Marina Dawn Wells

Marina Wells is a PhD candidate in American & New England Studies at Boston University. Marina holds a BA from Colby College in art history and literature, and has held positions at various institutions including at the Winterthur Museum and the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Marina’s academic interests include gender and sexuality, oceanic studies, and nineteenth-century print culture, which influences their dissertation, “Making Men from Whales: The Visual Culture of Gender and Whaling in New England, 1814-1861.”

“Marshes to Trouble Us”

Growing up on Cape Cod, surrounded by so many wild landscapes to explore, I took many of my first steps where land and water meet. I have soft-focus memories of scampering on squishy salt flats, scrambling through berms of marsh grasses, and wading up to my waist in mud. Yet even with such fondness for these soggy spaces, I’ve come to realize that we land-dwellers rarely think about wetlands, even when they surround us. Given their inherent in-betweenness, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we relegate them to the sides of highways, the margins of beaches, the interiors of woodlands––and certainly to the backs of our minds. This is partially because when we confront them, they often pose problems. Henry David Thoreau minded this in his journey through Cape Cod (1865), as when he asked locals if he and his hiking partner “should meet with any creeks or marshes to trouble us.” Marshes and other wetlands are as difficult to cross as they are tricky to render, whether in text, paint, or print. Such related forms as marshes, swamps, and bogs have the tendency to perplex; however, their paradoxical qualities bring to light how resilience functions at scales both large and small. Wetland environments recommend being bogged down with complexity, and offer ways that living beings may inhabit an uninhabitable world.

Yet scholarship of this sort can prove its own finicky fen to navigate. More humanities work could wander into this wilderness with wholehearted enthusiasm, although some has certainly turned to wetlands’ potency for meaning. For one, nineteenth-century societal anxieties and interests in the “dark recesses of the mind” have been identified in art and literature about southern swamps.[1] Not dissimilarly, salt marshes in Martin Johnson Heade’s paintings have been read as unstable sites where time and earth live in flux.[2] Within the context of environmental exploitation, wetlands contain their own examples of how natural resource extraction accompanies racist and capitalist violence to the earth, and how coasts have become less resilient over time.[3] Clearly, wetlands are visually, ecologically, geographically, temporally, and conceptually complex; it seems that ever more scholarship can truly get into those weeds.

One fertile area of study investigates swamps and marshes as historical havens for Indigenous and enslaved people. For instance, scholars recognize how in the northeast in the seventeenth century, Native people dwelt with wetland spaces as “an abundant resource base, an extensive home, and a natural fortress.”[4] Marshes and swamps could serve as hiding places when the Wampanoag, Pequot, and others escaped the violence of English settlers––who, in contrast, did not have the deep experiential knowledge required to navigate them.[5] As an example from the nineteenth century, the southern Great Dismal Swamp was a wetlandscape that became a “loophole of retreat” for people escaping enslavement, to cultivate communities and move closer to the waterfront to work or sail north.[6] Meanwhile, enslavers perceived such environments as uninhabitable, in part because they often were. C. Riley Snorton writes of the hardly livable environs that it was “a space of near death into which some other quality of living is assumed out of necessity.”[7] Yet it was precisely wetlands’ near-impossibility, and their location at the margins of land and water, that allowed them to protect marginalized people. The Great Dismal Swamp and other wetlands not only held contradictions of in/habitability and wet/land, but maintained them as necessary aspects of being.[8]

For those targeted by colonial violence, and now for all humans threatened by climate change, these environments may not pose problems, but solutions. At the level of coastlines, salt marshes protect vulnerable land that could not remain terra firma without them. Acting as a buffer, their tidal malleability protects coastal outcroppings from the otherwise erosive wind and waves. Meanwhile, a menagerie of flora and fauna––from mollusks to coyotes––make marshes homes where they dwell, eat, and reproduce. The permeable earth also cycles resources like nitrogen, which constantly renew as those organisms decay, and help filter nutrients from land to sea. From moose to molecules, myriad factors rely on these rich sites of biological activity that both protect and need protecting.[9]

