Read by Michael Flamel

We now travel back in time to (Dare I say it?) 1985 or 1986. I put those AirTag things on my wallet and keys so I’d have half-a-prayer of finding them, but alas memory is not so easily recovered. Although I did finally nail the “remember three words” part of one of those “Just how feeble are you?” visits my medical insurance makes me endure once a year to make sure I’m not dead yet: “Dog, boy, flower.”

It was a relatively easy group: “dog” was triggered by the memory of the multiple Great Pyrenees I cared for in my younger days; “boy” was my son Max; and “flowers” of course, is what I allegedly do for a living. (I now realize that I could have used Johnny Weissmuller’s Hollywood “son” as a memory aid instead of ‘Max’. And then I could have used JW’s voice! “Cheeta! Bondola!”)

Anyway, my tale for today is about the first or second year in the house we have since called home. I was busy clearing land for my raised-bed garden, and the only thing I knew about the woods behind the house was that they were magnificent.

I was also trying to get used to the idea that our water came from an artesian well.

Our neighbors’ wells were hundreds of feet deep and mine was 25. AND we had to run an overflow line that pumped about a gallon a minute into a nearby stream to keep the wellhead from exploding under pressure, as we essentially lived on top of an underground river.

We never ran out of water. During one especially bad Summer drought our house water did dry up—but the overflow pipe was still pumping away. When I called the local well experts they responded “Of course, you’re out of water! Everybody’s out of water! We’re just waiting our turn for the deeper drills to get here.”

I assured them that I had plenty of water and could prove it. They grumbled all the way through the process of locating and uncovering the wellhead. (I had no idea where it was; I was a recently relocated city mouse and still trying to figure out the location of my septic tank [Hint: watch for where the snow melts first.])

As they prepared to uncap the well, I warned them to be careful; I had been told that the pressure would produce a geyser that could knock over a man. They were still laughing at me as they unsecured the cap and were met by 16 firehoses worth of water that arched overtop of the house and knocked them both heinie over teakettle as I learned a lot of cool new Pennsylvania Dutch phrases.

After a day or two the pressure calmed down enough to re-cap the well, with the now non-skeptical workers adding TWO overflow lines while teaching me even more interesting “Dutch” expressions along the way.

(During the Caeser’s Fountain experience, my neighbors were invited to use the excess water, which they mostly captured in huge jugs and little red wagons [to carry off the jugs, not to drink wagon water] and later proclaimed my liquid to “taste better than bottled water,” which it still does to this day.)

In case you’re wondering, the initial problem was caused by a broken underground line carrying the well water into the house. But the entire episode should have made me suspect that there were serious wetlands behind the house.

Which brings us back to our originally scheduled topic.

Early one Spring I was looking out the kitchen window and saw a large patch of vibrant color I had never noticed before. Flowers? We were still having frost so that seemed unlikely. I figured maybe it was an ephemeral appearance of a colorful moss or slime mold that had been encouraged by the wetness of that Spring. It sure looked cool. And they were there again tomorrow, and the next day, and the colors seemed more vibrant, mostly a brilliant yellow with some purple mixed in.

The next morning, I went out and climbed up on a nearby fallen tree to get a better look. There were a LOT of them, all confined to a distinct area with well-defined margins. The individual flowers had a bulbous shape that was kind of a cross between an orchid and a cavernous pitcher plant.

I should point out here that, although I had been a self-taught food gardener for close to a decade, I had NO book learning. I had never even taken a botany course. It would be another five years before I became editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening magazine and began to read and research myself into a relatively acceptable level of botanic horticultural knowledge. And there was no internet back then to provide help. We were still living in the world of penny candy.

But we had libraries, which, thank God, we still have today. Much of what I know I learned from the intrepid Liberians of the Frankford branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, where I learned to read, think and be quiet.

We were no longer in Philadelphia with its magnificent libraries, but the Emmaus Library was just as useful and inspirational. They pulled a perfect group of illustrated guides to plants for me that quickly revealed I had discovered a large group of Lady Slipper orchids, a rare “terrestrial” sub-category that grew with its roots in the soil, unlike the exposed “aerial” roots of the vast majority of orchids.

My research revealed that their appearance was fleeting, they loved wet soil and should never be collected from the wild as it was impossible for humans to recreate the unique requirements they needed to survive.

“Fleeting” was my go-to word here, so I rose early the next day—of course, not telling my wife where I was going—and set out for a closer look at this rare occurrence, wearing heavy jeans (It was cold.) and a solid pair of hiking boots. I got to my “spotting tree” and stepped off into a muddy bog that was much colder than I expected. But I wasn’t far from the patch and figured the worst that could happen was that I would need to wash my jeans and drink a lot of hot chocolate afterwards.

I took another step and was suddenly deeper in the bog. Another step and I was in up to my knees and my feet were freezing. I looked back and there was only bog between me and the tree I had departed from. I looked forward and there was only bog between me and the orchids. I was now in up to my pockets. My previous thought of potential embarrassment was quickly replaced by the more accurate, “You’re now fighting for your life and running out of time. Rapidly.”

Every time I moved, I went deeper. I could no longer feel the bottom half of my body and realized that total hypothermia was maybe only minutes away.

In my childhood we had always spent a Summer week “downashore” in New Jersey. You prayed that it wouldn’t rain the entire week and that the ocean wouldn’t be freezing cold or filled with stinging jellyfish.

But there was another (little understood by vacationers) possibility that was a much more serious threat, and that was being caught in a sudden rip current (a dangerous movement in the water that can shock even experienced swimmers into a panic as they are quickly dragged out to sea). But back then I didn’t want ANYTHING to keep me out of the ocean, so I paid attention to the scary warning signs and figured I should learn what to do if I encountered one of these invisible menaces.

The first riptide lesson is DO NOT PANIC (Because if you do, you’ll potentially swallow ocean water and become even more helpless.) Then you were instructed to try and swim sideways along the shoreline until you got beyond the killer current and then you could crawl out of the water, scream, cry, shiver and get ice cream from strangers.

That’s what flashed into my mind. Turning sideways in the bog was a Herculean feat, but once I achieved it, I realized I was no longer sinking deeply into a cold and wet grave. I couldn’t feel my feet and my legs couldn’t move, but my arms were free. The only question was whether I could hold out long enough to keep them usable. I was too far from the house to be heard, and time was running out.

I went all in with my arms, “swimming” as best I could through 40-degree molasses. And then my hand brushed up against something solid. It was a sapling, growing next to and over the outside edge of the bog. I grabbed a hold of it as hard as I could, pulled like hell, and got about halfway closer to the edge when it snapped off.

I made a live or die decision, dove under the mud, reached the root and pulled on it hard, knowing that my hands wouldn’t last long under the bog. The root and my hands held out until I could reach a bigger nearby sapling, which I grabbed, pulled myself halfway out of the water and passed out.

I don’t think I was out for long, but it gave me enough of a break to be able to pull myself all the way out onto a large rock. It was a solid hour before I could move my legs enough to crawl within shouting distance of the house. When I did, my wife came running out and screamed, “My God! What happened to you?!”

“I got caught in a bogtide.”

P.S. I have recently learned that in the international Language of Flowers, Lady Slipper Orchids stand for sudden and unpredictable attraction, and the yellow variations stand for friendship and new beginnings. That sounds right.