Everybody knows that swamps are dank, dreary, decay-filled places smothered in fog. Skeletal, dead trees drag their fingers across the moon and monsters slink about through the mud, rising up to eat lost adventurers. A swamp is a step down from a graveyard, suitable only for horror stories.
This is what we are taught by pop culture. It brings to my mind a childhood memory, when I visited my grandparents on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Even as a child, I could find nothing pretty in the suburban sprawl, strip malls, and refineries of the Galveston area. But when we drove along the coast, there was this unbroken vista of coastal wetland grasses, a beautiful change of scenery. “They should fill that in” said my grandfather. “All it does is breed mosquitoes.”
And there lies the roots of our collective dislike of wetlands. Wetland is a no-man’s land. We can’t plunk a subdivision or strip mall or golf course or a road on it without first hauling in tons of dirt. Build a castle on it, and the castle will catch fire, fall over, and sink.
Some time ago I was asked to build one of those nasty pop-culture horror swamps. My instructions: make it creepy, rotting, foggy, and full of dead trees. (Why dead trees? Did the monsters kill them?) It was my job, so I built it, but ever since I’ve wanted to make a proper wetland to make up for it. A proper, beautiful, wetland.
Fast forward to Phiarlan. It needed work. The original Phiarlan was made of nice pieces, but the whole of it wasn’t laid out well. Visually, it was easy to become lost, and then right in the middle was this stagnant mud puddle, like a big pile of glue that you had to run through.
There was some push from the team to pave over that annoying swamp to make room for the carnival, but argh! I just couldn’t perpetuate the swamp-is-bad mentality any more.
My own real-life backyard, which we willingly purchased, is a verdant, lovely swamp. My town, along with two others, it the official headwaters of the Charles. We may soon be requiring that local business install artificial wetlands in order to clean the water and slow it down – to prevent flooding - before it gets to the river. Wetlands are actually so useful that we’ll be building more of them! That has me jazzed. Wetlands are wonderful.
I hope the Red Fens and the newly revised Phiarlan has given you a new appreciation for wetlands. Enjoy!