land.

Between the mouths of the Blackwater and the Colne, on the east coast of Essex, lies an extensive marshy tract veined and freckled in every part with water. It is a wide waste of debatable ground contested by sea and land, subject to incessant incursions from the former, but stubbornly maintained by the latter.

It was now 1952, so some of the claims had been held by a string of disconnected, unrecorded persons for four centuries. Most before the Civil War. Others squatted on the land more recently, especially after the World Wars, when men came back broke and broke-up. The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog.

Months passed, winter was easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya's shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother

Late in the spring of 1837, apostles Thomas Marsh, David Patten, and William Smith left their homes in Missouri and set out for Kirtland. Many of the Saints in Zion were now settled along a stream called Shoal Creek, about fifty miles northeast of Independence. There they had founded a town called Far West, using Joseph’s plan for the city of Zion as their guide to lay out the settlement. Hoping to find a peaceful solution to the Saints’ ongoing problems with their neighbors, the Missouri legislature had organized Caldwell County, which encompassed the land around Far West and Shoal Creek, for the settlement of the Saints.1

Thanks to these names, the terrae incognitae are gradually claimed; teetering on the border of civilization the unknown lands soon become islands. It is here that the land spirits find refuge and where they continue to dwell. The places that escape human control are quite stereotypical and essentially correspond to lands that are difficult to live in and to cultivate. This therefore causes a new natural distribution of spirits and places based on the inaccessibility of these spaces. So it is perfectly normal that the loca incerta, the dangerous places, would be forests, moors, mountains, as well as marshes and—as we shall see—bodies of water in general.

As the sun sank into the west it bathed the flat land of glistening marsh spread before them in its orange glow, myriad waterways and stagnant pools glistening like liquid amber. Behind them the bastion of the Darkwood stood stark and silhouetted, fading into the distance, and along with it the realm of Narvon.

Swallows darted through the clouds of midges dancing over the mudflats. The sky above the marsh remained grey, but it had lost its mercurial wintry gleam, and the warm wind sighing through the air above the ravaged land held the scent of healing.

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced. I have no wish to overstress the negative side of this great exploration. If I seem to do so here it is because both the older romantic exponents of a new life lived in accordance with Nature, or the later exponents of a new life framed in conformity to the Machine, overlooked the appalling losses and wastages, under the delusion either that the primeval abundance was inexhaustible or else that the losses did not matter, since modern man through science and invention would soon fabricate an artificial world infinitely more wonderful than that nature had provided-an even grosser delusion. Both views have long been rife in the United States where the two phases of the New World dream came together; and they are still prevalent.

they turned around to head down — and Jeff crawled onto the deck to pull down the jib — he saw a blue heron standing on a little muddy point of land across the creek. He pointed and Dicey followed his eyes. The blue raised its flat head to look at them. Its feet were in the water, its feathers slightly ruined as if by a recent annoyance. Jeff watched the bird, waiting for it to take off, anticipating the squawk with which it would trumpet its disapprovals. But the blue seemed not to find them threatening. It stared across the creek at them, then turned its back on them in a stately gesture of dismissal. Jeff knew the bird knew they were there. But, from all you could tell, the bird had never noticed them. It raised its head to look out across the marsh, unconcerned, solitary, ignoring them with great determination. Dicey’s low voice told him to pull down the mainsail, and he did. When he had it gathered around the boom, he looked back to the bird. The great blue still stood there, its back still to them. It wasn’t going to let the suspicion that they were there chase it off of its fishing territory. Jeff wrapped the sheet around the loosely furled mainsail and went up to the bow to fend off. Dicey concentrated on maneuvering the boat, propelled now only by its own weight. Her hand rested on the tiller as she waited patiently for the sluggish hull to respond to her directions. The landing was perfect. Jeff held onto a piling with one hand while he looped a clove hitch around it. Then he looked back at Dicey. “You know who that bird reminds me of? You.” Her expression changed, and he didn’t know what he’d said wrong. Then he saw that the change was caused by Dicey trying to hold back laughter. “I was thinking how much it was like you,” she told him.

