Nature Talks.

Fire And Ice.

Author: February 7, 2025 1 Comment

It’s warm for February, a meteorological island where I don’t even need to put on a jacket before going out. The weather’s been brutally cold, and we’ve even had an unusual amount of snow, so this sudden spike, while nice for those of us who tend to be more cold-blooded, is also unsettling. February shouldn’t feel like May, though the coming May will probably, at least at times, feel like August, when it really should feel more like September. It’s even possible that May will feel like February, which will be even worse.

There were times like this when I was a kid, brief warm spells in the middle of winter, the bare trees and beige spiky grass contrasting sharply with the ambient warmth. My parents insisted I still go out wearing at least a jacket. It was still winter, after all. That’s what the calendar said and that mattered more than the thermometer. At any moment the heat could break, like a fever, like the time my own temperature spiked and I stayed in bed all day, shivering even as my body burned,a thick quilt pulled up to my forehead, and hours swirled away into a dark funnel. And the heat did break, eventually, cold rushing back into the world the way it did on those late nights when I’d open my window to listen to the darkness.

The sky then was always cloudy when it was warm, another disjunction. The sky looked like winter even if the ground didn’t feel like it. It’s cloudy now, too, the flat dull gray of cold weather, of a sky that doesn’t have the energy to do anything but spread itself out and close its eyes. 

This afternoon, though, there was a change. The clouds curled up, still swaddling the sun but there was an azure expanse overhead. And off in the distance there was the faintest rainbow, barely together, a block of the spectrum against a flat backdrop of ash.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. We have words for how the winter cold makes us feel, and the summer heat, but a warm February has me tongue-tied. How should I feel? I ask the sky as though I need some external guidance, something to tell me what it means. But I know what it means. The world is in flux, in motion, and things will change even as I am, for the moment, frozen.

 

Nature Talks., The Weekly Essay

Light A Candle: 2024 Edition.

Author: December 25, 2024 6 Comments

This is a revised version of my annual Hanukkah post. The message remains the same but with each passing year I feel it’s even more important to do the best I can to value every life.

The squirrels have stayed out of the attic. At the start of every Hanukkah I think about this because several years ago we had a squirrel infestation. There was at least one family nesting in the insulation. The scrabbling sounds that woke us in the middle of the night were a minor inconvenience, as was the possibility the squirrels were using whatever we had stored up there for nesting material. A bigger problem was that they might be tearing up the insulation, as was the possibility that they might chew through wiring which could start a fire and burn down the entire house, leaving all of us without a nest, and unlike the squirrels we couldn’t easily move to a clump of leaves in the nook of a tree.
So I unfolded the rickety wooden ladder and climbed into the attic through the door in the hallway ceiling. I was able to chase some squirrels out but that was a temporary solution so I also took some traps smeared with peanut butter. I used the spring bar traps, the kind that used to be sold under the slogan, “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Since we were dealing with squirrels, though, I used the size intended for bigger animals. These had the slogan, “These will cut your fingers off,” and could be sprung from ten feet away by a good sneeze. I discovered dexterity I never knew I had and set the traps carefully, hoping they’d serve as a deterrent and convince the squirrels to move out. I wasn’t so lucky. I had to bag a few bodies, their necks broken by the steel bar, and carry them to the garbage then reset the traps, trying not to sneeze.
Then one night I found a squirrel still alive in one of the traps. It was struggling to get away but badly injured. I knew I couldn’t let the squirrel go. Even if it survived its injury, which wasn’t likely, even if it avoided being run over by a car, even if it escaped neighborhood dogs, stray cats, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, even if it wasn’t attacked by other squirrels, it could get back into the house. Most important, though, it would spend whatever life it had left in excruciating pain. I’d caused it to suffer and I had a responsibility to end that suffering.
I knew all this, but I wasn’t looking forward to what I had to do either. My wife suggested I use a hatchet but that would mean I’d have to look at the squirrel, I’d have to aim carefully, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. A history teacher once told me that Mary Queen of Scots, as she approached the chopping block, turned to her executioner and said, “Be mercifully quick.” Her request apparently made him lose his nerve; it took him three tries to finish the job.

