Eddie sat in the kitchen, back to the picture window, using the natural late morning light to read the daily paper.

He was supposed to be looking at the want ads, but there were never any jobs for people like him - over 40 with no high school diploma - that is, ever since Dana closed its plant in the nearby town of Churubusco.

Instead, he leafed through the pages and his eyes settled on the "CONSTRUCTION' section of the paper:

Madden Road is scheduled to close between Bryie and North County Line roads for a few days next week.

The Allen County Highway Department said the closure should start about 7:30 a.m. Monday and end about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Crews are fixing a soft spot in the road.

As he read, the blood drained from his face. Almost reflexively, Eddie looked over his right shoulder, out the window and toward the dip in Madden Road about a half block from his house.

"Those stupid bastards," he half mumbled to himself. "What are they thinking?"

Eddie put he paper down on the kitchen table, grabbed and put on his jacket and headed outside into the cold morning air.

He looked fearfully at the small woods bordering his home and at the finger of dark water that jutted out of the overgrowth and barely touched Madden Road.

Eddie, hands in the jacket pockets to escape the autumn chill, walked briskly to the dip in the road. 

No traffic this morning. Hardly ever is; only he and the Rosentraders live out this far since the bank foreclosed on the Holloworths last month.

All the commuters either take County Line Road to the north or Highway 205 - not this forgotten north-south stretch of chip-and-seal that bisects a 20-acre oddly-shaped marshland with its three muck-bottomed lakes. 

Eddie stepped into the street and walked over to and stood in the middle of the so-called "soft spot" mentioned in the city paper.

Looking toward the west he stared at a small hourglass-shaped 4-acre black-water lake surrounded by waterlogged and stunted trees. Its water was gently lapping against the crumbling tar and gravel of Madden Road.

Eddie then turned to the east and that same black water, no more than 12 inches deep picked up again as soon as the pavement ended.

Madden was starting to look more like a causeway than a road.

The water on the east side of Madden overflowed the shallow ditch and started spreading toward the Holloworth's waterlogged and abandoned yard.

The dark water stretched for about nine feet before being swallowed by the overgrowth that skirted along the Holloworth property line and stretched all the way to Fulk's Lake about 100 yards away.

Looks like there was more wet here now than this past summer, Eddie thought to himself, moving closer to the edge but fearful to get too close to the inky water.

This survey was interrupted by sharp cracking sound behind him. On instinct, Eddie turned and looked toward the source of the noise.

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The beginning of this story was inspired by my childhood in Northeast Indiana.

Back in the late 1700s, one of the largest contiguous swamps existed between Toledo, Ohio and Fort Wayne Indiana, bisected by the Maumee River.

It was called the Great Black swamp because it was so thick with huge trees - one of the largest temperate rain forests and wetlands of its time so thick that in broad daylight, very little sun reached the swampy ground.

Full of quicksand traps and thick clouds of insects, the "Black Swamp" name also befitted its reputation as a deadly killer to hapless travelers. Also, illnesses spread by insects such as malaria and various fevers killed off Native Americans and European settlers by the thousands.

The Black Swamp also was home to many now-extinct animals, such as the Indiana Panther.

Over that past two centuries, the swamp was systematically drained and turned into rich farmland.

But scattered about the land in small pockets of a few acres here and there, some remnants of the Great Swamp still exist in the form of a haunting hollow - and in hundreds of small muck-bottomed "bottomless lakes" that dot the landscape.

It is in these places that the Great Swamp holds on - resisting attempts at draining and sometimes, reaching out and lashing back at attempts to tame it by swallowing a hapless lone deer hunter in a long-forgotten quicksand sinkhole.

That is the setting of this story - Nature - with a capital N - refusing to be tamed and the remains of the Great Swamp's fight to survive and regain its footprint from the parasite that is mankind.

updated Nov 14, 2008 by Davodd