A Genealogy of Blood and Place

On humid summer nights, after the birds have flown into trees and folded their wings, the true natives of Northwest Ohio infiltrate the darkness.

They creep through the cracks in windows. They use stealth to prey on unprotected victims. They have a claim on this land that predates the Indian tribes whose names mark this place: Wyandot, Seneca, Maumee, Ottawa, Huron.

Theirs is a prehistoric possession, thawed out of the glacier that carved this region into a Great Black Swamp thousands of years ago. We who live here now are their birthright.

Their high-pitched song whines like the wheeze of a slumbering giant. The Great Black Swamp lives in the bloodlines of these delicate, hungry breeders.

When Northwest Ohio was The Great Black Swamp, the mosquitoes kept settlers and Indian tribes at bay. People who dared to enter the shadowy, wild cathedral paid for it with chills, uncontrollable shaking, malaria, condemned to wear wool in summer and inhale the soot of smudge pots at night.

Ditches were gouged into the sides of roads to drain the swampland and reveal rich, fertile soil. Rains still overflow these ditches that are deep enough to swallow a car and drown the passengers. Farms dot the flat horizon, but the clouds of mosquitoes cannot be tamed.

When I was a girl, on summer nights, the foggers would drive up and down the streets, and we would stop in the middle of our sweaty play and taste the peppery pesticides on our tongues.

And, still, the mosquitoes would come.

We would dab our bites with Witch Hazel, or scratch them into scars.

We are the prey of would-be mothers, so essential to their survival. On summer nights, female mosquitoes gather for their blood meal. These nutrients mean eggs and larva and the preservation of their dominion.

In their red swollen bellies is our second genealogy, the untraced lineage that can only belong to a particular place. We who inhabit The Great Black Swamp are blood brothers and sisters with those who inhabited these lands before us. Strong warriors—Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, Chief Bukongahelas, and the famed Tecumseh—who fought settlers and soldiers to maintain their hold on Ohio and its hunting grounds.

My people came to Ohio well after The Great Black Swamp was drained of its water, its great trees were chopped down, leaving a landscape so flat a person can see into the next county. They came well after there were cities and towns and the semblance of civilization. They came and lived where the bobcat once hunted, where black vipers slithered through muck, and beavers gnawed on sycamore branches. We live in a place the mosquitoes never surrendered.

Our blood comingles with the blood of our birthplace ancestors in the bellies of these determined mothers. A new generation waits to be formed, to grow, and keep ownership of our mutual home—a genealogy of blood and place.