I put the trap with the squirrel still in it into a white plastic garbage bag and took it out to the driveway. I got a shovel out of the basement. The squirrel struggled a little in the bag, which I appreciated because it told me exactly where to hit. I wanted, for both of us, to be mercifully quick.
After the clang of the shovel faded, I heard a flute playing. Someone a few houses away was in their backyard practicing “Jingle Bells”. For some reason this song always makes me think of people and woodland animals sharing the sleigh ride together, a sort of Eden with snow and moonlight. The sun had just set, and in the stillness I remembered it was the first night of Hanukkah. Inn some houses and places of worship the first candle of the menorah had either been lit or was about to be lit.
I’m not Jewish. I’m not even religious in any traditional sense, but I know Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates hope and perseverance. It’s about a miracle of light and life–one day’s worth of oil burning for eight–coming to people who have just been through darkness and death. It’s a celebration by people who survived an all-out attempt to wipe them off the face of the Earth. It may not be the highest of holy days but it’s usually celebrated around the solstice, and there’s something fitting, even poetic, about candles being lit against the darkness on the darkest nights of the year.
I first learned about Hanukkah when I was a Boy Scout and working on a project about religion. I was supposed to learn about a faith other than my own. I was raised in a very relaxed Presbyterian church and because I wasn’t particularly religious then either I could have picked just about any other Christian sect and had friends who were Catholic and Baptist and Methodist, but I didn’t know any Jews, or didn’t think I knew any. I’d read stories about Jewish families and traditions. The minister of our church had a sign on his office door that said, “Shalom!” I decided I wanted to know Judaism better. I went to a local temple one afternoon when it was empty. First the rabbi took me to his office and started asking me questions. How long had I been a Boy Scout? What was my project about? Why had I chosen Judaism? It was nice to have an adult take an interest in me but also confusing. I knew “rabbi” was the Hebrew word for “teacher” and I was there to learn, not talk about myself. When he asked if I knew anything about Judaism I panicked. I should have done some cursory background reading before coming, I thought, but I hadn’t done anything to prepare. I admitted this and prepared myself for his disappointment. Instead he smiled.
“There’s no sin in ignorance.”
Suddenly I felt relief. I’m sure adults had told me that before, but it was not what I expected, especially from a teacher. I spent most of my youth feeling like I was supposed to know things that I’d never been told; everything seemed to be a test, and I frequently thought I was failing. At that moment I felt assured that it was okay to not know anything as long as I was willing to learn.
“Do you know any Jewish holidays?” he asked.
I’d learned about Passover in Sunday school; the plagues of Egypt and Moses and his people feeling were one of the earliest Bible stories I remembered learning, even before Adam and Eve. That’s why I didn’t think of Passover as a Jewish holiday. Instead I said, “Hanukkah,” which I knew sometimes overlapped with Christmas, and I only knew that from after-school specials about Jewish kids who felt left out during Christmas.
“Do you know the story of Hanukkah?”
I still didn’t feel great about not knowing anything but I liked that he wasn’t just lecturing me; he was interested in what I knew. He smiled again and, as we walked through the temple, he told me the story of the Maccabees, and the destruction of the temple, and how the oil that was only supposed to last for one night burned for eight, and Hanukkah is the celebration of this miracle.
Then he took me into the main sanctuary and showed me around. It was very much like other churches I’d been in, very much like the Presbyterian sanctuary I went to every Sunday, in fact, with pews and a raised section at the front, but with slightly different decorations. He explained about the Torah, how the ark that holds it is positioned so those who face it are facing toward Jerusalem. Then he pointed upward to the Eternal Light. It was just an electric light, made to look like a flickering flame, but the specifics didn’t concern me. I was captivated by the symbolism. I’d read The Diary Of Anne Frank in school so I had an idea how unkind history, particularly the 20th Century, had been to the Jews but here, I thought, was the central symbol of a belief system built around hope, and as long as hope persists so does life.
In college I took a class on Judaism and attended services at the local synagogue. The first time I went I picked up a prayer book and opened it. On the first page there was a short story about the prophet Isaiah, who stood at the door of the temple and said, “I cannot go in, this temple is full.” The people looked in and said, “There’s no one in the temple. Why do you say it’s full?” And Isaiah said, “The temple is filled with prayers that are not sincere. Only prayers offered from the heart will ascend into Heaven.” Again I felt that deep sense of hope. Faith, the ultimate expression of hope, is worthless if it’s not sincere, but, more importantly, it has to be backed up with action. There’s nothing passive about hope.
I went to services at the temple several more times, and took part in Passover seders in the spring, and, with a Jewish friend, lit the menorah candles for Hanukkah while she recited the prayers.

