I guess how seven swamps got its name is lost in the midst of time, passed down from kid to kid, likely from when this was all farmland and undeveloped and owned by Hetty Green as some kind of investment. I am surprised that the story of Hetty has not moved Beagles. I found it fascinating, and was surprised when I first heard of it twenty years ago in a book about bungalows.
What interested me was that the seven swamps is kind of like the seven hills of Rome. Way back when I think kids learned more about the classical age than they do now, and I can imagine some farm kid maybe 170 years ago wandering to the edge of plowed field and first setting eyes on them and naming them the seven swamps even if there were maybe only five because of that Roman thing, and maybe dreaming that some day a mighty train would run the route taking people back and forth to the tall towers at the mouth of the great river.
I don't remember any rabbits in the prairie east of the tracks either, As a matter of fact I don't remember any rabbits at all growing up, but now they seem to be everywhere especially on lawns. I only get back to the southwest side once a year, and have missed it the last couple so I can't say about that, but walking through the neighborhoods around the Ten Cat I see one on every other block, just sitting there, not looking particularly scared but not asking me, "Hey you gotta carrot Doc?" either.
But speaking of wild life I remember snakes. Garter snakes, hundreds of them in the prairie east of the tracks. They were there all along but one day we suddenly noticed one and looking around they were everywhere, and looking further afield even our front and back yards were full of them, We caught handfuls of them and stuffed them into coffee cans and tossed some grass in there and of course they all died. At the end of that summer we lost interest in them and never paid attention to them again.
When I read Beagles' story about the unleashed dogs taking off it reminded me of something a friend pointed out many years ago. He was a cat man and he married a dog woman. Everyone got along well including the animals, who did not curl up with each other like in those photos all over facebook, but eyed each other warily, but there were no incidents.
He was talking about animals sneaking out when you opened the door. The dog would dash out like a rocket, its tongue flapping in the wind and was likely to end up in the street run over by a car. The cat on the other hand would dash straight to nearest clump of vegetation and hide and peer out with those strange cat eyes. You'll note that dogs took to hanging around with us back when we were living in caves, while cats waited until we had built some pretty good houses before they became our companions.
Maybe deep down in the hind brain of the dog even after twenty thousand years of domestication there still remains the memory of the wolf pack running bold and free and that is triggered by the release of the leash, the scent of the great outdoors and off they go, Cats on the other hand have never been all that domesticated and even when they were wild and free they spent most of their time skulking in some shrubbery waiting for something to come along and eat,
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