Becoming one with the bog
It was technically a 'poor fen', not a bog in the strictest sense, because it's ground-and-surface water fed, not reliant entirely on rain. It's still on the acid side of neutral and dominated by sphagnum moss. The acid and lack of oxygen in the water mean the plant matter doesn't fully decay, which forms the 'peat' of the peat bog, and the sphagnums help make sure it all stays that way.
The peat fen is a sensitive ecosystem, and it's totally possible to sink one of the 'dry' feeling hummocks (they're NOT dry, they're lying; sphagnum can hold a huge amount of water), so you don't walk from hummock to hummock; you avoid them and wade through the water and mud.
It makes very satisfying SSHCHLORP and GLOOOP sounds, stealthily tries to eat your feet if you stand still too long, and it bounces. The ground was actually something like 20 feet below us; we were walking on the peat. I think they said that 90% of the water was in that peat, with 5% below and 5% above. Not sure I've got the numbers right, but picture a giant neutrally buoyant sponge. With a landscape on top of it. It is sproingy.
Bounce, and the shrubs and stunted trees bounce with you, or whatever that saying is.
We saw three species of carnivorous plants. I didn't get a picture of the bladderwort, but the left is a Washington native sundew, and the right is sticky false asphodel, which was only discovered to be carnivorous in 2021.
I also took lots of pictures of pond lilies, which aren't specific to this environment but are really cool looking:
They also make it warmer inside their flowers. That's part of why all the lil' bugs are there! Pond lilies be making it cozy. Swamp lantern (skunk cabbage) also generate heat — and they create their own little 'wells'; clear space in the sphagnum hummocks. None of my pictures captured it well, but it's quite weird. Like little variations on the massive "plant shaping it's environment" theme that the sphagnum moss started.
And that, it turns out, is the true lure and danger of the fen. Not just that it could schloop you under (I only fell on my ass once, and it was sproingy). Not will-o-the-wisps. No, the true mystery is the sphagnum hillocks themselves.
Mounds of moss rising a foot or more above the water, red, brown, chartreuse, and yellow. They look like little hills, but it's moss, moss, moss, all the way down. You can wiggle your hand right down inside it. It's incredibly soft, and it's warm.
I can just imagine someone, weary from their bog slog, starting to miss their footing in the gloop, falling prey to the siren song of the Forbidden Coziness. They lay down (crushing numerous delicate plants as they do). They wriggle in. They fall asleep.
Several thousand years later, a lucky archeologist finds another bog body.