One day while I was doing research for a paper in the synagogue library I sat in on a talk the rabbi gave parents about coping with, and hopefully preventing, teen suicides. He was emphatic that “l’chaim”, “to life”, wasn’t just a toast made at meals but a philosophy, that to be a Jew meant taking joy in life.
In my studies of Judaism I kept going back to Hanukkah and its traditions. I read how, over a thousand years ago, two rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, had competing ideas about how Hanukkah should be celebrated. Rabbi Shammai said all candles should be lit on the first night and then one extinguished on each night as a literal representation of the diminishing oil. There’s a strange beauty in Shammai’s literalness, and I assume the growing darkness would end with a grand blaze. Rabbi Hillel said that one candle should be lit each night so on the final night all eight candles would blaze with glory. Instead of increasing darkness there would be growing light and hope. Hillel’s tradition is the one that’s survived.

None of this has anything to do with the squirrels, but it all came to me anyway. I was extinguishing a light even as in other houses lights were being offered up against the darkness. It seemed like the universe was conspiring to make me feel bad about what I’d done, but I accepted the responsibility. I’d even say I welcomed it, even if I wished the epiphany had come more easily. I can rationalize until I’m blue in the face–although it might come across as, well, I believe the appropriate term is kvetching. I can say that even though one-fourth of all mammal species are presently in danger of extinction squirrels aren’t one of them. I can say that at least I’m not actually harming another person, and that through history people have done terrible things to other people with less justification than I have for killing the squirrels in the attic. Nothing I can say changes the fact that, hokey as it sounds, I don’t want to be directly responsible for the deaths of squirrels. I don’t think squirrels are a cornerstone species, or that the disappearance of Sciurus griseus would tip the balance and lead to the extinction of Homo sapiens, but being too casual about extermination threatens us all. As long as the traps were killing them I could shirk responsibility. I was just a caretaker; the traps were doing the work. When the trap failed, I had to face what I was doing. I thought about a poem by Maxine Kumin, who was Jewish, called “Woodchucks”, about her efforts to protect her vegetable garden. She opens with a quick description of first using gas, “The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange/was featured as merciful, quick at the bone,” but it doesn’t work and over the poem’s thirty lines she quickly escalates to shooting them, “The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling/to the feel of the .22.” One woodchuck evades her and in the end she laments, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” This is the danger that comes from being too casual about death. She feels herself becoming her own worst enemy.
It’s not a perfect metaphor. The only perfect metaphor that I know of in English literature is from Gertrude Stein, also Jewish, who wrote, “a rose is a rose is a rose”. There is no justification for the Nazi concentration camps. The woodchucks, on the other hand, threatened Kumin’s food supply, or at least her rhubarb and brussels sprouts. The Biblical land of milk and honey is called that because, in theory anyway, because nothing has to die to provide them, but we can’t live on milk and honey alone. And dairy farmers and apiarists will agree that milk and honey aren’t that pure. Part of the web of life is death.
As a counter to that I also thought of a poem by Gerald Stern, also also Jewish, called “Behaving Like A Jew”, about finding an opossum shot and lying in the road. He says, “I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death./I am going to behave like a Jew/and touch his face, and stare into his eyes.” What exactly he does next isn’t clear, other than moving the opossum off the road, but what is clear is that he refuses to let a death pass; he is going to mourn the loss of a life so small and seemingly unconnected to his. Death is a part of life which is why it should never be taken lightly.
I didn’t reset the trap in the attic that night, or again. Something in me had broken, but in another strange coincidence the squirrels left and didn’t come back. There were still a few traps up there at either end of the attic, where I’d balanced carefully on the rafters and tried to avoid stepping through the insulation, but they stayed empty. Eventually we’d replace the roof and put up new siding, replacing the old that had holes in it, but by the time we did the squirrels were no longer a problem. Maybe the injured squirrel had frightened the others away. Maybe it was just a coincidence. If I were religious I might believe they knew I’d prayed for the killing to stop and that because my prayer was sincere it rose up.

Nature Talks., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Fall Homecoming.

Author: December 10, 2024 2 Comments

Even when I was very little I didn’t like the ladybug nursery rhyme—the one that says, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children will burn.” That’s the variation I was most familiar with. I was told that allowing ladybugs to fly away would bring good luck, but they never seemed to need any encouragement to leave. They’d land on my hand or arm and then fly away even without the threat of family tragedy.

