Welcome to the bog

cottongrassBlogs fill me with a certain disgust, mostly because the word blog seems like it’s an amalgam of blah, bah, and blather. So, instead, I’d like to call what I’ll be writing for this site a bog. Bogs, to me, are beautiful, especially in the fall, when the reds of sphagnum, the teals of bog rosemary, and the whites of cotton grass suggest a painter’s palette. Unlike blogs, bogs smell of earth and life. My friend and bog expert Charles Johnson thinks wondrously strange gods inhabit bogs. So do I. Those gods have created (for instance) carnivorous plants like the sundew, the pitcher plant, and the bladderwort, the last of which can spring its trap on an unsuspecting insect in as little as two-thousandths of a second. Perhaps the rarest of all fungi, Echinodontium ballouii, can only be found in a bog. My favorite salamander, the four-toed salamander, is a bog inhabiter; I have never found it in a blog (a terrible habitat for a herp), but I have found it in several bogs in the Northeast. And here’s a parting salvo: bogs are timeless, whereas blogs are transitory, indeed downright evanescent.

Stay tuned for the first bog entry…