when he sat in the rowboat again, the oars ready but not yet dipped into the water to take him away from the island, Jeff looked back. He didn’t see the busy land crabs nor the overgrown interior; he saw the beach, knowing it was there just beyond sight, keeping the sight of it clear in his inner eye. He splashed the oars into the water. Behind him, a great blue squawked — Jeff turned his head quickly. The heron rose up from the marsh grass, croaking its displeasure at the disturbance, at Jeff, at all of the world. Its legs dragged briefly in the water before it rose free to swoop over Jeff’s head with a whirring of powerful wings. It landed again on the far side of the ruined dock, to stand on stiltlike legs with its long beak pointed toward the water. Just leave me alone, the heron seemed to be saying. Jeff rowed away, down the quiet creek. The bird did not watch him go.

Straightening his legs, he dropped below Gia. He weighed more than she did and he’d bet it killed her that he’d make the LZ first. He loved how competitive she was. Beating her to the landing zone would be

The others climbed into the back of the truck with the pitchforks and the pinestraw, leaving Stacy all alone in the front with the man. She sat as close to the door as she could and held the handle tight in case she had to jump out or something. Suspiciously, she looked at the big paper bag on the seat between them. The man, still frowning, put the truck into gear. With a jolt, they started off. Before they had gone very far he slammed on the brakes, throwing them all forward. He doesn’t even have seatbelts, Stacy thought. But how can you think of dumb things like that when you’re about to die? “Sorry,” he said gruffly. “I forgot. I’ve got to make one stop before we go to the dairy barns.” Throwing the truck into reverse, he backed up a few yards to a narrow road that led into the woods. A small sign that read “Private! Closed to the Public” was posted by the side of the road. Oh dear, Stacy thought, we’re doomed now. How many times did Mom ever tell me never to get into a car with a stranger? And now I’ve gone and done that and here we are heading down an off-limits road into the woods. She had a cold chill, and this time it wasn’t from her wet clothes. They bounced down the rutted road. In the mirror outside her window, she could see the kids hanging on to the side of the truck for dear life. The arms of the low pines brushed the roof of the truck with a skeletal scraping down. At least they came to an opening. Before her Stacy could see rows and rows of vines. “Vineyards,” she whispered to herself. Suddenly, the man slammed on his brakes. The truck jarred to a stop. Without a word he threw open the door and climbed out. Now we’re in for it, thought Stacy. I just know he’s coming around this side to get me. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Over the idling hum of the motor she could hear him walking. Then there was a squeal from the kids in the back of the truck. Oh, my goodness, she thought, squinching her eyes tighter and tighter until they hurt. What is he doing to them? In a moment he slung the door of the truck open. In spite of herself she turned and looked at him. He had a big grin on his face. And his shirt was covered with a big purple stain. Blood! “Your shirt,” she stuttered, pointing a quivery finger toward him. He laughed. “Juice,” he said. “Juice from the grapes.” Stacy sniffed. Sure enough it did smell like grape juice. She got up the nerve to look in the rearview mirror. The kid’s heads bobbed in the back. Slowly she ungripped her hand from the door handle. The man waved an arm towards the vineyards. “We grow grapes for wine here. It’s just another way to use the land like Mr. Vanderbilt thought you should.” Stacy just stared at his shirt again and said, “Oh.

We were approaching the Sudd. For thousands of years this giant swamp—more than fifty thousand square miles, as big as England—had repelled invaders from the lands to the north. The British explorer Samuel Baker described it as “a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that fetid heat there is a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning of the world.” In 61 AD the Roman emperor Nero, who controlled Egypt, dispatched troops up the river to find the source of the Nile. They returned with reports of “immense marshes” that were too dense for all but the smallest of one-man canoes. It wasn’t until eighteen hundred years later that a Turkish naval captain, operating under orders from the Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali, was able to penetrate the swamp, reaching as far as Gondokoro. Slaves and ivory were soon flowing north on the Nile. This was the beginning of what Dinka lore calls the time when “the world was spoiled.

Did you know it was from up here they got the word sitting duck? It comes because commercial hunters used to take a live wild duck and put a collar on it and fasten it to a stool—this is also where they got the expression stool pigeon, because they did the same thing with a wild dove—lots of folks couldn’t tell the difference between a pigeon and a dove. They’d put the duck out at the edge of a marsh an’ when the big flocks go over, the fastened-down duck would call and the others would come in for a landing and get shot. Or a dove stuck out in a field would call its friends to help. They used to send barrels full of ducks and pigeons and geese to Chicago restaurants.

Many questions have been raised about the Chapalu and three theories have resulted. This monster is the fruit of Celtic traditions and would be identical to the Cath Paluc of the medieval Welsh Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (Black Book of Carmarthen), which exists in a manuscript copied between 1154 and 1189.10 Here, too, the monster comes from the waters, this time those of the sea, and lays waste to the land, but he is slain by Arthur’s seneschal, Kay. Another interpretation sees palu as a form of Latin palus, meaning “swamp.” The cat would thereby be a marsh spirit or swamp demon.

Outside the cottage, the North Wind howled mournfully. The snow flurries from earlier in the day had thickened, and now the wind brought with it a thick, swirling blizzard that blew in over the Marram Marshes and began to cover the land with deep drifts of snow.

But sometimes we’d spin the moon, and you had to close your eyes and put your finger down to make the spinning stop, and wherever your finger landed, that was your spot, and you had to make up a story about it. It was a good game, but then Mom landed in the Sea of Crisis three times in a row, and Dad kept landing in these tiny places like the Marsh of Diseases and the Lake of Death. He thought it was funny, but it freaked Mom out, so we stopped playing.

Much of this was Churchill’s handiwork, confirmed in March 1921 at a conference in Cairo to decide the immediate future of these lands which had just been added, albeit somewhat ambiguously, to the British Empire. Thither the Colonial Secretary went, accompanied by Clementine and her maid. Churchill could claim responsibility for cobbling together the disparate territory of Iraq, extending from Kurdish lands in the north to Marsh Arabs in the south, a completely artificial country whose predominantly Shia Muslim populace was placed under a Sunni dynasty; a piece of statecraft much later described in a book with the succinct title Winston’s Folly.

Through a break in the willows, if the fog isn't too heavy, you can see the edge of what everyone around here calls the Waters, where a sort of island rises up, accessible by a bridge three planks wide, strung between oil barrels floating on the watery muck. There, under the branches of sycamores, oaks, and hackberries, the green-stained Rose Cottage sinks on the two nearest corners so that it appears to be squatting above the bridge, preparing to pitch itself into the muck. Beyond the cottage, the trees give way to a mosquito-infested no-man's-land of tussocks, marshes, shallows, hummocks, pools, streams, and springs a half mile wide between solid ground and the Old Woman River. This is where Herself harvested wild rice, cattails, staghorn sumac, and a thousand other plants.

Last night I dreamed of Charleston, as I do almost every night. Far away from my beloved land by day, at night I am there. I dreamed of the marsh grass, the coral sunsets, the smell of plough mud, and the sound of the breeze rustling through the fronds of the palmetto trees. If you were to cut me open, you'd find the water of the Atlantic instead of blood, driftwood instead of bones, and seashells in place of everything else.

Go,” she called to Marsh, but he needed no encouragement. Together they flew onto the field surrounding the house. The scene was drowned in mist. Gray forms blurred in the distance as they converged toward the house. Margot, bent double, kept one hand on Marsh’s collar. Dawn can’t be far. Please. It can’t be. She tried to track the forms about them, but their ferocious pace made it hard to see anything. Marsh, dragging her in his wake, chose a gap between the gray figures. Margot had a second-long glimpse of twisted faces, hollow eyes, and black-threaded mouths, and then they were past, racing down the hill. To where? The employee accommodations? Off the land entirely? I can survive a headache for a couple of hours if it means the dead ones aren’t able to follow.

So the poor wretches swarm over the baron’s lands, making roads, draining marshes, building villages. In nine years he begins to tax them. Five years later he increases the rent. Then he doubles it. The peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones elsewhere; and little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord’s wealth. And it is not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers swoop down upon the villages, multiplying as the wretchedness of the peasants increases. That is how things went in the Middle Ages. And to-day is it not still the same thing?

Two days passed, while through woods and trees, and over the hills and the marshes, went the procession of spring, to the music of wood-pigeons cooing. It came like something new out of strange lands, that had never come before.