I was reminded of all this when, on my way to work, I passed a small cluster of ladybugs on a wall. They were too spread out to get a picture of the group, but it’s a place where I’ve seen swarms of them before. There’s a large sugar maple next to the wall. Maybe ladybugs are drawn to sugar maples because the aphids and other bugs they like to eat are drawn to sugar maples or maybe it’s just a coincidence that my parents planted a sugar maple in the front yard of the house where I spent most of my childhood and it was regularly covered with swarms of ladybugs.

Based on Google Maps that sugar maple is still there, though my parents moved out more than twenty years ago, and it hasn’t gotten a lot bigger than it was when I was young. The magnolia tree they planted a few years later is there too. I remember the first time I found ladybugs on it and their funny little larvae, and their funnier accordion-like chrysalises. The chrysalises were fastened to the tree at one end and if I tapped them with my finger they’d bounce up and down as though saying, “Get lost, I’m pupatin’ here!”

I collected some of the larvae and put them in a jar with leaves and twigs and took them to my room so I could watch them build their chrysalises. Within a few days fully grown ladybugs emerged and I felt guilty. I had to release them in the cold and I was afraid keeping them in my warm room had accelerated their development. Watching the ones on the tree, though, assured me that this was normal. Some ladybugs lay eggs in the spring or summer then the eggs hatch and they form swarms in the late fall or early winter. They don’t worry about fire because they’re used to the cold.

Here’s Google’s view of my childhood home:

Source: Google Street View

Adventures In Busing., Nature Talks.

Can We Talk?

Author: October 18, 2024 4 Comments

I believe life exists on planets other than Earth, and even life that’s intelligent in ways we could recognize and even communicate with. I don’t think that’s a controversial idea but this week I did get into a conversation with someone who said that if intelligent life forms are out there surely we would have found some evidence by now. After asking them not to call me Shirley I think I made a pretty good case for why we haven’t found evidence yet. For starters we haven’t really been looking for that long. Telescopes in the modern sense have only been around about five hundred years, and that’s just the ones you use to see Saturn’s rings or what your neighbors are doing. Even the most powerful telescopes are extremely limited. The first planet outside our solar system wasn’t found until 1992, and even though a lot have been found since then we haven’t gotten any up-close view of any of them. A few years earlier, in 1990, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to use the Galileo probe, on its way to Jupiter, to see if there was any evidence of life on Earth. The answer was, “Maybe.”

We don’t even know how many planets could potentially have life because we’ve got a sample size of one out of an unknown number. And there’s the question of why intelligent aliens, if they’re out there, haven’t visited us yet. Maybe they have—I’m not sure about that—but if they haven’t it’s probably because, as Douglas Adams said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Here’s my own perspective on that: you may think a one-hundred thousand mile warranty on your car is a sweet deal but that would barely get you one percent of the way to the Sun, and that’s the closest star to us. Even if super-intelligent aliens have somehow discovered a way to travel between stars, even if they’ve found a way to travel beyond the speed of light there’s so much space out there the odds of aliens even passing through our neighborhood are, literally, astronomically low.

So what about communication? Why haven’t we heard from anybody? That’s where I think things get really interesting because, yes, we can beam radio waves out into space, but we’ve been doing that for less than a hundred and fifty years. There are a lot of stars within that distance but anybody out there listening would have to have something that could pick up those signals, interpret them, and send a message back. If they’re at the farthest point it would take just as long for their message to get back to us and we’d have to be still be listening, and have some way to filter the message out of all the galaxy’s background noise. Now imagine aliens on other planets having the same issue with their signals.

That’s assuming they even communicate the same way we do, which makes it even more complicated. We can’t even communicate with our closest genetic relatives on this planet. In stories about animals it’s funny to me when different species all speak the same language—when birds can talk to rabbits, skunks can talk to raccoons, and so on. It’s a nice ideal but, let’s face it, I’ve watched enough real backyard wildlife to know that even squirrels and foxes have vastly different priorities. And what if creatures on other planets don’t even communicate through sound? In the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama humans meet, among other things, spider-like aliens that “speak” with bioluminescent rainbow patterns. In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager the crew encounters a spacefaring giant centipede that communicates through chemical emissions. And speaking of that there’s the alien Kurt Vonnegut imagined who came to Earth to tell us how to prevent war and cure cancer in its native language of tap dancing and farting which, now that I think about it, isn’t that strange—I had an uncle who communicated by farting, but that’s another story.

