As I trudged through the spruce swamp on my family's piece of land in north-central Wisconsin, I could have been mistaken for a grouse hunter. The hunting license in my pocket, box of #7 1/2 ammunition in my vest, and 12 gauge shotgun in my hand contributed to this illusion, but I had little intent (or perhaps hope) of killing a bird this day. I had never flushed grouse on the property with a gun in my hand, so I rightly assumed the birds had been once again tipped off to my going afield. It's frankly hard to characterize the feelings that beckoned me into the swamp on that cold January afternoon, but they were not unfamiliar to me.
My first memories of the swamp took place over a decade before, deer hunting with my dad. In the pre-dawn darkness, we'd make the half-mile trek from the cabin to the stand. The two-track driveway was dark, but the dense black spruce and cedar towering on either side of us were even darker, forming a corridor that would make anyone uneasy as they passed through. Sitting by the wood stove after the hunt, my dad would tell me stories about the swamp: how the biggest buck ever recorded on our property had suddenly materialized at its edge, revealing itself to him during the hunting season of 1995. Or how, during his first season hunting the swamp alone, he'd begun creeping back to the cabin when it was too dark to see, only to emerge into a field and find that the sun hadn't begun to set.
On this afternoon, I found the swamp relatively bright with snow, reflecting the small amount light the canopy allowed to reach the understory. It would be a stretch to call it inviting; a still, snowy winter only heightened the swamp's sound-dampening quality, and the feeling of being an unwelcome guest in another being's domain--one that had benevolently decided to keep a suspicious eye on you for the time being--was one I had become familiar with since those early days hunting with my dad. In fact, it's a feeling I often found myself yearning for. The swamp is sublime in the truest sense of the word. It is awesome and terrifying and peaceful and foreign at once. It is simultaneously ephemeral and permanent, ever-changing and stuck in time. The number of fallen and uprooted trees in the swamp is barely exceeded by the number alive, composing its dense canopy. Immersed in the swamp, one cannot help but be keenly aware of its natural history. To venture into the swamp once is to wonder about it indefinitely. That is exactly what I found myself doing on that sunny January afternoon, sitting on a red cedar trunk that must have fallen in the last year, or perhaps the last hundred years--I couldn't quite tell.