Okefenokee

2024 - Reductive Woodcut - 11” x 11” - Edition of 22

For “Wetlands: Swamps, Bogs, and Fens” exchange, MAPC 2024

COLOPHON STATEMENT:

The Okefenokee Swamp, straddling the border of Georgia and Florida, is the largest “blackwater” swamp in North America. Water flows through those 438,000 acres of peat and cypress knots, feeding the Suwannee; feeding my family past. Lovie would tell us about her father living in the cracker style homes which are iconic to the southeastern swamplands; about life amongst the turtles and birds and snakes. About the alligators. Maybe they’re the scariest thing to any of my out-of-region friends; holdovers from some era of history better suited for science fiction movies, where mankind was not able to play god so easily with the Earth. 

The swamps I grew up in are fed by the Santa Fe- it in turn feeds the Suwanee as it makes its way south of Okefenokee and towards the Gulf of Mexico. My parents grew up, fell in love, raised my siblings and I, on this same river. My mother’s family populates sparse little fishing towns on the Gulf, where the lifeblood of my father’s family past feeds out to the warm coast. This little slice of swampy paradise is as familiar to me as my own face, as the faces of those I love. Faces cut by the same sun, the same passage of time, as the land which is cut by those rivers, by that water. 

The Okefenokee Swamp, straddling the border of Georgia and Florida, was listed as one of the most endangered rivers in America in both 2020 and 2023. Titanium and Zirconium sit beneath the centuries of peat and soil, tempting companies looking for profit, threatening the area’s future. I want to tell people about visiting the cracker style houses, filled with eerie mannequins and historical displays, which my dad would joke were stand-ins for some of our kinfolk. There’s your great-great-grandad; there’s the Queen of the Okefenokee, sometimes Lovie claims we’re distant relatives. There are the alligators. Maybe guardians God put into the humid Eden of the southeast; reminders of places better suited for a more noble species than us, who wouldn’t play god with the Earth.