And this doesn’t even get into one of my favorite science fiction tropes which is that alien species are so often monolithic, speaking the same language, even having the same culture, across an entire planet. Every time that comes up in a science fiction story I want to ask the writer, “And how long have you lived on Earth?” Admittedly it’s plausible that there are advanced alien species that are like that—it’s a big universe and there are a lot of possibilities.

And speaking of monoliths, or rather monologues, no, I didn’t spout all this out at the other person—I’d have to have been babbling away longer than Hamlet. These are all just thoughts I had and that I felt the need to share with the universe.

Keep Looking Up, Nature Talks., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Ciao, Baby, Part 2: They’re Back.

Author: September 6, 2024 4 Comments

When I said hornets hold a grudge I thought I was kidding. Insects having the memory to recognize and target an individual, to make deliberate attacks, sounds like something out of a horror film. If it hadn’t happened I wouldn’t believe it. I’m still not entirely sure I believe it.

When bugs first started appearing in horror films they were mostly solitary giants: the titular monsters in Tarantula (1955), The Deadly Mantis (1957), which deliver exactly what they say on the can, and Mothra (1961), though one of the earliest bug films, Them! (1954), did something different with a horde of giant ants who are somehow really hard to find in Los Angeles. Both The Beginning Of The End (1957) and Five Million Years To Earth (1967) gave us giant grasshoppers, though in the later film they’re from Mars and use psychic powers to summon the Devil. As audiences evolved horror did too. More people realized that, although there were once eight-foot millipedes and two-foot dragonflies, the Earth they roamed was a very different place, and giant insects now are biologically impossible. And bugs are so much more terrifying, and plausible, in quantity, which led to films like the still disturbing and atmospheric Phase IV (1974) with hyper-intelligent ants, Bug (1975), and Kingdom Of The Spiders (1977). And I remember when I was a kid the threat of killer bees being a hot news item for a hot second, probably because of the movie The Swarm (1978). And while bug films tapered off through the slasher-minded ’80’s there was a little bit of a resurgence with Arachnophobia (1990)—I’m ashamed to admit a friend and I threw handfuls of plastic spiders into the audience of a screening of that one—and Eight Legged Freaks (2002).

The hornets, each one no bigger than the end of my pinky finger, didn’t need numbers to frighten me. It’s been a long time since I was stung by anything and while I was never allergic before my body then was a very different place, and anaphylaxis is no joke, though Anna Phylaxis would be a great name for a Drag Queen, but that’s another story.

I’d put off dealing with the hornets because I only saw one or two at a time, and they didn’t seem interested in me. When one followed me into the house, however, I knew we couldn’t continue to coexist in such close quarters.

First I tried an organic solution. I plugged the hole they’d been using to go in and out of the crawlspace under the house and where, I assumed, they were building a nest. I hoped maybe the ones stuck outside would bivouac elsewhere and if any were inside, well, time would take care of them. Instead of going away a whole squadron hovered around the plugged hole like paparazzi outside a Hollywood nightclub. At least they ignored me, for the moment, but I felt I had to take drastic measures before they went into attack formation. The bug and hornet killer delivered exactly what it said on the can. A quick, well-placed spray of foul-smelling foam took down hornets clinging to the wall and in flight. They fell into piles of dead leaves and disappeared. I could only hope the end was mercifully quick.  

I only had to knock out a few. The horde disbanded. But the next day a couple came back. I was a dead-eye with the spray, and soon they were dead too. That would be all, I thought. Then, the day after, I was out in the yard when one grazed the back of my neck and buzzed by my ear. “Clever girl,” I muttered as it sailed up over the house before I could arm myself. After that every whisper of wind, every falling leaf, even the buzz of a fly made me jump. One last hornet was out there and it knew me. I saw it by the plugged hole about an hour later; I grabbed the spray can from the basement and aimed. I missed, and the hornet flew right at me, making cold eye-contact before it disappeared.

That night it went to the patio light, buzzing around the bulb inside the glass case. With the spray ready I waited until it came out and hit it. The hornet fell, struggled, curled and uncurled, then stopped. All I could do was stand there and watch it die. Then I got some water and washed away the spray, like tears in the rain.  

