Home in the Swamp

First of all, when we say "swamp" in Northern Michigan, we don't mean marshland, we mean thickly vegetated land with the water table at or near the surface. It's too thick to navigate and too thin to cultivate. I can see evidence that somebody tried to drain our land for agriculture in the past, and my neighbor remembers that a former owner used to cut hay on parts of it, but it must have been more trouble than it was worth because the effort was abandoned a long time ago. We built our home on one of the higher parts, and we still needed to haul in three feet of sand fill in order to get percolation and insure that the crawl space under the house wouldn't have water in it in the spring.

Trespassing has never been an issue here, so we have never seen a need to fence or post signs on our borders. The only access for any kind of vehicle is the driveway that leads to the house. I have cut three trails that branch off from there, but none of them come back out to the public road. They are not usable by street legal vehicles, only small farm tractors, ATVs, and snowmobiles. Even then, you can easily get stuck back there in the spring and fall if you don't know what you're doing. The public road dead ends just past our driveway, and the other three sides of the property border on private tracts with similar characteristics.

After we first bought the place, back in 1986, but before we built our house in 2000, I would occasionally meet another hunter when I was out there hunting myself. They were all from the immediate neighborhood and had walked in from one of the surrounding parcels. I told them I didn't have a problem with that. Since we built the house, I can only remember one neighbor kid who asked permission. Judging from the tracks he left in the snow, he came in one time, looked around, and went back out. I think that's the only human trail I have crossed since then, and I spend a lot of time out there in the winter. I would be surprised if anybody considered it to be a good party site because of the difficulty of access. There's lots of mosquitoes too, but only in the summer.

The more I think about it, Uncle Ken might be onto something with his genetic theory of good and evil. All the rules and regulations formulated by cultures may be nothing more than their instinctive efforts to preserve themselves. The fact that even the best of cultures have a few bad apples in them might be attributed to the badness gene being recessive. Recessive traits are almost impossible to breed out of a population because everybody who carries the trait doesn't display it.