This was written in response to a message board posting at Freelancewriting.com calling for personal essays for publication in a magazine targeted at affluent women ages 25-50.


Bogged Down

For the first time in approximately nine months, the sun was out and the temperature rose above sixty degrees. This being England, that kind of day was a rare and beautiful treasure, as Ellen, my friend and fellow member of our college's study abroad program, and I had learned. We decided to make use of it by spending a day in Dartmoor National Park as my last bit of Devon before I left the country for good on Tuesday. We caught the roving bus in downtown Exeter and headed off for a hike along the moor.

After lunch at a pub in the small hamlet of Princetown (population one park ranger, two chatty ladies at the pub, and a few wandering sheep), we decided to take the same trail we took when we'd hiked there last October, an old rail bed that had been converted into a sinuous path among the hills and tors. Part of it eventually ends up at an old rock quarry, which is now filled with water. At the Y-fork we'd seen the last time, we took the road less traveled, going away from the quarry and into the unknown.

We passed a rather nice bridge, wandered among free-ranging cows and sheep (not to mention various evidence of cows and sheep), and clambered up a small tor, or rocky hill that may or may not be totally safe for climbing. From the top of said tor, we watched the mist roll in, because oh, wait, it's Dartmoor, and it isn't Dartmoor without mist and gloom. If you don't believe me, go read The Hound of the Baskervilles.

After a rest atop the tor, we decided to take what we thought was a fairly well-marked shortcut back to Princetown. Those of you who've read Wuthering Heights or anything like it may start laughing now.

There was practically a straight line between the tor and the head of the trail, but the real trail made a big loop before connecting, somewhat like the two legs of a triangle versus the hypotenuse. To continue the geometry metaphor, we took the hypotenuse, which kind of turned into a sheep path, and then not a path at all.

For a moment, we paused in the middle of the...field? Pasture? Endless vista of grassy rolling hills that was to become our doom? Now that we didn't have the height advantage sitting on top of the tor gave us, the real trail was out of sight. The tor itself had gone missing as well, swallowed up by the increasing fog.

I remembered what the incredulous park ranger we'd talked to in October had said when we asked directions to the best place to strike out on our own: he'd told us, in no uncertain terms, that doing so without at least some wading boots, and preferably a tent and a week's worth of water and canned food, was foolhardy in the extreme.

Here we were, me in hiking boots that were on their last legs and Ellen in sneakers. The only food we had between us was a packet of cheese crackers and half of a granola bar. "Ellen," I asked, feeling remarkably calm, "do you think we might be lost?"

"Let's keep walking," she suggested.

We kept going in the general direction of the trail. Soon, though, I began to feel something strange under my feet. It was rather squishy, and while, yes, Dartmoor is muddy, the ground I'd been standing on before was significantly firmer than this. I took another step, not realizing yet what was going on...

...and found myself up to mid-calf in water.

"Ellen!" I cried, "Look out, it's--"

But I saw that she had also found herself sinking down to her knees in muck.

We quickly discovered that this was, in fact, a bog and just not an overenthusiastic stream, and that it extended quite a ways to our right and left. Our bus--the last one of the day--was going to return in less than an hour, which made going back the long way pretty much impossible if we didn't want to spend the night in Princetown. If we were going to get to the trail, we would have to go through the bog.

It is, technically, possible to get through a bog without getting too wet as long as you can quickly figure out which plants have good root systems and are thus solid enough to step on. Hint: Short bushy things? Good. Reedy things with bits of cotton fluff stuck to them? Very, very bad. These plants--I don't know what they're really called, nor do I have enough goodwill towards them to learn--stand taller than everything else in the bog, drawing hapless wanderers inexorably toward them because, if nothing else, they are at least visible. They're like sirens or marsh lights, strange phenomena which lead good-hearted sailors to wreck themselves upon rocky shores. What I would've given for a rocky shore.

I waded through the muck, getting a bit better at jumping from one spot of solid(ish) ground to another. It was getting colder, and the wind, a constant presence screaming in one's ears on Dartmoor, began to whip drops of rain into my face. I still wasn't entirely certain where the trail was, although I hoped was I was heading in the right direction.

I began to wonder if I would eventually fall suddenly into water over my head and drown, my flesh to be slowly nibbled over the years by passing cows. Do cows even eat anything that's not grass? I wondered. They seemed mild-mannered enough from behind a fence, but who knew what malice lurked within their bovine hearts?

As I contemplated this, a sick feeling growing ever more noticeable in my stomach, I heard Ellen shout, "Over here!"

She, apparently not as concerned with Death By Cattle as I, had found her way to solid ground. I slogged my way over to her, ignoring the squelching in my boots and the mud that crept further and further up my jeans. By the time I reached the sweet, sweet solidity of the grass, I was caked in brown goo all the way up to the knee.

But none of that mattered, because just down the hill we now found ourselves on was the trail. We were less than a mile from Princetown, and had nearly half an hour to get there. We would make our bus, and not be eaten by cows, and I would fly back to America two days later.

My boots, as it happened, would not fly with me. Already three years old and having endured heavy use in that time, the mudbath was the proverbial final nail in their coffin. Given the amount of stuff I had accumulated since arriving in September, this was actually rather helpful in my frantic attempts to shove my life for the past nine months into two suitcases and a carry on. Therefore, "The Bog Incident," as Ellen and I would refer to it, became not a decision bordering on idiocy and the consequences thereof, but a necessary step in the packing process.

That's what I tell myself, anyway. Don't you think it sounds better?


Copyright 2006, Rebecca E. Helton

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