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Call of the Congaree | 1 | 2 | 3

Spent jasmine blossoms cover the boardwalk as if tossed by onlookers at some extraordinarily joyous wedding. False chameleons, some as green as swamp moss, lurk on the edges, having just crawled out of the swamp (those that have been lying in the sun longer are already boardwalk-brown), and my daughters delight in racing after them hoping to capture one.

Occasionally they’ll get their hands on a lizard, but will lose it through the cracks of their fingers, breaking off its tail in the process, as called for by nature’s design. At first the girls are horrified at the transformation as the imperfect, stump-tailed survivor scampers off into the swamp. Who would have dreamed you could break something as durable as a living, breathing animal into parts as one might a plastic toy? Even when I tell them that’s how it’s supposed to go, the surprise remains illuminated in their faces.

Thank God for these wet and rank places, where our momentum cannot yet carry the machines of our habits as well as our imagination; where we must still stop the car and get out and walk, if we are to go in at all. As we amble, Keen reminisces about how it was, almost 25 years ago, during all the tussle over saving the Congaree. One of his students got all fired up and dropped out of school to bring local environmental groups together to fight for this vast swamp.

Some people need these shreds of funk to continue being strong and fully joyful in the world. Knowing that, do we pave them over anyway, or allow these little swamp foxes the last vestiges of wild country as God intensely and intimately imagined, designed, and created before the engines of our economic growth came prowling down the lane? Whatever it took to protect this odoriferous shady swamp of a place was worth it. Not for one hundred trillion dollars could you build such a place, or re-create such a heaven, were it to vanish.

How rich are these woods? How to measure the bounty, the surplus, they yield to us? Not just in terms of sediment given over to agricultural production, or water filtration, or absorption of carbon dioxide. Such models exist, and show how our swamplands and deep shady forests more than "pay for themselves," as they always have. But I have no interest in such rationales. I want us to learn, even at this late date, to set aside these last wild places as acts of faith and duty, not as economic payoff.

We can look nowhere without seeing seething life. Box turtles wander by, their skulls dappled with multiflorate oak-leaf patterns, and a black racer, as long as a man or woman is tall, hurtles across the boardwalk like a wavering javelin hurled. Red maple seeds, crimson as cherries, with their intricate fingerprint whorls, are scattered everywhere, and beneath one great maple tree, we spy a huge blacksnake lying motionless, shedding its skin—eyes milky blue and unseeing. A butterfly fans its wings just out of his reach, safe for the time being.

Farther on, something electric-blue scampers through the leaves, something neon and iridescent, and yet alive and organic—not electronic and manmade. This creature is something directly of the earth’s making, original and irreducible. In the flash we can tell that its color is far superior to any we have yet produced or even imagined.

The creature stops and looks back at us, panting. It’s a blue-tailed skink, about as long as an adult human’s finger. Its dark eyes are but the size of pinheads, and its tiny ribs heave from its flight. The sight of it reaches far into me, and the last of my discomfort fades and disappears. All I can know, in the presence of that tiny and improbably blue creature, is peace and inexplicable gratitude.

The skink catches its breath, tucks its head left and right, looking like the tiny dinosaur it is, then scoots off into the leaves and disappears. So astounding was its brightness that even after it is gone, it seems that we can see it for days.

Rick Bass is author of more than a dozen books, including The Book of Yaak. His latest work of fiction, The Hermit’s Story, will be published this summer by Houghton Mifflin.