A Visit to Dark Swamp

The edge of Dark Swamp.

 Out east on the Putnam Pike in Glocester, Rhode Island, on the border with Connecticut, there is a neglected patch of wild land with an eerie reputation: Dark Swamp. In November 1923, H.P. Lovecraft and fellow horror writer Clifford Martin Eddy Jr. attempted to travel to the swamp to investigate local legends of supernatural occurrences and nameless creatures. Although the authors never managed to find their way into the swamp itself, the lore and the atmosphere of the area may have helped inspire stories like The Dunwich Horror and The Colour Out of Space, and Lovecraft's letter about his trip to the vicinity of Dark Swamp is the main conduit through which knowledge of the legends of the swamp has survived to the present.   

Dark Swamp is located near the western edge of Glocester, RI, between Reynolds Rd and Willie Woodhead Rd, on state forest land associated with the Durfee Hill Management Area. I visited in December last year, starting on foot from the small parking area at the end of the paved northern section of Willie Woodhead Rd, and seeing the sights of the swamp from the maze of footpaths and wood roads west of W.W. Rd, with some bushwacking into interesting-looking locales. Logging and hunting takes place in the state forest, and a sign suggested that wearing blaze-orange is required for entry during hunting season. 

The inexplicably named, semi-impassible unpaved middle section of Willie Woodhead Rd, east of Dark Swamp. 

 The rough, hilly landscape in and around Dark Swamp is pretty typical of southeastern New England. The bedrock is the hard, pale granite of Avalonia, an ancient island arc pasted onto parts of coastal North America during the formation of Pangea. The soil is thin and acidic and mostly made of rocks. The uplands support a stunted, scraggly forest of White Pine, Pitch Pine and a half a dozen different oak species, with an understory of various blueberries, huckleberries and shadbushes, with mountain laurel and impenetrable tangles of catbrier here and there. This vegetation type is known as Oak-Heath Forest, and is found on poor, well-drained soils in the eastern US, mostly not too far from the sea. Low-lying areas are dominated by Eastern Hemlock and Red Maple, with an understory of highbush blueberries and Sweet Pepperbush. Lovecraft found the landscape of the rural Glocester hills, woods and isolated farmsteads to be uncommonly beautiful, and it still is lovely, but good lord imagine trying to make a living from agriculture on soil like that, in an era before powered equipment and chemical fertilizers.     

Grave of the infant Eliza Ann Bowen.

Cellar hole just east of Dark Swamp.

 Dark Swamp was not quite as shunned by humanity as Lovecraft suggests, and there are remains of 19th Century inhabitation on the eastern margins of the swamp. A small but still regularly maintained cemetery has graves from the Bowen family from the mid eighteen-hundreds. A little further south there is an early fieldstone cellar hole from a farmhouse, including the base of a massive central chimney, with surrounding stone walls and the remains of outbuildings. The buildings were electrified at some point in the 20th Century, and probably would have been standing and occupied in the 1920s for Lovecraft's visit, if he had managed to reach the area. 

A deep dug well next to the farmhouse ruins.

Flash photo down the well. 

Next to the cellar hole there is a deep dug well, lined with stone and with a pool of clear water at the bottom, maybe 20 feet down. It was strongly reminiscent of my image of the contaminated well in Colour Out of Space, but of course every lonely farmhouse in New England in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries would have had something similar. This particular example was quite well-preserved and deep; they are often shallow and collapsed or choked with debris when you run across them in the woods. 

Large cairn near Dark Swamp. 

Group of big cairns in a hollow between low ridges. 

One of the peculiar features of the Dark Swamp area is the unusual prevalence of cairns, or lithic sites. There was a striking group of about 20 large cairns, some almost as tall as me and 12-15 feet across, deeper in the forest in the vicinity of the farmhouse ruins, scattered around the floor and sides of a small hollow. These sorts of things could be prehistoric ceremonial grounds from Native Americans, or the product of the land-clearing efforts of settlers, or something else, but the large number and size of dry fieldstone structures at this spot was odd.   

Barren field of sand near Dark Swamp. 

 Another peculiarity of Dark Swamp is a rounded patch of barren sand, about an acre in size and easily visible in satellite photos of the swamp, with almost no living vegetation within its perimeter. This will immediately bring to mind the "Blasted Heath" in Colour Out of Space, though Lovecraft did not mention having heard of this particular sand field, if indeed the site existed in its blasted state in the 1920s. Could this be a place where blasphenous sacrifices to the Old Ones have been performed on May Eve, and the veil between worlds is worn thin, and malign influences from beyond the stars seep into our sphere, such as naught that is of our world may long endure? Or, might it be that, since time immemorial, drunken Swamp Yankees have gathered at an old sand pit, on May Eve, to drive their ATVs around in circles, thus killing anything that starts to grow in an already challenging micro-environment for the establishment of vegetation? One shudders at the mere contemplation of the possibilities.  

Dense stand of Atlantic White Cedar in Dark Swamp. Now that, my friends, is a dark swamp. 

