Swamp Walk

We stroll across the low bridge crossing camp's swampy wetlands. The water shimmers even though the air is still. We bend closer. Below the surface, we see a flash. Then another. Our footsteps on the wooden planks set of a flurry of motion. Tiny, bubbly, black bodies scatter and scurry in a crazy matrix of seemingly choreographed movement. "Polliwogs!" I cry.

Eliot gets down on his belly and hangs his head uncomfortably close to the fetid water. Murky leaves and moss-furred sticks carpet the bottom, just inches below the surface. First, we see dozens of the tiny critters. Then hundreds. Then thousands. They shoot forward, freeze, shoot again, all seeming to know how to avoid their neighbors, how to scoot under and over the rocky mud.

"There's one!" Eliot says, inhaling sharply. "There's another one!" He points, almost touching the water. Its surface dances with their movement. "Is it ice, Mommy?" he asks. He has walked over this boardwalk through two seasons, and now a third. He has crossed its crust of snow, and has soaked his feet up to his ankles when the brige was submerged under the rushing flow of wintery runoff. And now it dips into a muddy morass teeming with life.

"No, it's not ice, honey," I tell him. "It's algae." I think. The surface of the water appears oily, greenish. And it stinks. As we sit still looking over the side, the black, tic-shaped critters with the wiggling tails poke up to the surface, grab bits of green dust, and scoot away.

"Look mommy!" Eliot shouts. "A mosquito!" Sure enough, a mosquito, in the company of a few other thin-legged insects, dart across the surface of the water. Still too big a mouthful for the teensy polliwogs. I tell Eliot those little black critters will be froggies someday soon. And they will eat all these mosquitos.

As we head back up to dry land, I see a welt already swelling on Eliot's temple, and I scratch two on my ankle. Eliot asks, "What you scratching, Mommy?" He is not even aware of his own itching bump. "A mosquito bite, honey," I tell him. As we plod on past the stable and the new farm, we say, "Hurry up, froggies! Grow up, froggies! Eat these mosquitos!"