Annie Proulx

A love song to the wetlands, this series of essays on different land/water habitats is comprehensive and informative without being dry (pun intended).
It captures aspects of humankind's interactions with watery land from ancient peoples to modern drainage and the massive implications that has for nature and the environment.
As someone with fenland heritage, I feel inspired to make some land soggy again.

My house is on swampland. Well, it isn’t swampland now, but it was in the middle of the last century. A woman a block away told me that her son caught tadpoles in the woods were my house stands.

The entire city was once swampland, as was much of Southeast Michigan. The glaciers that carved the land and melted to make the Great Lakes and the thousands of lakes in Michigan left behind waterlogged land.

The year we moved into this house a torrential rain flooded most of the city.

The Oakland show more County Landscape Stewardship Plan of 2017 stated:

“The development of the southeastern zone, and the conversion of historically wetland area to
residential properties, has led to a number of complications including a major loss in
stormwater storage and flood control capacity. These communities have struggled to adapt to
the loss of these natural stormwater retention areas as hardscape cover has expanded with
continued development. These issues were highlighted in 2012 and 2013 when rainwater from
severe storms closed highways, flooded homes, and stopped commerce and business in this
region for several days. It is important that land managers and foresters understand the
symbiosis that exists between wetlands and forests, and that they ensure the protection of these
adjacent wetland areas is worked into any forest management plan.”

I thought that I had an idea of what the area would have looked like before it was turned into a suburban neighborhood because a few blocks away is Cummingston Park, created in 1925. For as long as I have known the park it has been wet and flooded. But I learned that in the 1950s while a college student, my sixth grade teacher documented it as a wonderful wildflower haven…until the land around it became developed and the water accumulated in the park with no where to go.

Ok, then, I turned to the other local nature park, Tenhave Woods, a mile and a half away, next to my high school. It was formed in 1955. It was fenced after my high school classmate’s brother was murdered in the woods in 1967. Tenhave has a vernal pond and swampland and it is documented that it always had swamp land. It has a high fence to keep out deer and protect the wildflowers. Every spring we visit to see the trillium and other wildflowers that take over the ground. My high school biology teacher was part of the society that formed to protect both of these woods.

My husband’s family also lived on swampland. His great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents settled in Lynne Township, St. Clair County, Michigan on reclaimed swampland. In fact, the 1865 map shows A. Scoville’s land bordered the swampland. The 1897 map shows all that swampland was privately owned farms. When we visited the area we could see the drainage ditches.

How much of its wetlands has Michigan lost? I was shocked to learn that the greatest loss was around Lake Huron and Lake St Clair. Why would I be surprised? Constance Fenimore Woolston’s 1855 story St. Clair Flats tells of a man’s enchanted encounter with the St, Clair marshes only to return five years later to find them destroyed and replaced by a canal.

That’s a lot of wetlands loss.

Annie Proulx wanted to understand and organize the massive amount of information about wetlands and their loss and the impact on climate change. Her essay turned into a book. In brief, wetlands store CO2, and their destruction releases it into the atmosphere. Once lost, wetlands are not easily restores. But across the world, we are endeavoring to reclaim lost wetlands.

The book considers the various forms of wetlands:

fens, fed by rivers and streams, usually deep, peat-forming, and supporting reeds and marsh grass
bogs, shallower water fed by rainfall, peat-forming, and supporting sphagnum mosses
swamps, a peat-making, shallow wetland with trees and shrubs

I was quite charmed by the book. Proulx delves into so many aspects of wetlands. She describes humans who once lived in harmony with the land, before land was privatized and turned into ‘productive’ farmland to increase the owner’s wealth. The English fens once covered 15,500 square miles and now less than 1 percent remains. The abundant life of the fens also disappeared. My mind was set alight reading about the lost Doggerland which connected Britain and Europe, suddenly flooded by seawater from glacial melt at the end of the Ice Age. I dreamed of those people that night. “I wonder if, as the waters rose, metamorphosing proto-England from the doorstep of a vast continent to a small island, some landscape memory of hugeness underlay the country’s later drive for empire,” Proulx muses.

The sphagnum moss of the bogs “holds a third of the earth’s organic carbon,” I learned. When drained, the soil still leaks CO2 for a hundred years. “It can take ten thousand years for a bog to convert to peat but in only a few weeks a human on a peat cutter machine can strip a large area down to the primordial gravel.” In ancient times, humans made offerings to the bogs. Including humans. Bog people have been discovered across the world, preserved by the acidity and low oxygen, telling their gruesome stories of human sacrifice.

