Manchac Swamp Louisiana's Undiscovered Wilderness (review)

Manchac Swamp Louisiana's Undiscovered Wilderness Photographs byJulia Sims, Introduction byJohn Randolph Kemp Louisiana State University Press, 1997 142 pp. Cloth, $39.95 Reviewed by Bland Simpson, who teaches in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Creative Writing Program and performs with the Red Clay Ramblers. His books include The Great Dismal: A Carolinian's Swamp Memoir and Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's CoastalPlain, with photography by Ann Cary Simpson. America's interest in, and appreciation for, its varied wetiands—coastal, estuarine , and riverine—has grown steadily over the last few decades, and a cadre of artists and naturalists has been effectively noting and charting these generally little-known provinces and the marshes and swamps that go along with them, proclaiming their value as wildlife habitats, fishing and hunting grounds, seafood nurseries, pollution filters, and simply as beautiful, intriguing, and ever-changing ephemera. Some of the most informative of these wedand works include: Brooke Meanley 's Swamps, RiverBottoms and Canebrakes, a tour ofsuch features across the South; Francis Harper's posthumously published Ohefenokee Album, a glimpse into the great south Georgia wilderness as Harper found it in the early twentieth century; Franklin Burroughs's Horry andthe Waccamaw, an entertaining and lyrical tale of a canoe trip from North Carolina's Green Swamp to South Carolina's Winyah Bay; and Thomas Blagden Jr.'s South Carolina's Wetland Wildnerness, a first-rate photographic tour of the Ashepoo-Combahee-Edisto basin between Charleston and Beaufort. In the Deep South, John McFee has assayed The Control ofNature as it is practiced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with an enormous dam-and-dike at Old River, Louisiana, where the main flow ofthe Mississippi River seeks (and has sought for over a century) a shorter route to the Gulf of Mexico via its distributary , the Atchafalaya River. C. C. Lockwood, a man with a fine eye and lens, also has been about Louisiana and the Atchafalaya, capturing that region's natural glories in both film and still photography. Among the latest and most impressive in this line isJulia Sims's ManchacSwamp, her extraordinary collection of color photographs of the Louisiana territory surrounding Lake Maurepas, adjacent to Lake Ponchartrain on the west. Sims's pic100 Reviews tures put Manchac on beautiful and revealing display by the seasons, and they glory in all of that swamp's sylvan, avian, social, and marine elements. Fifteen years in the making, Sims's folio shows this 25,ooo-acre terrain with enormous understanding, clarity, and precision and with a great artist's loving attention to detail—she has followed Flannery O'Connor's advice to the writer who strives not only to catch the ready appearance of reality but also to comprehend the deeper meaning beyond the surface: Stare. Sims's resulting closer look, the elegant ManchacSwamp, strikes a very high level oftechnical achievement and marries it to a full measure ofpassion for the place and its constituent parts. Julia Sims has been on a long and patient prowl in and about and even above Manchac, often spending nights atop a fifty-five-foot scaffolding in order to focus her lens upon treetop nests and their nocturnal avian activity, as the wealth of her images displays. Even those who are extremely familiar with swamp, lowcountry, and bayou scenes will be struck by the variety and originality Sims's photographic feast affords. A sampler: a screech owl, talons forward and wings back, bringing a frog to its chicks in a nest; cypress draped with Spanish moss standing in duckweed-carpeted water; red maples pinking out and announcing spring; a great egret, chalk-white and neck forward, stalking the lavender shallows of a growth ofwater hyacinths; a pink-eyed albino alligator; an abandoned cypress pirogue, come to rest next to cypress knees; a rickety fishcamp on Lake Maurepas, replete with rusty-tinroofed verandahs, captured a month before a summer storm deconstructed it; a pair ofwing-net shrimpers in the red dawn ofPass Manchac, looking as primitive as the prawn that is their prey; an alligator leaping from the water, mouth open voraciously wide, a micromoment before closing upon a bird-baited hook hanging from...