Water defines the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville long before we see or hear it. At first, it is only a dampness in the air, a coolness at ankle level, a dark sheen between sedge tussocks. In the space of a half-hour walk, we pass through fen, bog, marsh, and swamp, each distinct, yet bound together by the same slow, persistent flow.
Here we are traversing a swamp, our steps buoyed along on planking made from recycled plastic. The boardwalk floats visually above pools the color of tea, edged with moss and skunk cabbage. It’s easy to imagine what this crossing would have been like before the planks were laid—boots sinking, knees splashed, delicate plants crushed. The modern walkway is a quiet compromise: we may enter this saturated world without trampling it, a human gesture that matches the preserve’s ethos of protection and restraint.
The Malloryville wetlands lie in a low pocket along Fall Creek, a landscape shaped by the last ice age. As the glacier that once covered this region melted, torrents of water tunneled through the ice, depositing braided ridges of sand and gravel known as eskers. Today, more than a mile of these ancient riverbeds winds through the preserve, narrow wooded spines rising above the surrounding wetlands. From an esker crest, the pattern of water reveals itself: dark channels of open flow, pale pools rimmed with sedge, patches of sphagnum floating like cushions, and, farther off, the straight silver of Fall Creek.
But the story of Malloryville’s water begins far from these pools. Rain falls on the uplands as cool, slightly acidic water. It sinks through glacial till—a jumble left by the ice—and begins a long, blind journey underground. As it moves, the water reacts with the minerals it encounters. Where it brushes limestone or other carbonate-rich layers, it is slowly neutralized and picks up dissolved calcium and magnesium. By the time it resurfaces in low spots, it may be transformed from sour, soft rain to mineral-rich groundwater.
Those subtle chemical shifts are written onto the land. In some hollows, where water still mainly reflects its origin as rain, the environment becomes a bog—cold, acidic, nutrient-poor. Here, sphagnum moss knits a floating carpet, and only specialists such as leatherleaf and cranberries can endure. In other pockets, where groundwater welling up from below brings minerals, we find fens: lush, lime-touched wetlands offering niches for orchids, sedges, and the carnivorous pitcher plant. Marshes and swamps round out the spectrum, their standing water and wooded shade forming still more microhabitats.
In this small preserve, all these wetland types coexist side by side, threaded by water that often moves so slowly it appears not to move at all. The stillness is deceptive. A slight difference in elevation—barely the height of your boot—can determine whether water spreads and stagnates, seeps outward in a fan, or concentrates into a narrow, unseen channel. Hydrologists studying the area have shown that a water-table mound of only a few inches can redirect the underground flow and, over time, steer the evolution from open fen to peat-filled bog.
Human history here is entwined with that quiet power. The founders of the preserve, themselves from a dairy farming family, came to understand that the springs, seeps, and wetlands feeding Fall Creek were vulnerable. Gravel pits on nearby land had already bitten into the valley; another such excavation on this side would have severed the veins of water that sustain the fen and bog. Their years-long effort to protect the property culminated in a Nature Conservancy preserve whose very purpose is to safeguard water and the uncommon communities it supports.
The boardwalk under our feet is part of that story. Its recycled-plastic planks do not rot in constant dampness, and their smooth, slightly hollow sound reminds us with each step that we are guests in a place where soil never truly dries. At the edges of the walkway, tamarack and red maple lift their trunks from hummocks, their roots anchored in peat built grain by grain from centuries of water-logged plant remains. In the open patches, we can seek out pitcher plants, their flaring, water-filled leaves digesting unwary insects to make up for the nutrient-poor conditions.
Everywhere, water moves almost invisibly. It rises as a cold trickle at the base of the esker, fans through the moss as a thin sheet, and gathers again in dark, tannin-stained channels. It rarely speaks aloud; only in spring flood or after hard rain does it murmur against roots or tap lightly at the plastic planks. Yet its influence is written in every texture and color—emerald moss, rusty sedge, the silvery bark of birch leaning over a pool.
To walk in Malloryville is to learn to read this subtle handwriting. We begin by noticing the obvious: the wetness, the boardwalk, the glimpses of standing water. By the end of the walk, we are tracing gradients—how the plants shift with elevation, how the ground feels underfoot, how the air cools or warms by a degree or two. We sense the long journey of water from sky to stone to peatland to creek, and onward to Cayuga Lake and the wider world beyond.
Water, flowing quietly, almost soundlessly, with powerful effect: Malloryville Preserve, that power is persistence. It is the power to carve a valley, to build a peatland one stem at a time, to sustain rare communities of plants and animals in a modest corner of New York. To honor such water is to move carefully, speak softly, and remember that our presence, like our boardwalk, should allow the flow beneath to continue its ancient work.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 