Greetings from Big Swamp

July 15, 2004

Dear Julie,

These are steam-heated days when people here in Southeast Missouri remember where we came from -- the swamp. Sweat drips from pores we didn't know about.

Our lives have become so air-conditioned, sweat is a shock. But we are swamp creatures.

At the beginning of the 20th century, mosquito-hating entrepreneurs drained Dark Cypress, aka the Big Swamp. The swamp once covered half a million acres south and west of Cape Girardeau. The project, the largest of its kind ever attempted at the time, took 17 years.

The Atchafalaya Swamp near New Orleans is about the same size Big Swamp was. As you enter the Atchafalaya on the highway, the very air seems more dense and vibrates with the chorus of billions and billions of insects singing their song of the Earth.

My favorite song of the Earth is our beagle Alvie's baying. When Alvie bays, it tells me he loves being alive. It is his way of saying, "I am."

This heat leads DC, my favorite prophet of doom, to look for harbingers of the ruin global warming is bringing us. The deformed frogs scare her. A movie on TV in which African huts spontaneously burst into flames scared her.

DC loves disaster movies, but most frightening of all to her is that some people -- including her government -- act as if the scientific proof of global warming is a Chicken Little fantasy.

There are many different scenarios for global warming to play out. None of them sound like the people on Earth then will be living happily ever after, all because not enough of us who are living now are saying, "I am."

By the year 2100, temperatures in Missouri could increase by 2 degrees in the summer and 3 degrees in other seasons, even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claims. A warmer climate will produce more evaporation and more precipitation. In Missouri, 15 percent increases in precipitation are predicted for fall and spring, and 20 to 60 percent increases in the summer.

It looks like Big Swamp might reclaim us.

DC claims the leaves on our red bud tree are shriveling up. She reminds me to wear sunglasses so I don't get cataracts.

I don't know the other signs to look for. I do know animals are starting to run amok.

DC put her two finches, two parakeets and two lovebirds on the front porch this summer so they can taste the outside world before all of us go up in flames. When I peeked at the birds this morning, they were not alone. Deft as thieves, two squirrels had sliced holes in window screens and were scrambling around the porch in search of bird seed. Once I walked through the door, candles and pottery placed on the ledge clattered to the floor as the squirrels tried to locate their escape hatches.

One of them flung itself over and over at screens that weren't cut open. A squirrel guilty of wishful thinking. When it finally found a hole, I placed a 10-pound statue in front, hoping the Buddha might have a chance of keeping the squirrels out.

"The Buddhas do but tell the way," he said more than 2,500 years ago. "It is for you to swelter at the task."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor for the Southeast Missourian