Getting leeches on your balls kinda sucks. On one hand you want to rip them off but on the other hand you are lonely and it's been a while since anything's touched them. ¯\(ツ)/¯
While swamps seem “gross” they are actually the cleanest things in nature.
Wetlands are massive water quality processors, they are the opposite of dirty or gross, though I completely understand that feeling that stomping through thick mud is gross.
There's a reason swamps are portrayed that way. They're generally unpleasant to be in for a variety of reasons. Just like being in a cold, dark, wet cave full of spider webs.
Clyde Butcher is one of the greatest American landscape photographers since Ansel Adams and a true hero of modern naturalism. Not only does he hike out into the swamp under conditions that would make most here wilt like cotton candy in the rain (see other comments), he often does it with camera equipment that is ancient, heavy, and bulky by today's standards.
The biggest danger in the Everglades isn't leeches (not at all common), brain eating amoebas (just keep your head above water), snakes (most would rather just slither away), snapping turtles (only aggressive when trapped), or gators (generally slow, predictable, dumb, and avoidable); it's ignorance. The swamp isn't a place into which you'd want to be dropped off unprepared and unequipped, but neither is LA of New York City. Clive Butcher walks the line between tough man and sensitive artist, cottage-core and goblin-core, Lorax and Crocodile Dundee.
Clive Butcher also did a landscape photography series of Salvador Dali's home town that really opened my eyes about the scenes and settings in many of Dali's paintings. It becomes clear that although surreal, many of the landscapes in Dali's paintings are actually surprisingly real places painted literally but adorned with surreal characters and objects.
I live here and it's fine in the cities, they just have us gerrymandered to shit. And yes, I grew up here and never saw the beauty until I left for awhile and came back.
blew my mind when I first learned how useful bogs used to be for living off the land. preserves food and wood, tans leather, gives you fuel, great for foraging, etc
like where else can you find thousands of year old butter that is perfectly good to eat?
All of my knowledge on bayous comes from hunt:showdown and my future decisions regarding waterlogged terrain will be based on an acute expectation of demonic incursion.