Except that wasn’t the end. There was another one clinging to the brickwork in the shadows, and the next morning another. There will always be another one. They know it’s not size that matters but numbers.

Nature Talks., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault, The Weekly Essay

Ciao, Baby.

Author: August 30, 2024 6 Comments

There are hornets under the house, in the crawlspace. I only know this because I’ve seen them going in and out of a hole in the bricks next to the patio. They’ve kept to themselves which is the only reason I haven’t convinced my wife to pack up the dogs and all our belongings and set the house on fire as we drive away. I’ve thought about getting one of those bug bombs that sprays a cloud of insecticide and throwing it into the crawl space, then packing up the dogs and all our belongings and setting the house on fire as we drive away, but, as I said, they’ve kept to themselves.

Still they need to go. I believe I was stung by a hornet once at camp. I can’t be absolutely certain—it was some kind of flying insect that landed on the ground near where I was collecting firewood. I’ve also been stung by honeybees, bumblebees, yellowjackets, and paper wasps and this was a pain more intense than any of those. Luckily I’m not allergic and though it felt like hours the pain dissipated in about fifteen minutes, even without any treatment. When I was a kid and got stung by bees my mother would make a compress out of tobacco and a wet paper towel which helped draw out the poison, and that’s why cigarettes are better than vaping, but that’s another story.

Hornets are also just scary looking beasts. Around the time I got stung by a hornet I was writing stories about a character named Nighthawk. He was sort of a futuristic Robin Hood, going up against an evil king with a robot army in a neo-medieval world. At one point, having infiltrated the castle, Nighthawk had to battle a giant mutant hornet, the scariest thing I could imagine, created by the king’s mad scientist. I believe this is why one stung me; hornets carry grudges.

Wasps are also another matter entirely, giving their kids names like Aldrich and Margeaux, and droning on about how they summered in the Hamptons. When I was a kid a neighbor showed me a mud dauber nest, a cluster of tubes built out of dried mud. He showed me how, like bees, they’re clever and industrious creatures. Then he broke open the tubes and dozens of spider corpses spilled out. As someone who’s always been fascinated by the beauty and wonder of the natural world, who appreciates that there is death as well as life in the grand cycle, that’s when I wanted the neighbor to pack up all his belongings and leave so I could set his house on fire. You come for the spiders you come for me.

The hornets, on the other hand, eat bugs like grasshoppers, and they also drink nectar, so they’re even beneficial. The ones we have are also not, as far as I can tell, the infamous murder hornets that caused widespread panic a few years ago; they’re more likely European hornets. In fact they belong to the genus Vespa so I think they’ll be cool as long as I pass by them and say “Ciao”.

Nature Talks., The Weekly Essay

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

Author: July 26, 2024 4 Comments

One day the rain just stops. A day goes by, a few days, then a week, then more weeks. You notice that the grass is getting brittle and dry and the ground is rock hard. Then the grass turns the color of sand and even the air seems brittle with the dryness of it. The weather reports become numbingly uniform: sunny every day. Reports of record-breaking temperatures become repetitive. Something in the back of your mind says that this is wrong, but the heat saps any energy you might have for thinking about it.

On your way home from work each night you start counting the number of neighbors who are watering their yards, the ones who stand out because their grass is a patch of emerald in a sea of buff and sepia. You get wicked ideas about sneaking into their yards and cutting their hoses with a pair of garden shears in the middle of the night. Maybe they’ll pay a fine for using so much water.

Maybe you should think about xeriscaping, but this isn’t the desert. The rain will come back eventually, won’t it?

Desiccated tree branches fall in the yard. No need to move them just yet. The lawnmower sits in the garage, its small reservoir of fuel sending out a slow stream of fumes.

One morning you notice a spider hanging in her web next to your house. She’s brown and white speckled with big yellow dots on her abdomen. You saw her early in the spring, just like you watched her mother, her grandmother, and a whole line of her great-grandmothers going back several years. She clambers around, connecting the spokes of her web.

The lack of rain affects everything up and down the food chain, and you haven’t seen as many rabbits, snakes, or even squirrels as usual. This spider, like you, is not native to North America; her ancestors probably came with yours, around three centuries ago. She’s nocturnal so it’s strange that she’s still out on a sunny morning when the temperature is already higher than it would be at noon in a normal year.

