tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post2603581256040070417..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Air Force One Fortune Cookie, over The Great Dismal Swamp / Preparing for the floodUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-6894179868783228052017-02-07T21:30:00.955-08:002017-02-07T21:30:00.955-08:00Hilton, It's been raining so much for so long ...<br />Hilton, It's been raining so much for so long I'm half convinced that The Great Dismal Swamp is actually located right here. But the lesson of the dejected bard suggests that merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time isn't always good enough to induce an overwhelming state of nescience.<br />__<br /><br />Frost’s attempt at self-destruction resulted from unrequited love. The twenty-year-old feared that his sweetheart, Elinor White, was drifting from his affection while she was away at college. In an attempt to secure White for himself alone, Frost made the overnight journey from his home in Massachusetts to her college in New York, carrying a book of his verse that he had created for her, and bearing the good news that finally one of his poems, “My Butterfly,” would be published.<br /><br />Much to Frost’s chagrin, White refused to see him.<br /><br />Frost was heartbroken and wanted some way to get back at White. What better way to show White the pain she had caused him than to disappear, never to be seen or heard from again?<br /><br />The water is stained a deep, chocolate brown. The edge of the ditch is mostly a tangle of vines such as wild grape. There are mosquitoes the size of shoeboxes. At a dam on the Feeder Ditch, we saw where some predator had made quick work of some large bird of prey. Ten minutes into the paddle, my friend spooked a black bear out of a tree. The day before someone nearby had been bitten by a venomous canebrake rattlesnake.<br /><br />Shortly after White rebuffed the young Frost, he left his Massachusetts home and the following morning disembarked from the Merchants and Mariners Line in Norfolk. Frost’s inquiries to locals as to the direction of the swamp must have made a peculiar sight. He was not a hunter or logger, and dressed in ordinary clothes as he was, not in a condition to tackle the terrain. But Frost was determined, though, and he walked the eight miles from Norfolk to the village of Deep Creek (now in Chesapeake).<br /><br />Night had already fallen, but still Frost pressed on. The path he walked was a dirt road that ran parallel to one of the swamp’s many canals used by workmen to float logs out of the impenetrable interior. For all the potential dangers that awaited him in the swamp, though, Frost encountered relatively few. In some places, the road was covered with water and he had to negotiate planks of wood that served to span these washouts. At one point, the satchel he carried became too heavy and he jettisoned some clothes and books.<br /><br />About ten miles after he entered the swamp, Frost came to one of the canal's locks and in it, a boat en route to Elizabeth City to take a group of duck hunters to the Outer Banks. By that point, hungry and tired (having walked nearly twenty miles), Frost paid the crew a dollar to take him aboard and out of the swamp. He stayed on the boat, sleeping mostly, all the way to Nags Head. Upon his return to Elizabeth City, Frost made a series of connections (including a short stint as a boxcar hobo), that eventually landed him back in Massachusetts, ending his macabre visit to the Great Dismal Swamp where his plans to end his life didn’t pan out.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-78981403826237562792017-02-07T10:53:58.959-08:002017-02-07T10:53:58.959-08:00I'm working on a piece about The Great Dismal ...I'm working on a piece about The Great Dismal Swamp and Robert Frost. In 1894 Robert Frost tried to kill himself after he thought his fiancee had rejected him by walking into The Great Dismal Swamp and hoping to get lost and swallowed by the swamp or eaten by a wild animal. He was a failure and instead came across some duck hunters who took him back (and then he was afraid the drunken duck hunters might end up killing him!). The GDS was also a place where escaped slaves hid out and made their own secret community. And of course Native Americans knew it well.Hiltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04497545378045907642noreply@blogger.com