Kill V. Maim
Nine year olds in the mangrove swamps of Andros
Housekeeping: Just shy of 6am now. I’m up and we’ll be starting a whole new construction project at 8. I have many more stories of the Corkydog, but I feel more called to root around in my childhood right now.
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Man, I was a resilient little kid.
I don’t know where the wisdom and cleverness came from that got me through some of the situations I found myself in. Sometimes I feel like I had a visit from a future self. Sometimes the help seems like it came from elsewhere.
We were on an ecological science field trip to the island of Andros—I don’t know how many of us, maybe 20 or so kids, all from St. Andrew’s school on New Providence, which was a totally different island. Growing up in the Bahamas, you have to either fly or take a boat to get anywhere, so we’d all piled into a Bahamasair Dash-8 at Nassau International.
The trip was a few days, and we were to be exposed to a variety of different places on Andros that would open our minds to Bahamian ecology. I was nine.
We stayed in a run-down hotel. I think we were four to a room. When my roommates and I opened the bottom dresser drawer in our lodgings, we found a bowl of moldy pudding that some previous group had inexplicably decided to leave there.
In the morning we’d gather up in the courtyard, the teachers would tell us what we were doing that day, we’d make sure we had bathing suits and towels and sunblock and water, and we’d all pile into the back of a diesel stakebed truck where we’d sit on wooden benches and be trundled around the potholed roads.
We went to a terrestrial blue hole, which is a sinkhole that forms in the limestone geology of the Bahama islands and other places with similar karst landscape. In Mexico they call them cenotes and they are the portals to the Land of the Dead. Swimming around in the freshwater lens was interesting, because there’s so little fresh water in the Bahamas. 60 feet below us, the sweet, electric blue water would change to salt, because the underwater cave system was connected to the ocean. The water in the blue hole would go up and down with the unseen tides that flowed around the island. Knowing how deep the hole was even beyond the salt transition at 60 feet made me feel giddy and vertiginous.
But we also went to a mangrove swamp. In the name of science, 20 nine year olds were required to hike about a quarter mile across the swamp and back. We were informed about the animals and vegetation of the ecosystem, and we made faces at the sulfur smell of the anaerobic bacteria we disturbed during our trek.
Not bad, but our swamp wasn’t connected to the sea and it wasn’t as picturesque. This one probably has baby barracudas and baby stingrays in it, which as I think about it now is probably why they took us to a landlocked one.
I was the fat kid. The year before, I’d contracted a case of Bell’s Palsy partial facial paralysis and been put on steroids, which had blown me up like a balloon. I’d put on 30 pounds in a month, and my metabolism was shot. I puffed and sweated and struggled across the swamp, last of the group to make it to the other side. My Kangaroos shoes had been sucked off my feet by the mire, so I was barefoot when I put my foot down on something unseen, unknown, and very, very sharp buried in the mud.
*BRRRR* time’s up!
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Song in my head this morning. I don’t have a better title for this post, so here we are: