Cedar Swamp
2012
We went down to the Cedar Swamp to do yoga one warm spring day in April a few years ago. We were feeling the thaw, life coming back to our limbs after the cold.
The Cedar swamp is at the bottom of a mile-wide bowl carved out of the dunes. To get there you follow a path down the side of the bowl through pitch pines that get taller as the descent gets deeper. Underfoot is the white sand of the dunes packed hard by 40 years of seasonal foot traffic. Here and there as the descent gets steeper logs steps have been dug into the hill. The steps are placed too wide apart, and require an awkward pacing. They have all been circumvented by alternative pathways.
Once in my childhood I came down here on a tour with a Park Ranger, who gave us a blow-by-blow description of the changing ecology from the top of the dune to the swamp. At one point he stopped and pointed out the strange matter of the height of the trees. As he pointed to the roof of the forest he explained that the salt blowing off the ocean stunted the trees and that further down the trees, protected by the bowl, grew higher. High up on the tallest pines, all branches point west, away from the ocean. Here and there on the path are posts with simple line drawings of the local vegetation, some of which lie on the ground now. The ranger stopped at all of these and talked about each plant on a post explaining how one plant depended on another for its beginnings and how one’s end was often the natural beginning of another. The ecology around here is changing, he explained how: from heath, to scrub and pitch pines, from pines to scrub oak and taller oak, from thence to mixed deciduous hardwood forests. I’ve been watching it happen all my life.
We were three going down to the swamp to do yoga, my son, his girlfriend and myself. My daughter-in-love is willowy, and, at the time, blond. Getting the hair the right color was a three day adventure. It looked a little Soho in the Eighties punk. My son’s hair was recovering from a radical bob, it had just finally got down below his ears. Erstwhile, he had hair down past his shoulders, dark and thick and curling around his neck like a Romantic poet. They were, both of them, in that moment of time when nothing is more important than to seem nothing like anyone else.
The swamp is always dark and wet. It’s inhabited by tall dense evergreens growing out of shallow water. It’s a place for the out-of-the-ordinary, fairies maybe, or, at least, exotic birds. The trees have faces and worlds exist in the shallow pools of water that reflect the red and green of the cedars all clothed in moss. Back in the 60’s when everyone was excited by the new National Seashore, The Park built a boardwalk wending a way through the swamp in a circular path of about a mile. In places the boardwalk is still wooden, but it’s slowly being replaced by a recycled plastic. Merissa and I found a spot where the boardwalk widened to accommodate, perhaps, a Ranger guide with a handful of tourists. Jefferson wandered off on his own.
Today is dark and wet, early in April. Here on the Cape, we are still waiting for a day warm enough to do yoga in the Cedar Swamp. Merissa and Jefferson are out in Oregon; dark, wet, everywhere smothered by moss. They are settling in there, making friends, cultivating connections, exploring the otherworldly landscape.