606 - Battle Creek Cypress Swamp
Today we found a mysterious epicenter of glass bottle plants.
It all started on a frosty afternoon at Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, located in the Calvert County peninsula of southern Maryland. Spring was near, but its tidings hadn’t quite hit the Chesapeake Bay region yet.
A frigid cold-front still lingered in the air, and plants sat utterly still in the grim swamplands. It’d been a brutal winter. Several days in January had wind chills that dipped down to the single digits. It was the perfect day for a horror photoshoot- and I figured there had to be something green here to contrast the nothingness. A glisten of hope, as I call it.
But when Alara and I pulled up, the park was completely empty. The visitor center had been closed for the season due to fire damage, and there wasn’t a single car in the lot.
We crunched across the gravel to the trailhead, and took in the map before us. The entire place consisted of two small loops. One being a single boardwalk through the cypress trees, and the second being a loop in a field, around the previous tenant’s house. Since they were both relatively short, I figured we’d do both.
The boardwalk groaned with misery as Alara took her first couple steps into the marsh. Chunks of ice broke off the wood, evidence of the previous night’s freeze. Cypress hovered around like gravestones, and the larger trees cast shadows over them in the murky waters.
Nothing but a single tree was alive- one clearly suited for the bitter chaos of winter:
The leaves vaguely resembled a mistletoe, so I leaned over and gave Alara a kiss. A hint of fire was needed to sustain this harsh winter landscape.
Eventually we made our way over to the second loop, which contained a house from the previous owners, the Gray and Keim families. Not much information can be found about them online, other than the fact that they grew tobacco on the land. I’d need a cigarette too after living in the place every winter.
Here’s what remained of their house, which was boarded up and rotting among the leaves:
And yes, that massive wheat stalk in the foreground was intentional. It felt like a good representation of the loneliness this house emulated.
As we progressed around the field, my eye caught another glint of metal in the distance. It was off the trail, but through all the dead trees, it was clear to be another house.
Luckily it was winter- had it been midsummer, or even spring, there’s no chance my eye would have grazed it through all the underbrush.
This second property, unlisted on any maps and databases, was also completely abandoned. But unlike the main property on display, this one wasn’t boarded up, and one of the side windows was wide open.
My heart flooded with curiosity and a tinge of fear. There’s nothing quite like entering a vacated house for the first time, entirely unsure of what you’d find inside.
But it wasn’t anything dangerous, or even special- besides a single green curtain laying along a window:
It fit nicely with the green / rotting theme we have going on here.
And finally, as we walked away from the discarded residence, we came across what many would call, the discovery of the year.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of empty glass bottles were strewn across the hillside. But they weren’t in plain sight- one had to look with keen eyes. The vast majority were buried or covered in decaying leaves. And even more had plants growing within them. The kind of thing you’d find a hip young artist selling at a farmer’s market for $30 a pop:
And at first, that was my actual assumption. Some artist must have been living here, and finally decided to get rid of their collection. But then I looked closer and realized that many of the bottles hadn’t been touched in years. This dirt was old, and some of the bottles were buried deep under the soil.
And the more we walked around, the more we noticed. You’d crunch on a bottle by accident, only to realize you’re standing on a pile of seven more bottles. Then step away and land on ten more. I’m not kidding when I say in all of the years of exploring I’ve had, it was one of the wildest things I’ve ever come across.
Now, I’m not an ecologist by any means, but my assumption is that the bottles were dumped on the hillside at some point, and after years of erosion, rainfall, and biological activity, they became mini terrariums suitable for growth.
I presume the bottles provided some type of protection against the harsh winter environment, which gave the saplings a chance to get a jumpstart on Spring. Because like I mentioned before, everything in this place was dead.
It was truly a work of art, fresh off the natural griddle. The glisten of hope we’d been looking for.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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