Battle Creek Cypress Swamp

Author's Comments

The water here is the color of strong tea, almost black where the cypress roots cluster and break the surface, and on a still morning it mirrors the trees so completely that the boardwalk feels like it is floating between two versions of the same forest. Battle Creek is small. The loop is less than half a mile, and you can walk it in fifteen minutes if you are the kind of person who walks places to get them done. I am not that kind of person here. What the swamp does best is atmosphere. The cypress are old, genuinely old, and they lean and buttress in ways that younger trees do not. Resurrection fern mats the upper branches in green clumps that look almost deliberate. In summer the canopy closes over and the light turns diffuse and underwater. In early fall the needles go rust and begin to drop, and the reflections take on a warmer cast that I have not seen anywhere else in Maryland. Spring brings mist that sits on the black water until the sun climbs high enough to burn it off, usually around nine. Come early. Come on a weekday if you can. The boardwalk creaks under almost no one at seven in the morning, and the quiet is the kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own breathing. Bring a tripod if you have one. The light is low, the compositions want slow shutters, and the reflections only hold when the air is completely still. This is not a place that makes dramatic photographs easily. It makes quiet ones, and you have to be willing to slow down enough to see them.

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