In 1849 Congress passed the first Swamp Land laws that allowed states to sell wetlands for draining. The land made first rate farm land. The Great Black Swamp, the Dismal Swamp, the Kankakee, mangrove swamps, the Limberlost–all their stories are told by Proulx.

Proulx describes the beauty of these vanished landscapes.

The fen people of all periods knew the still water, infinite moods of cloud. They lived in reflections and moving reed shadows, poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummeled the land edge in storms.

from Fen, Bog, & Swamp by Annie Proulx
My husband recalled when he worked as a grants officer that Duck Unlimited was a major contributor to wetlands protection as supporting duck hunting. And pages later, Proulx commented on this ironic support. Her descriptions of the multitude and number of species that flourish in wetlands is wondrous. And when we discovered them, what did we do? We brought our guns and hunted for the sake of shooting. As if our only response to being awestruck by the magnificence of the natural world is to destroy it.

And by destroying wetlands, we have increased the CO2 that drives climate change. Some wetlands are being restored as we realize their benefit.

Is it too late to stop or reverse or slow climate change? Can humans alter their concept of using the natural world to respecting it? The rights of nature is an emerging concept, and if we can alter our behavior and laws, perhaps the very worse can be avoided. Maybe.

So, I enjoy my house, inherited from my parents who bought it five years after it was built, a house which sits where once a pond existed, where even fifty years ago garter snakes and toads visited the yard. And realize that my gain and benefit had a huge cost on the local and world environment.

I received a free ARC from Simon & Schuster. My review is fair and unbiased show less

This is a dense, rich, packed-to-the-rafters attic of a novel. Totally engrossing, but with so many story lines, so many sets of characters, so much detail, that I felt rather like I was reading a Russian novel, or perhaps 4 or 5 books at a time. The writing, as always with Annie Proulx, just grabs you and won't let go, but just when I'd start to feel invested in one bunch of characters, she'd leave them behind and move on to another group, any of which could have supported a very fine novel show more all by itself. The central character of this book is a small green, hand-made, two-button accordion, and the focus of Proulx's storytelling is the instrument's long life history as it passes from its maker down the generations through multiple owners, with long periods where it lies forgotten in pawn shops or storage rooms, guarding its very own secret until its final sad days. I can't imagine the research that must have gone into this novel, which takes the reader from late 19th century Sicily to late 20th century Minnesota, from one immigrant culture to another, along the way embracing food, music, occupations, lifestyles, geographies...all of it feeling absolutely authentic. I loved it and want to start from the beginning to experience it all again. show less

It's hard to believe this is a debut novel. Proulx writes with such assurance and mastery that you would think she had been writing for decades. It's not hard to see why this book won the Pen/Faulkner award in 1992.

The Blood family of Vermont has been farming the same small plot of land for generations. They grow a little grain, have an orchard and keep dairy cows. Loyal, the oldest son, is the person who has the knowledge to keep the farm going. But Loyal has to leave the farm after he show more kills his girlfriend by accident. He hides her body under the stone fence that surrounds the property and takes off in 1944, telling his family that he and Billy, the girlfriend, have decided to pursue their fortunes elsewhere. After that the farm declines. Loyal sends postcards home from wherever he is on a sporadic basis. He is the quintessential loner, moving from job to job and place to place. Sometimes he mines, other times he traps but wherever he goes it seems disaster follows him. His siblings, Dub and Mernelle, also have some hard times but they both find love whereas Loyal is unable to have a relationship. He can't be all that bad though because his dog, Little Girl, loves him with all her heart and he loves her.

Proulx's eye for detail is amazing. Her descriptions of rooms are so vivid I could see them. She describes people as clearly too. Here is her description of Loyal at a point when he is out of work again:
The mirror drew his eyes like a tunnel opening into another world. He had not looked in so long, still thought of himself as a young man, strong arms, the black fine hair and hot blue eyes. His face, he saw had gaunted out. The blue mirror frame enclosed his fixed features. The ruddy liveliness, the quick rage of the eyes had faded. here was the skin of the ascetic whose neck is never marred with sucking kisses, the rigid facial planes of someone who spends time alone, untwisted by the squinting disguises of social life. His eyes did not change when women walked past. It could be, he thought, that spark was finally dead. But did not believe it.

I think I am going have to read Proulx's latest novel, Barkskins, to see if she still has her writing chops. show less