Bridge standoff at Okefenokee Swamp Park. -- Photo by Pat Bean
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Pogo
Travel With Maggie
It was a fall day in 2006 when I visited the Okefenokee Swamp, a place I had once thought was as fictional as Anne McCaffrey’s Pern. I knew it only as the imaginary home of the animals in Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” which ran in newspapers across the country from 1948 to 1975.
Many a Sunday morning would find me curled up somewhere reading all about Pogo the possum, Albert the alligator, Howland the owl, Porky Pine the porcupine and a host of other animals that grew out of Kelly’s imagination.
In its early days, I saw Walt’s colorful drawings as simply a comic strip about the four-legged and winged creatures that lived in a swamp. As an observant animal lover, I understood the human attributes he gave his creatures, but it wasn’t until I was about 25 that I realized he was satirizing human nature as well.
When the water levels are higher, visitors to Okefenokee Swamp Park are given a boat ride as part of the swamp experience. A drought in the park in 2006 meant no boat ride for me. -- Photo by Pat Bean
My discovery that the Okefenokee was more than the byproduct of a vivid imagination came even later than that. While the Texas school I attended taught me a lot about the geography of Texas and the rich oil fields that lay off its Gulf of Mexico shoreline, it skipped completely any information about Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean.
I had to learn that on my own.
For the record, the Okefenokee Swamp was once an ocean floor. It lay beneath the salt water until a sandbar, formed about a million years ago, cut the basin off from the sea. Time and the elements eventually turned it into the freshwater wetlands that today extends Georgia’s eastern coastline by about 75 miles.
Of course I compared what I saw on my day in the Okefenokee to my memories of it from Kelly’s comic strip. What I saw made me glad Pogo’s home was not just an imaginary place.
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