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Tales from the Swamp, Part 6
Well, the Swamp is really the perfect place to try out all this new (well, to me, anyway) technology. The first thing I tried to do was build a hut. Honestly, who hasn't wanted to build their own little house thing in their backyard at some point in their life? Well, I went out to the woods with the stone axe I had made in class (which is another story entirely) and set out to chop down ten small trees to make the frame of my house. Easier said than done, because apparently I hadn't fixed the head of my axe to the handle well, and it went flying off into the swamp, so I had to spend twenty minutes combing the brush looking for it. I finally got all the trees chopped down and dragged into the backyard so I could start building (my parents, of course, were thrilled, especially Dad, who sees any backyard activity as a threat to his carefully-cultivated lawn), then I set about chopping down palm fronds to use as the roof and walls. Well, the axe was useless for this, so I had to use the rusty (and by rusty, I mean almost falling apart) machete I dug out of the garage. Channeling the great jungle explorers, I hacked my way through the underbrush in search of the perfect fronds. I guess it works a lot better and looks a lot cooler when you're literally going through walls of vegetation, but on the occasional vine or leafy branch, not only do you look silly, but the machete doesn't cut it. It just makes it bounce back and whap you in the face. Not fun. Anyway, I got the fronds and dragged those back, too, and started to work on building. I had to bend the stems of the fronds so that I could zip-tie them together into a circle (they were part of the frame of the hut; the leaves themselves would be used for roofing and siding). And I know zip-ties aren't primitive technology, but, honestly, I didn't feel like making that much rope. (Yes, I can make rope.) So I got it all laid out how I wanted it and was getting ready to zip-tie it all together… And I was really ready; I had it going. Then came the mosquitoes. I don't know how familiar y'all are with Florida mosquitoes, but these things could seriously carry off your firstborn if you weren't watching too close. All that hard work to get everything together and ready to go, and I was defeated by a swarm of bugs that, honestly, weren't any bigger than my thumbnail. I don't know how the primitive peoples of the South dealt with them, but that's not something I was taught in the class, and the modern bug spray was NOT working. Sadly, I had to give up. Defeated and my hut in shambles, I stumbled upstairs to wash off the foul-smelling bug concoction and all of the great little twigs and spider webs I'd accumulated on my person when playing explorer in the swamp. I had every intention of finishing the hut, really. I promise. My parents, of course, didn't believe me, so by the time I had the inclination to work on it again, they had already burned all the pieces with the rest of the pine straw and downed tree limbs from the yard. So my dream of building my own hut is on hold till the end of mosquito season. There's just some things you can't fight in the Swamp.--Katelyn Moore is our summer intern and a senior at Valdosta State University.
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