Reply #2: I'm partial to Finzel Swamp, myself...

[GoddessOfGuinness]

It is March and I have left the tidy community of Finzel perched on the ridge of Little Savage Mountain,
left its black roads, its tavern, the Community Fire Hall, and small, dark houses, each with its plume
of smoke rising into the winter air, turned east and dropped into the white valley of Finzel Swamp.

I have walked out of order and certainty and into the margins of a land still shadowed by the Arctic.

Finzel Swamp is a relict community, formed thousands of years ago when the icy tongues of glaciers
pushed Canadian flora and fauna south for hundreds of miles. When the glaciers receded some ten thousand years ago, most of the boreal plants and animals migrated slowly back with them.

But not here. Here they stayed, the tamaracks and black calla, in a poorly drained bowl perched high
in the Maryland Appalachians, protected by the even higher ridges on either side. Here in this frozen
valley, now owned by the Nature Conservancy, there is no asphalt, no stop sign, no sidewalk, just the
wide, white space, pathless, interrupted only by the frozen etchings of alder and black spruce, the
scribbled, heart-shaped tracks of deer, the marginalia of some creator who mused for a while on the
edge of the page, then dropped the pen and headed north, leaving us to decipher the notations.

From "Stirring the Mud : On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination" by Barbara Hurd