You fill a birdbath in the backyard. You fill another in the front yard. You watch cardinals, bluejays, even a sleek-headed crow dip their beaks in it. You watch squirrels come to drink then flip the birdbath over. It’s only a few minutes before you go to put it back and refill it but the ground is already dry.

You have a side bed of morning glories and other small plants. After the sun goes down you turn the nozzle on the hose to “mist” and you realize you can’t remember the last time you heard a tree frog. They always sing in the dark after it rains.

Leaves turn brown and fall even though it’s only late summer. A seven-foot branch falls from a tree. The broken end is reddish, dry, and dusty.

Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and even tsunamis are all horrible, often tragic events that come in suddenly, sometimes with no warning, or not enough warning, but then they disappear, often as quickly as they came. Floods and tsunamis recede, wildfires burn out all their fuel or, hopefully, are stopped, and tornadoes just spin themselves out.

A drought is a tragedy in slow motion.

And then one day it rains. It rains and rains, and it’s like a fever breaking. There’s a puddle that frames clouds bronzed with sun, and it looks deep enough to be a whole new world.

Nature Talks., The Vault, The Weekly Essay

Summer Lights.

Author: June 14, 2024 4 Comments

There have been more lightning bugs this year than I can remember seeing in a long time. Last night I walked through the yard and lost count of how many there were, each one drawing a distinct J shape in the air as they lit up the darkness. And yet I always feel guilty when I see them because I remember how many I sent to their deaths when I was a kid. Not that I wanted to—there were just some things I didn’t understand, mainly that if you put a bunch of lightning bugs in a jar and leave it next to your bed overnight it doesn’t matter how many holes you punch in the lid. Unless the holes are big enough for them to get out. It’s something I only did a few times but still I think I should have learned the lesson after the first time I woke up to find a jar full of tiny corpses on my bedside table. That also didn’t stop me from performing some pretty disturbing science experiments, like the time I put a lightning bug in the freezer for one minute. When I pulled it out it had stopped moving so I ran outside to the air conditioner and held the lightning bug under the hot blast of air. After a minute or so—I didn’t think to time this part of the experiment—it revived and flew up into the air. So I caught it again and took it back to the freezer for two minutes. Again the air conditioner was able to revive it, although I might have gotten the same result if I’d just left it on the warm ground. At three minutes it took much longer to revive and, sensing I was at a crossroads with one divide leading to a possible career as a serial killer, I let the lightning bug go off into the night, hopefully to find a partner.

It wasn’t until several years later that I read an Appalachian folk tale that, had I read it earlier, might have stopped me from experimenting with lightning bugs. Maybe it would have even convinced me to just let them be. It seems a man was sitting out on his porch with a bunch of his buddies one night watching the lightning bugs and he remarked that they must be cowards, afraid of the dark, to carry their own little lights. A lightning bug heard this and challenged the man to a fight.

“Meet me in the town square tomorrow night,” said the lightning bug, “and I’ll show you how cowardly we are.”

“Will you be bringing any of your friends?” the man asked.

“I won’t need to,” the lightning bug replied.

The next night the whole town showed up to the square, everyone having heard that one of them was going to fight a lightning bug. The lightning bug was there, all lit up.

“All right,” said the man, putting up his fists, “let’s have this fight!”

The lightning bug immediately flew up his nose and the man punched himself in the face. He fell down unconscious and the lightning bug flew out his ear. Another man, not entirely sure what happened, put up his fists and challenged the lightning bug. It flew up his nose and he knocked himself unconscious. A dozen of the town’s biggest, strongest, and not exactly brightest men went down in this way.

Circling over their bodies the lightning bug asked if anyone else was up the challenge but the remaining townspeople just quietly backed away.

Now I also let the lightning bugs alone, even if I’ve got my own reasons.

Nature Talks., Not Non-Fiction

Blood Donor.

