Near the eastern end of where Virginia meets North Carolina lies the Great Dismal Swamp. At one time, escaped slaves hid here in small enclaves, using tools left behind hundreds of years earlier by Native Americans, or raiding nearby farms and settlements to survive. Now most of it is a National Wildlife Refuge. I found it because I happened to be in the area, with a day to kill, and looked at a map with the intent of finding somewhere I could hike, outside, unimpeded by pavement or traffic. The entrance I chose may not have been the best for hiking trail selection, but it did offer me access to the pavilion with interesting information about how the swamp had harbored escaped slaves (I feel like there should be a bodies-of-water pun in that sentence, but I can't figure out what it is), and the only driving access to Drummond Lake.
The refuge is marked with a network of perfectly straight ditches of apparently stagnant water. The roads run parallel to these, and it seems sometimes like one serves the other, but I'm not sure which is in either position. Are the roads for the sake of the ditches, or are the ditches there for the sake of the roads? As I drove in, I saw several herons sweeping low above the road, keeping just ahead of me. Later, while walking along one of the ditches, I heard a steady stream of turtles plopping into the water from various logs and other perches. In the drier sections of the preserve, cicada song rose and fell in the trees with a steady rhythm, like a wave in a stadium. Along the ditches and obviously water-logged sections of the refuge, the songs came from frogs that were always somewhere I couldn't see. Once, I heard something that must have been a deer rushing from my view, because nothing else in the area is that large, fast, and loud.
As I neared the lake, I saw something white in the middle of the narrow gravel road, and stopped to get a better look. I never left my car, because I didn't want to scare it away, but I'm not sure I could have bothered this egret too much. He knew it was his place, and I was just visiting, and saw no reason he should cede access of the road to me. I waited patiently, taking far too many pictures of him as he strutted nearer and nearer to my car, until I finally decided to try creeping around him very slowly, and he finally flew off over the swamp.
Lake Drummond is one of only two natural lakes in the state of Virginia. At roughly 9 miles in circumference, it's also the largest of the two, despite averaging 2-3 feet in depth. The water looks black because it's filled with sediment. It drains into the lake from the swamp and bubbles up from the ground. A few times, I thought I saw something flop at the surface of the water, but by the time I was close enough to the splash to see what caused it, the splasher had dropped below the surface and was effectively invisible again.
I've spent a lot of time lately isolated in the city, surrounded by pavement and high buildings. It felt good to spend a day in the swamp, in sweltering heat, even if the trails were arrow-straight and bordered, or were perhaps bordered by, ditches of black water. The trails I found weren't that interesting, but the environment was. It was definitely more great than dismal.
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