Congaree

Because my mum asked about it, here's Congaree National Park/ Congaree Swamp.

According to the photo folder name, I went to Congaree on May 5th. It's near Columbia, South Carolina, a bit in the middle of nowhere because it is a big damn swamp, but not too far from the airport that you can't hear airplanes flying over. It's a little strange to be walking along in the dead quiet and then hear an airplane.

Although the National Park Service website claims that there are sometimes seen black bears and river otters, I saw neither. I would love to have seen an otter, and I would love to have a picture of a free-range black bear, but I fear that I would have been too petrified with fear to actually take said picture. The only animals I saw were a few squirrels, two snakes, and some small birds. I also heard lots of woodpeckers; that was the predominant sound while I was there. Woodpeckers, as I have observed in the front yard, are a lot bigger than I thought. I was misled by Woody Woodpecker.

The park is on a floodplain of the Congaree River, so it floods quite often, like several times a year. It wasn't flooded when I was there, or else I would have been quite annoyed. There's a nice elevated boardwalk right when you leave the Visitors Center, and then after a while it becomes a regular boardwalk, and then it veers off onto a trail, which after a bit leads to another trail, and so on. I walked the shortest trail, the Weston Lake Loop, which is 4.6 miles. That trail didn't go all the way to the Congaree River, but it went to Cedar Creek and Weston Lake.

It was quiet and peaceful almost the whole time. Since the park is so big, you're not running into other people left and right. Most of the time it was just the sound of the woodpeckers and me crashing about. I feel I'm pretty good on the whole "take only pictures, leave only footprints" deal. And I'm okay with a little bit of nature getting on me. Mostly this takes the form of insects flying into me and/or sucking my blood. Mosquitos love me. Outside the Visitors Center there was a Mosquito Meter. The day I was there the mosquitos were apparently only "moderate." The meter went up to War Zone. Unfortunately, the battery on my camera ran out before I could take a picture of it.

Now, the bad thing about being in a foresty area is that it may look very cool whilst you're there, but that often doesn't translate well into photographs. Most of my pictures basically look like...a bunch of trees. But these trees were in water! Many of the trees are cypress and tupelo, although I would not know these trees if I met them on the street.

Des arbres dans l'eau.

The park reminded me first of the fireswamp in "The Princess Bride"--I kept a sharp lookout for ROUSs--and then later of Jurassic Park. There were palmettos toward the end, but not at the beginning, so that's probably why. There were indeed a few moments when I thought that if I somehow got myself lost (which wouldn't really surprise me) I would be screwed, because there was no cell phone service, and how would the rangers know where I was? Of course, this did not come to pass, but I did think about it.

That, to me, was the most impressive thing about Congaree. It is an area of woodland that remains standing. It shows a glimpse of what this part of the Southeast looked like when the colonists arrived, and what the American Indians were slogging about in. Or possibly they were avoiding living in an area that flooded multiple times a year and was full of mosquitos in the summer. Anyhow, I imagined what it would be like for settlers moving west from Charleston and other coastal areas, coming upon this vast tract of land with no conveniently marked paths to follow. I wonder how many people got lost and died in the swamp. If coming to the New World had been left to me, I might have stayed in Europe, because that was a long, hard voyage, and I hate puking. But if I did make it, I would have been tempted to park it right on the East Coast. Because I can imagine staring into the woods at night and hearing strange noises and being frightened. Which is not so far from what happens on occasion even now. So well done and thank you, aboriginal and colonial Americans, for going across the ocean and through the swamps and over the mountains.

In conclusion, I looked it up, and "Congaree" does not mean a thing that anyone knows of thus far.