Member-only story
The quality of the light touches something deep inside; powdery blue-gray coming from above, sides, and reflected below. The bottomlands, all 80,000 contiguous acres of them, carry a palette of gray brown in fantastically shaped wooden arms erupting like fireworks toward the sky.
As the fog burns off, things clear and shimmer, vivid palmettos, sparkling backswamp water, and stately tree trunks as graceful and muscular as a Baryshnykov interlaced with Vishneva.
At a tighter scale, we see the vines move and a rough green snake emerges climbing slowly up the tangle while hunting an insect, lizard, or tree frog. His camouflage was great for any color blind predator.
Another predator builds a filamentous ground trap for insects and the spider lurking below will run out of the hole in the middle to feast.