 Much of the actual Dark Swamp is not dark at all, at least not now. There is a whole complex of wetlands that make up what I suppose is the Swamp, with watery low areas separated by hillocks and eskers of glacial outwash sand and gravel; most of these wetlands are sunny and open, with cattails and sedges around shallow pools. There are a lot of dead trees, sun-bleached and bark-less, both fallen and standing, in the open marshy areas, though, and it is clear that 100 years ago the majority of the swamp was shaded by thick growths of pine, hemlock and Red Maple. Likely what has happened is that beavers returned in the mid-twentieth century--after having been hunted to local near-extinction in colonial times--building dams and raising water levels in parts of Dark Swamp, either drowning or straight-up eating the trees that had made the swamp dark. There are still some suitably dismal corners of the Swamp with dense tree cover, though, including a cedar swamp with some real old-growth looking specimens of Atlantic White Cedar and a deep spongy bed of sphagnum moss, which hint at how this half-forgotten corner of Rhode Island earned its name. 

40th Annual Connecticut Cactus Show

The Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society's show and sale is happening this weekend, at the Bristol Community Center. The weather was pretty sketchy Saturday morning, with wet snow overnight and some accidents on the highways, and cold rain during the day. That may have depressed turnout a bit, but there were still plenty of enthusiastic visitors. YouTube plant vlogger Summer Raine Oakes stopped by to document the show and interview some cactus club members, so there should be a nice mini-documentary about the event on her channel soon.

 

Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS

Comet C/2023 A3 (cafuego. Wikimedia Commons)

 Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS has been visible in the evening for me for the past week or so. It's in the west for an hour or so after it gets dark. It's visible to the naked eye as a faint white streak, but much easier to see and and a more interesting sight with binoculars. The comet is getting less problematic to catch in some ways: it's further from the sun and higher in the sky, and the moon is rising later and waning, so the sky is darker for comet-viewing. But, the comet is definitely starting to fade and get smaller, at the same time. At it's best it was quite a nice comet, but still not nearly as bright and obvious as Hale-Bopp in 1997. 

Update: as of October 26, I can still find the comet with binoculars, but it's getting small and dim. I can't see it at all without binoculars, even knowing exactly where to look.

It's been a big month for astronomical happenings in New England, with the aurora borealis also making a rare appearance on a couple of nights. I caught them as kind of a diffuse pink glow in the sky. You can apparently see more structure with a camera with a good long-exposure astrophotograpy mode.

 

 

Eclipse Solargraph

Mansfield, Connecticut, looking to the south, April 8 to June 20, 2024.

 My solargraph of the 2024 eclipse, plus the next two and a half months through the summer solstice, turned out pretty well, but I'm not sure if I can really make out any eclipse dimming. Theoretically, the lowest sun track in the sky includes the April 8 partial eclipse, but it kind of blurs into the sunny days in subsequent, higher tracks. Plus, the sun is off the top of the picture in the early afternoon, when the eclipse probably was starting, because the camera wasn't pointed upwards enough. 

In the solargraph, permanent, stationary objects in the landscape, like trees, are visible in the lower part of the image, while the sun's paths in the sky over the course of the exposure are the arcs in the upper part. Sunny days show up as bright arcs, while cloudy periods (or eclipses?) leave dark bands. 

The solargraph was made in a soda-can camera obscura with a pinhole to project an image onto a sheet of black and white photographic paper. The actual physical photograph is an upside-down and backwards, pinkish-sepia negative image, burned into the emulsion on the paper. I used a flat bed scanner to digitize the negative, then inverted the colors and flipped the image to get the bluish positive image above. Solargraphic originals apparently can't be developed in the usual chemical way, because the emulsion has been exposed to enough light that it would just turn solid black. There are practical instructions online if you want to try solargraphy yourself. 

Scan of the original negative image.

Midsummer Conophytum Flowers

Conophytum pageae from southwestern Bushmanland. Nocturnal summer flowers photographed with a flash.

 Plants in the genus Conophytum are all primarily cool-season growers, and most species flower at the start of major vegetative activity in autumn. A few conos bloom at the summer solstice, though: Conophytum frutescens, C. francoiseae, C. minusculum ssp. aestiflorens, C. bolusiae, and certain forms of C. pageae are all flowering for me right now. 

Conophytum pageae has the widest geographic range of any Conophytum species, from the outskirts of the Knersvlakte in southern Namaqualand, all the way north into Namibia. There is a lot of variation in the plants over that range, and many species were separated out from C. pageae in the past. One of the more distinctive former species now considered C. pageae synonyms--Conophytum subrisum--is represented by the photo above. This particular batch of seedlings, from the southeastern part of the range of C. pageae, is a more or less classic "subrisum," with fairly large, greenish-yellow obconical leaves, with red lipstick-like markings late in the growing season, and flowers that are yellow, big and showy. Subrisum flowers also tend to happen very early, before the growing season otherwise starts and even in midsummer, as with these plants. 

There is a definitely an argument to be made in favor of maintaining C. subrisum as a separate species; the trouble is all of the variation and combinations of traits seen in wild populations of C. pageae in the broad, modern sense of Steve Hammer's revisions of the genus. So, there are southern plants that are C. subrisum in every way, except that they flower at the end of autumn, five months later than the population pictured here. Or, there are are plants with good subrisum flowers and leaf coloration, but with small, round plant bodies the size of peas. There are populations with plants that are vegetatively subrisum, but with puny pale-tan flowers reminiscent of the former Conophytum minutiflorum, another C. pageaae synonym. I really don't know what the best taxonomic solution would be in this case; in the balance between trying to name all of the variation seen in nature, and acknowledging that the boundaries between different forms are murky and shifting, maybe the best solution is to sink everything into one wide-ranging and problematically variable species, Conophytum pageae.