The death of the swamp in A Girl of the Limberlost is emotionally unobtrusive, part of the background albeit always part of the background, and no one laments it or tries to stop it from happening – it’s just a fact of the setting. Elnora looks up from her busy schedule one day and realizes it's almost gone. She needs money for college, but she can no longer count on finding moths to sell:
After high school, Elnora gets a job teaching supplemental natural history courses for grade schools around the region. There’s an ecstatic scene in which she and her mother work out lesson plans, figuring out the best form of life to focus on for each month. It’s delightfully odd, like all the best parts of this book, and it’s also sad: this new program will teach children about the local ecosystem just as it’s being changed into something else entirely. The Limberlost swamp was a real place and it really did vanish, drained and cleared and smoothed over into a broad green and yellow patchwork of farmland and oil wells.
( This is not a story about that. )
One thousand thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer for sponsoring this wonderfully weird, flawed but fascinating book! I might never have gotten around to reading it otherwise, and my life would have been a little poorer for it, like all those benighted suckers who smash moths in ignorance and/or leave creepy notes in other people’s sheds.
Men all around were clearing available land. The trees fell wherever corn would grow. The swamp was broken by several gravel roads, dotted in places around the edge with little frame houses, and the machinery of oil wells; one especially low place around the region of Freckles’ room was nearly all that remained of the original. Wherever the tress fell the moisture dried, the creeks ceased to flow, the river ran low and at times the bed was dry. With unbroken sweep the winds of the west came, gathering force with every mile and howled and raved, threatening to tear the shingles from the roof, blowing the surface from the soil in clouds of fine dust, and rapidly changing everything. From coming in with two or three rare moths in a day, in three years’ time Elnora had grown to be delighted with finding two or three. Big pursy caterpillars could not be picked from their favorite bushes, when there were no bushes. Dragon-flies would not hover over dry places. . .
After high school, Elnora gets a job teaching supplemental natural history courses for grade schools around the region. There’s an ecstatic scene in which she and her mother work out lesson plans, figuring out the best form of life to focus on for each month. It’s delightfully odd, like all the best parts of this book, and it’s also sad: this new program will teach children about the local ecosystem just as it’s being changed into something else entirely. The Limberlost swamp was a real place and it really did vanish, drained and cleared and smoothed over into a broad green and yellow patchwork of farmland and oil wells.
( This is not a story about that. )
One thousand thanks to
osprey_archer for sponsoring this wonderfully weird, flawed but fascinating book! I might never have gotten around to reading it otherwise, and my life would have been a little poorer for it, like all those benighted suckers who smash moths in ignorance and/or leave creepy notes in other people’s sheds.
