Forgive me for the length of this, but here is a similar story of wading around, but in my case it was in bog in Northern Michigan. This was in 2014.
I had been invited to join a very select group of naturalists who were given permission to enter a rare bog preserve at the very top of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in order to take a survey of wildlife there. Bogs are very fragile environments and even walking on them is destructive. But this conservation society allowed special teams to enter these closed reserves once or twice a year and I was to be the team’s herpetologist. I had been trained in reptiles and amphibians, specializing in amphibians, in particular salamanders (Ambistomids), and so I knew all about them and every other Michigan amphibian and reptile. I was geeked to go.
I could not wait to get to Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula and out on those endangered bogs with my camera. The trip was to last a number of days, and I was up before dawn of that first day and in my car heading north. It must have been around 4:30AM when I hit the road, which is like me.
The only hiccup was the fact that I had just had some fairly protracted oral surgery (several days of root canal work), and the tooth in question had developed a really nasty abscess beneath it. I was already on my second dose of antibiotics, this time really heavy antibiotics, the first round having not even touched the problem, but I was not about to be stopped by a wayward tooth.
Although I was in some pain and my lower jaw was swollen, I assumed that as time passed and the new antibiotics kicked in, the swelling would just naturally go down. Anyway, hell or high water would not have kept me off those bogs, so on I went. I had been studying bogs for quite some time, and these were massive.
My first stop was at a small bog at the top of the Lower Peninsula, just before you get to the great Mackinac Bridge over to the Upper Peninsula. I was out on the bog in the full morning sun by 8 A.M., already hours from my home. It was a magnificent crisp morning. Yet I was still having trouble with that dumb tooth, a certain amount of throbbing punctuated by needle-like shots of pain in my jaw. I did my best to ignore it and again told myself that it would die down.
There I was in my hip boots, far out on the surface of the bog, surrounded by sphagnum moss and small bushes, and carefully stepping my way along in the deep ooze. Each step made a suction sound as I lifted a leg and then placed it back in the thick matrix of the bog. Moving was very slow. I was maybe halfway around the periphery of the small lake-bog when I first saw them, a pair of large Sandhill Cranes picking their way through the bog on the opposite side. I was thrilled to see them, of course; these huge birds are incredible.
As I threaded my way along, I must have somehow begun to encroach on the area where they perhaps had their nest, for they became increasingly animated. Now these are large birds. They can stand five feet high and have wingspans of six to seven feet across. And their piercing red eyes were on me, and they were not just casual looks. Then slowly I realized these birds were moving in circles around me.
Many of the bushes on the bog were several feet high, so I could not always see the cranes, but I could hear their frightening calls. I didn’t say ‘frightened’ calls; I said frightening calls, which they were – eerie. And then the cranes began running through the bushes, circling me closer, working together, and they moved fast. Much of the time all I could see through gaps in the bushes was a sideways profile of one of their heads as they circled me. I could see one bird as it ran through the bushes on my right, and then suddenly on my left, there was another bird circling in the opposite direction. I was constantly off balance, and I had to watch my every step lest I step into muck so deep that I would begin to sink down in it, which happens. Bogs are mostly a mat that you can fall through, so there was that. I was carrying over $12,000 worth of camera equipment, not to mention my life. Bogs, like quicksand, can be treacherous places.
One of the birds would rise in the air and cut directly across my path (only a few feet in front of me) only to disappear into the bushes and take up running around me again. And the cries were now getting really scary. At some point I began to feel like I was being stalked, and visions of the movie Jurassic Park and velociraptors came to mind. These were very large birds, and they didn’t like ME. It is easy for me to see how birds were once reptile-like creatures.
Well, that is as far as it went. I finally managed to plot a course through the bog that apparently took me on a route away from their nesting area, while all the time I was moving one gooey step at a time very slowly through the muck, carrying a large tripod, geared head, camera, and accessory bag. Every step was a balancing act. I finally got out of there, found my way back to the car, and drove to the nearest town.
By this time, it was beginning to be clear that my tooth was not going to just calm down, but instead was only getting worse. I had super strength-Ibuprofen and even some Vicodin that the dentist had given me, so I had to dip into those a bit. And this was just the first morning of the first day of a five day journey. I had to decide what I would do.
I went to visit some friends who lived in a nearby city to where I was. I was now safe in a nice home in a town only a few hours from my home. But I had the strange experience of feeling that I was somehow embedded in a scene at which I was no longer fully present. Part of me was elsewhere. It was probably the Vicodin, and it was like a dream or a movie set in which I was only an actor. In other words, I was beside myself. It must be the medicine.
At the same time, I was kind of leaning out of it, like you might lean out the back door to get a breath of fresh air. Something had stirred or moved inside of me that day and I was damned if I could figure out what it was. Somewhere back in there I had lost my incentive or my direction. Perhaps these combined events with the birds, my tooth, etc., schooling (like fish school), now appeared as signs that all pointed that something within me had changed (or was changing) at the core.
Yet by tomorrow I was supposed to be across the Mackinac Bridge and way at the tip of the top of the Upper Peninsula, hours from where I was now, and out on those remote bogs, miles from any town (much less a hospital), and the temperatures up there were predicted to be very cold, even for a spring day. After all, way up there it was still hardly spring. Hmmmm. What's the message here?
In the end, the throbbing of my tooth and those little sharp spasms of shooting pain told me that slogging through a bog for a few days, miles from anywhere, might not be the time to try and push this 67-year-old physical envelope. As it turned out, that was the right decision because the second round of antibiotics with its very large dose also failed to do the trick. My abscess overcame all attempts to control it and spread much farther into the bone of my lower jaw. In the end, the tooth had to be extracted and the jaw treated. And I only tell this longish story because this became a real turning point for me. I will try to explain.
Like so many times in my past, I had once again managed to confuse the inside with the outside, the important with the unessential. What had been going on over the last year was that I was now using the outside (nature photography) to look at the inside (my mind) AND I had fallen into the mistake of confusing the two, which is easy to do.
Since it was through photographing nature up-close very exactly that I was realizing something about the nature of the mind, through ‘Insight Meditation’, I began to elevate photographing nature as the goal or object of my passion, when it was only the means through which I was experiencing a glimpse at my mind’s nature, which is my real passion. I hope that makes sense.
Yet here I was, trying to upscale my nature trips when all they were to me in the end were the lens or means through which I was viewing the mind itself. It was the seeing the nature of the mind that was illuminating. And here I was, buying more equipment, planning longer and more extensive trips, and ordering every kind of field guide I did not already have, and I have a whole room full of them. Well, this all changed, and that early morning faceoff with the Sandhill Cranes was perhaps the turning or pivot point. That experience was thrilling and not really that scary, so I was not scared off by what happened there. But something else did snap around that time and I woke up from that particular dream. It seems that in this life, I wake up from dream within dream from within dream.
Here are a few snapshots I took of the cranes while I mucked through the blog, one step at a time. It will give you some idea of how it was with me.
