By Janice Daugharty

 

I’ve just been diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder called Lupus. Try coming up with something positive about a disease called “Lupus.” Sounds kind of loopy to me. So, I’m making the best of it by thinking finally I have something in common with one of the South’s most famous authors, Flannery O’Connor. I’m trying to think positive.

But here’s the catch: either good or bad stress can bring on what’s called a flare-up. Your joints swell and throb, your kidneys and other organs come under attack, healthy cells and tissue are fired on like the confusion of enemy troops in Iraq. (Watch it, Janice, that’s a stressor.)

So, to get my mind off this war going on inside my body, I started reading THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy. Midway through, our water pipes started sputtering and gurgling to signal that our well was going dry. Again. At the same time, the Okefenokee Swamp, 30 miles southeast of our homeplace began belching smoke. Most days the air is no longer air but thick, festering yellow and gray smog, just like the apocalyptic smog in THE ROAD.  

And get this! About the same time, my NY agent’s office flooded, drowning her computer with my latest novel gestating in its womb.

Am I stressed? You bet!

So, what I’m doing now is focusing on the quaint names of these fires, and the fact that the old “Okefenoak,” as we call it, needed burning. There’s the Knee-knocker Fire, the Sweat Farm Road Fire, the Turnabout, and the Bugaboo Fires.  All coming together, if we don’t soon get rain, in one violent whoosh, an F5 tornado of flames that will lay waste to thousands of acres of forest—pine, blackgum, cypress and bay—in and around the largest swamp in all of North America.

It’s hard to believe right now, with smoke clamping down and smothering us for miles, that fire is beneficial to this half-million-acre, bowl-shaped depression composed of cypress swamps; prairies of grasses, sedges, ferns and rushes; floating islands of loamy peat moss and “houses and hammocks,” a term the locals handed down for clusters of trees and underbrush scattered throughout the Okefenokee. If not for periodic wildfires razing the Swamp, vegetation would choke out the channels of clear, tannin-stained water feeding the 70 named lakes, from the headwaters of two rivers: the St. Mary’s River, draining into the Atlantic Ocean, and the Suwannee River, draining into the Gulf of Mexico.

The most legendary of these lakes is Billy’s Lake, surrounding Billy’s Island, named after the bold Creek Indian, Billy Bow-legs, last Chief of the Okefenokee, or land of the trembling earth. Dating back to 2500 BC, Native Americans, those namers of things, inhabited this watery wilderness with its floating peat rafts and alligators. After the last Indian battle with the white man in these parts, the Seminoles and Creeks took refuge in the Swamp before being driven across the state line into Florida.

In 1937, the Okefenokee became a National Wildlife Refuge, managed and controlled by the Fish and Wildlife Service. They built a dam to raise the water level, trying to do away with the purging, enriching wildfires. Over the centuries, man has tried to log out all the timber, claim capture and tame the Swamp; they even tried to taint its purity by mining for cheap, common titanium. They’ve tried to poison the old Okefenoak with pesticides and herbicides and gator-farm it into a tourist attraction.

But so far this vast swamp has proved mightier than man. Only fire can control, if not conquer it. The Okefenokee Swamp, it’s been said, is a balancing act of plant, water and animal life. Fire, then, is the balancer.

I just hope this line of thinking falls somewhere between good and bad stress.