Author: May 31, 2024 7 Comments

There was a red smear on my arm where I’d slapped a mosquito. It’s not even really summer yet and already I can’t sit out on the patio at dusk without being poked by at least a dozen tiny needles. It’s like a visit to the emergency room, but the bill doesn’t come in the mail—it shows up as a bunch of tiny, itchy red bumps. Some years mosquitoes completely ignore me, and supposedly what you eat can keep them away. As a kid I was told swallowing a spoonful of vinegar kept mosquitoes and other parasites away, and from what I’ve read eating a lot of onions, garlic, and beans will deter both mosquitoes and everyone else. As I looked at that red stain on my arm and the crushed mosquito body, such a dangerous, even deadly thing and yet so tiny and fragile, I started to feel something for the mosquitoes. I wouldn’t call it sympathy but I felt a kind of understanding of them. I’m not ignoring the fact that mosquitoes are responsible for at least a million deaths a year—even if it is indirect. The diseases they carry, especially malaria, cause so much suffering. Still the mosquitoes didn’t ask to be carriers. They just want to pop in, fill up on a few milligrams of a protein drink—which just happens to be blood—and go on. And eliminating the mosquitoes isn’t a great solution because there are so many other insects, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles that feed on mosquitoes that they’re an important, if extremely annoying, link in a lot of food chains. Malaria, on the other hand, we could do without. Malaria is the guy who shows up at a party and says, “You know, homelessness could be eliminated if people would settle for renting instead of getting into debt with a mortgage” and no one knows who invited him.

Also there have been a lot of times when I’ve been bitten by mosquitoes without even realizing it. They have the decency to inject an anesthetic when they plunge their snouts into our skin, and mostly it works. Sometimes it doesn’t and I’ll feel a little sting. Again it’s like going to the doctor’s office. Some nurses can slide a needle right in and I won’t feel a thing and some jab me and leave me feeling it for at least an hour afterward, and once a nurse said “You’re going to feel a little prick” and I said “You could at least take me out to dinner and a movie first” and somebody else had to come in and draw my blood, but that’s another story.

There is something amazing about the tiny, fragile mosquito. Just a few drops of our red corpuscles can produce hundreds, even thousands. And think about them this way: they’re shapeshifters, transforming from aquatic wrigglers to denizens of the air. They emerge at dusk, find an unsuspecting victim, and drink its blood.

The last thing that went through that mosquito’s mind was the flat of my hand. But I wonder if the next to last thing that went through its mind was, “Sure, when vampires do it you think they’re all sexy and cool, but when we do it we’re a nuisance.”

Then again I’ve never heard of a vampire bringing malaria to a party.

Nature Talks., The Weekly Essay

Feeling Sluggish.

Author: April 12, 2024 4 Comments

April showers have brought out the slugs. Like a lot of common animals I have a history with slugs and it’s not all happy. When I was a kid my mother showed me how to kill slugs by pouring salt on them and I went up and down the sidewalk at night with a big container of the “when it rains it pours”, pouring it all over every slug I could find. The next morning I’d find shriveled leathery bodies like three-dimensional commas, an interrupted life sentence.

Why did I hate the slugs so much? I can’t explain it because I loved snails. I collected snails, built little terrariums for them in empty jars, and spent hours watching them. Slugs were just escargot liberated from the extra cargo of a shell. If anything they deserved more respect for daring to go bare, but I think it was the lack of a shell that bothered me. Snails are builders, architects. They make a refuge and carry it with them, and I could pick up a snail without getting slimed, although I also let them crawl up and down my arm. Slugs, I thought, lived up to their name: sluggish. Lazy. Fat. Stupid. Slugs are unstamped coins. Big, slow moving boats. Hit somebody hard enough and you say you slugged them. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary was an insulting term for people long before it was applied to the gastropod.

That’s imposing a lot on slugs, none of it true. Well, I don’t know about slug intelligence, but their bodies are all muscle, as some friends who decided to fry them up in garlic butter since it was cheaper than going to a French restaurant discovered, and slugs can move pretty quickly, although I guess they have enough natural defenses that most of the time they don’t need to. Most animals either know or, like my friends, discover that slugs aren’t that appetizing.

I’m sure I’d also feel differently if we lived on the west coast where banana slugs are found and are even a school mascot because they’re amazing. I’d probably feel the same way about them that I did about snails. And I’ve always found sea slugs fascinating, from when I first read about them in my Jacques Cousteau books to when, on a trip to Florida, I found some hanging onto a piece of driftwood. They had amber bodies and azure gills. I carried them to the house where we stayed in Florida in a bucket with some sand and rocks and seaweed and watched them for hours. They crawled all over their temporary plastic home, occasionally swimming by curling and uncurling until they floated up to the surface then drifted back down. The next day I took them back to the beach and released them to the sea, not wanting them to die in captivity.

They lived in salt, the same stuff I used to destroy their terrestrial cousins. I don’t know if that’s what changed my mind about the sidewalk slugs but after that I let them pass.

Nature Talks., The Weekly Essay