Wetlands’ abundant fluidity and ever-betweenness perhaps calls to mind how a marsh could be conceptually queer. Not dissimilar to the concept of shoals as laid out by Tiffany Lethabo King, wetlands, too, are “an interstitial and emerging space of becoming.”[10] High marshes lost to sea level rise can transmute into low marshes where new species flourish.[11] In this, wetlands express the qualities of queerness that reject binaries and encourage the beauty of transformation. The constancy of change is embodied by their tides, which cover and uncover the earth about twice a day. From the scales of molecular structure to coastal geography, watery movement allows wetlands to both exchange and preserve their form and substance, and in so doing support both arguments for queer time as linked to ephemerality, and to futurity.[12] Because wetlands make material the metaphor of shifting waters while they simultaneously conserve land, they make space for both transience and sustainability.

Like Thoreau, many littoral humans still tend to see these in-between landscapes as obstacles, since they lie between the two legible entities of land and water. On the highway, notice how many of these not-lands fly by beyond the borders of guardrails. As coastlines erode and more of the human population is forced to live in or along such liminal spaces, we may choose to collaborate with, rather than refuse, the ostensible impossibilities that wetlandscapes present. Whatever form this takes, interdisciplinary studies can expand understanding of how these spaces have been rendered in law, religion, science or culture, and offer further insight as humans face the tides of the future that will inevitably roll in.  

End Notes

[1] From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred; or, The Dismal Swamp (c. 1856) as quoted in David Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 96.

[2] Kimia Shahi, “Entanglements of Land and Water: Picturing Contingency in Martin Johnson Heade’s Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm,” In Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2018): 304-311; Maggie M. Cao, “Heade’s Hummingbirds and the Ungrounding of Landscape,” American Art 25, no. 3 (2013): 48–75.

[3] Ned Randolph, “Muddy Foil: A History of Extraction and Resistance in the Lower Mississippi River Delta,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2021): 1-18; Christopher Pastore, Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[4] Lisa Brooks, “Every Swamp is a Castle,” Northeastern Naturalist 24, no. 7 (Special Volume 7: Winter Ecology: Insights from Biology and History), 53; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, NY: Knopf, 1998), 86.

[5] Brooks, 53; Christine DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Phillip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Kevin McBride, David Naumec, Ashley Bissonnette, Noah Fellman, Battle of Mistick Fort: English Withdrawal and Pequot Counterattacks II (Mashantucket, Ledyard, CT: Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and National Park Service Department of the Interior, 2017).

[6] David S. Cecelski, “Black Watermen, Fugitives from Slavery, and an Old Woman on the Edge of a Spamp: Maritime Passages to Freedom from Coastal North Carolina,” in Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, ed. Timothy D. Walker (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021): 54-79; Ras Michael Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[7] C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 72; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 9; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861).

[8] Artist Kelly Taylor Mitchell informs the ideas presented here; she explores the contradictory aspects relating to the Great Dismal Swamp in her multimedia work, such as in her solo exhibition “Reunion” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia (2021), and in her thesis fungible commodities at the Rhode Island School of Design (2018), in which she articulated the contradictions of “home vs. trap, beauty vs. grotesque, trauma vs. joy, and generosity vs. withholding.”

[9] My thanks to Perri Meldon, who pointed me to environmental histories that explore the specifics of wetlands’ role in land conservation and migratory bird populations. Nancy Langston and William Cronon, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2003); Cronon and Robert M. Wilson, Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011).

[10] Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 2.

[11] Kurt Repanshek, “Salt Marshes At Cape Cod National Seashore Being Squeezed Out Of Space,” The National Parks Traveler (March 5th, 2015). Accessed June 1 2022.  https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2015/03/salt-marshes-cape-cod-national-seashore-being-squeezed-out-space26357

[12] Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005).