Best Left

by Jen Hirt

The Mel-O-Cream cashier says call ahead and reserve your favorite doughnuts, otherwise they run out. But I’m here only once, won’t be back, driving through Illinois. Lincoln’s Tomb to what’s left of The Great Black Swamp in Ohio. I don’t have favorites, do have destinations.

There’s a mosquito and two dogs in the car, storms, a longer day than planned. I down three Mel-O-Creams, stop between the tomb and swamp at dunes, where great-crested flycatchers call in their orders after a downpour. Dog-friendly north coast beach, a novelty, with a nuclear reactor on the horizon and rip currents for the killing. I walk the dogs their first ever mile on sand. In Indiana. We watch the storm head out to sea and forget the sea’s a lake.

Across the border in Ohio, same day walk in the opposite of sand, in what’s left of the swamp. No one is here except a woman changing a child’s diaper. Great hovering insects, too great for flycatchers, hang in the humidity at the trailhead, scanning my retinas I’m sure. Do they send my hunger down the trail like an order called back to the kitchen?

I eat the last lemon custard. Mel-O-Cream dough used to be made with fresh mashed potatoes but now freeze-dried, and eating that last one, standing on the edge of a swamp, I don’t know yet about the switch. I march forth under delusion.

The Great Black Swamp used to be wetter and bigger and blacker until it was identified as a place to drain for probably potato fields among other necessities of agriculture. So rife with malaria mosquitoes that an Ohio town imported quinine from Peru and took the name Lima. Fortified, men built roads and railroads. They felled the massive trees in winter when the swampland froze.

What’s left is breathtaking and strange, bounded by cornfields but with such a forested heart you’d never know there was an edge. “100 acres of virgin timber” declares a sign from 1975. “This site contributes to a better understanding of man’s environment,” says another. One family who liked swamps saved this place. I watch the dogs for signs – they sniff carefully, pause and stare, take tiny quiet laps of vernal ponds to mix with the Great Lake they tasted earlier. Neither pulls at their leash. They love what’s terrifying and essential and so do I. But yeah, the mosquitoes must have been a force back in the day. I’ve brought no spray. I watch them land in railroad rows on my calf, orderly as corn.

I watch my step and watch swamp birdsong become birds in my Merlin app. A blue-headed vireo, two notes, then gone, and the description reads, “Some birds are best left unidentified.” Too late, I think.

Later upon leaving, at a gas station in a small town, there is a mural celebrating a great white man draining the Great Black Swamp. As my tank fills and I toss an empty doughnut box and count the welts on my legs and think about the man standing in for all the men who drained the swamp, I scroll my screen. A question circling social media, for women, would you rather encounter a bear or a man alone in the woods? OK but which woods, I wonder. The one that contributes to a better understanding of man’s environment?

I think it’s a question asked by people who don’t actually walk alone in the woods. I’ve never worried about men and bears in what’s left of the woods. I mix quinine in gin for fun, not for fever. I appreciate the roads I wish hadn’t been built at such great expense to the great-crested and the blue-headed. I’ll side with the bird app—identify and then don’t. Don’t call ahead for favorites. Some things are best left, right?

Jen Hirt is the author of the memoir Under Glass, the essay collection Hear Me Ohio, and the poetry chapbook Too Many Questions About Strawberries. She is the co-editor of two anthologies: Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers; and Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction. She is the editor of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and she is an associate professor at Penn State Harrisburg. Read more of her work at jenhirt.ink.