THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 26, 1995 TAG: 9510260074
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Eco-Adventures
SOURCE: BY LISE OLSEN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
THE SWAMP IS hushed and dark. It beckons you to explore and then to rest within its depths. To spend a weekend among the tree frogs, the owls and the cypress.
Merchants Millpond State Park is a simple name for a magical place, where you leave civilization behind in a canoe and set up camp on an island ringed by ancient gnarled trees. Here, it seems almost as if you could just disappear - and fully enjoy doing it.
Some friends and I set out on a rainy Saturday and arrived at the park a sunny hour later. The millpond seems in another dimension, but it's only 22 miles south of Suffolk city limits in Gates County, N.C. There, we acquire a canoe for $10 for 24 hours and a camping permit for another $5. We then strike out into the swamp, carrying a map and following orange markers into the dark waters.
The groves of cypress make mazes of the 184-year-old millpond. At first, you might not notice you're lost. There's too much to see in this ecologically eclectic coastal pond and southern swamp forest. Stumps have become planters for the thorny swamp rose, and duckweed makes red and green mosaics on the water. As you slide through it, the 'weed makes a shushing sound like a soda bottle opening very slowly.
And there's another sound of canoeing in the millpond: a loud thump and jarring, scraping noise as your canoe temporarily beaches itself on a cypress log or stump hidden by the brown-stained water. Every time you think you might sink - but you don't. These are sturdy Plexiglas canoes. Still, the bumps snap you out of your reverie. They remind you that every cypress looks the same at twilight and that you might get lost in the 760 acres of water. Thus prompted, we spend 10 serious minutes finding those orange buoys. We then set a more direct course for the island campground, and reach it too soon. We pitch our tents and settle in for the night, around a campfire, vowing to explore again at dawn.
The night sounds - insects, and an occasional screech that I hopefully attribute to an owl - mix with the unwelcome hum of traffic passing over the dam. But the intrusion of civilization - shift-workers and truckers on their way to and from Hampton Roads - is the only flaw to this beautiful place in the fall.
In the summer, though, the ticks and flies can make the millpond positively uninhabitable. That's why, rangers like Jane Wyche will tell you, it's better to visit now or in the early spring. Wyche got Rocky Mountain spotted fever this summer - a tick-borne disease. Bear and poisonous snakes are less dangerous inhabitants, since neither is seen often. In fact, the bear tend to stick to the farmers' fields around the park - where the livin' is easy.
Park pamphlets boast that you can see more in a few hours in Merchants Millpond than you could in weeks in the immense Okefenokee Swamp.
The woods hold deer and birds. There are trails and campgrounds there as well - less often used. But Wyche recommends the pond itself for seeing wildlife: river otter during the day; beaver at night. Fish are there too, of course - primitive types, like the long-nosed gar and the bowfin, which have remained almost unchanged for millions of years. And she'll tell you to listen for the tree frogs, for the owls, for the calls of ducks.
On our second day, I hoped to see an otter. I figured they'd leave long trails in the duckweed for me to follow. We set out early enough that the birds were still saying good morning to each other.
But instead of otters, I see weird roots of waterlilies that look like sea serpents, a few shy wood ducks and a cormorant standing still at the top of a dead tree - almost achieving the look of a branch. We see sunny yellow flowers growing right up out of the pond in places, out of trees in others.
We spend a good 15 minutes sneaking up on the Pests of the Park: Canada geese. A small flock is flying in perfect formation above the treetops, then lands with graceful splashes. Their honks, a deep warning followed by a higher staccato chorus, echo across the marsh. But they have so quickly grown in number (to about 50) and are such prolific producers of excrement that they present a serious threat to the clear waters of the Mill Pond. In fact, Wyche said, the state will probably end up paying a fee to give each goose a one-way ticket to Louisiana - one of the few states that is still short on its quota of the big birds, and their poop.
I never did see an otter, though we spotted several heaps of branches that beavers call home. And I vowed to come back on a moonlit night to pay one of the nocturnal swimmers a visit.
It wouldn't have mattered, though, even if I had seen no birds or animals in this magical millpond. It was enough to have disappeared there, into its depths and its mazes - if only for two days.
You can do the same. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by TAMARA VONINSKI/The Virginian-Pilot
The view from a canoe just before sunset at Merchants Millpond in
Gates County, N.C.
Canada geese fly above the canoes and toward the cypress trees
dotting the pond.
Photo by Tamara Voninski/The Virginian Pilot
The early morning view from a campsite at Merchants Millpond in
Gates County, N.C.
Drawing
by CNB