“COME QUICKLY. YOU MUSTN’T MISS the dawn!” Georgia O’Keeffe once urged her guests at her Abiquiu, New Mexico, house in 1951. “It will never be just like this again!!”
As I set out for a walk, stalks of pink and orange clouds rise straight up in a porcelain-blue sky. Is the sky a blue vase? Only as part of the vase of the universe, mottled with planets, surging with broths and possibly with other planetarians who quest and question. A good walk, despite the pinched nerves in my neck, which I’ve been suffering with sometimes mightily, anxiously, despairingly, maybe even angrily (Angri-la, that paradise of rage in the Himalayas of the mind). I’ve felt volumes of suffering during these days, but not unhappiness. I love being part of the saga of life on earth, and both suffering and change feature large in that adventure, are that adventure. For the moment, we can only know Earth-life, the shape and complexion life has found in us and our neighbors, on the home planet where we were born. It’s ironic that we designate this or that landform as a natural wonder, when no facet of nature is as unlikely as we, the tiny bipeds with the giant dreams. I mean our being here at all, given all the twists, turns, sidesteps, leaps, and genetic bottlenecks of evolution. We are natural wonders, creatures easy to know, but hard to know well.
Low in the sky, a floury white sun floats in a ring of its yellow gases. St. Francis is said to have rung the church bells during the night, and when the villagers gathered to ask about the emergency, he said: “Lift up your eyes! Look at the moon!” A bright, baying moon hangs low this morning over the tall grasses and the black-eyed Susans beloved by the quick chittering goldfinches that lunge and fall in flight.
The voracious cicadas prefer the oak, hickory, and apple trees growing abundantly in my yard. But the trees fight back with their own chemistry labs and arsenals. There’s nothing mild-mannered about plants, which don’t just lure insects and other pollinators to their combination espresso bar and opium den. Some compel them. Since plants don’t travel much, they’ve become clever assassins and wily suitors, devising ingenious ways for other animals to help them have sex.
Consider the innocent-looking milkweed in my yard, an aggressive lothario with slippery flowers that grab an insect’s legs. Then bees and flies are treated to pollen britches on their way out. A female monarch butterfly (soft white-speckled belly and no spots on her wings) hovers above the milkweed, lands on a blossom which she grips with tenterhook feet, and unrolls her party-favor tongue.
A landing moth slides around until its feet get caught in tiny pollen-coated clamps that attach yellow sacs. Struggling to pull free, it lifts one leg, now wearing a pollen saddlebag, then another. At least the moth exits. Fine debris on the flower tells the tale of some insects that weren’t lucky enough to escape. As the moth travels to other plants, it will deposit some of the pollen and the rest will eventually fall as part of a wasteful harum-scarum system that works.
Newly opened milkweed pods offer bunches of seeds with silken parachutes designed to travel far. Monarch butterfly caterpillars, feeding on the leaves, flavor themselves with enough poison to use as chemical body armor. But cooking disarms the poison. Chefs sometimes prepare the spring shoots like asparagus, the unopened buds like broccoli florets, the flowers battered and fried, the early pods boiled in several waters to subdue the bitter “milk.” Sweet flowers can be stewed and eaten like jam, the early pods fried like okra. Orioles tug fibers from the milkweed stems to brace their nests. The delirium of milkweed silk used to provide peasants with stuffing for pillows and beds, or the silk could be mixed with flax or wool and woven into thread. It took about nine pounds of silk for a mattress. In World War II, milkweed down was used in life preservers and to line airmen’s uniforms. Harvesters collected the dry pods when they were bursting with silk, which is nothing more (or less) than millions of tiny tubes filled with air.
All I mean to do with this milkweed is admire it and remember my mother, one of its great devotees, who always graced our living room with a vase of milkweed pods, some closed, others spilling their silk. In her last years, I sometimes collected milkweed from the fields and culverts for her. She needed to have some pods with her everywhere she lived, I’m not sure why, and now it’s too late to ask her. Were they a memory aid to carefree days as a girl on Maryland’s Eastern Shore? Did they suggest hidden selves held captive inside a familiar husk?
She would have liked knowing that whenever one sees milkweed, a mother plant with long runners is sprouting offspring underground, below the consciousness of air. In that down-reaching world, milkweed leads a different life, locking horns with such foes as mice, star-nosed moles, and rot. It keeps its hungers separate—sex aboveground, food below—and spreads fast into a pillow fight of many pod-laden plants. But every it is a we, all one family sprouting up from a single runner, in their roots and deepest strivings still attached to mother.
Every autumn my garden also becomes a booby trap of mole holes, a maze of tunnels trailing just below the surface. I’ve never seen any of the moles, crouch as I might behind rosebushes at dawn, since they don’t emerge for breakfast, but mainly feed on earthworms and other invertebrates that stray into the tunnels, which act as snares. The soil in my garden is too acidic to support the feast of earthworms moles might find in a sunny meadow, but it only takes a few moles to riddle the ground, as one mole’s territory can be 700 square yards with six levels of tunnel. They create shallow tunnels by pushing into the soil and stiffening the body to strengthen the walls. Come autumn, the moles excavate more, I presume because as the soil grows colder earthworms must tunnel deeper (and moles in pursuit). For deep tunnels a mole digs up the soil behind it, somersaults, then pushes the loose dirt aboveground, creating the famous molehill in the process. That takes so much time and toil that it’s earned them the collective term of a labor of moles. In breeding season, February and March, moles risk leaving their territories to look for mates, but otherwise they’re mainly hermits who chase away intruders. Dauntless male moles, who pound their heads against tunnel ceilings to entice females, might be head-drumming right now. Listening hard, I don’t hear them, but it amuses me to know they’re underfoot wildly thumping come-hithers.
Lots of dead bees in the pool. These “watermaid” bees collect water from swimming pool, pond, and puddle, carrying it home to toss onto the hot hive, where the water evaporates and cools the queen, even when the temperature starts to fall in autumn. It’s hard not to picture them lugging tiny buckets.
In the front courtyard beneath a hanging fuchsia is a white scrawl I recognize as slime left by a slug. In the driveway I find hopscotch and free-form chalk drawings. Worms lie on the road, one coiled into a question mark. These three have nothing in common, except as designs created by living things, but the pattern-mad brain links them, just in case the similarity may matter one day when the stakes are higher.
Carefully raked piles of red, orange, and yellow leaves line the roadway. Sometimes the whole world seems to be shedding its previous selves. Not just the local deer and squirrels, but the garter snakes and foxes. We shed our top layer of skin every two weeks, and every fall the birches strew the ground with bark, a pageant I find pretty and scroll-like, but birds put to clever use.
As the sun drives gold nails into the shadows, a red-winged blackbird lands near the sycamore, pecks at a tatter of bark, then ruffles its feathers, cranes its neck, and curries its chest feathers with gusto. Another peck at the bark litter. The bird waddles in place. Another spirited rub, this time under one wing. Another peck. Twisting its chest like a lid, it aims to reach back feathers, jabbing at them several times. And so the cycle of poses continues, a sort of feathered tai chi.
At last the red-winged flies off, and I can inspect the ground where it danced. There fifty or so alarmed ants still scramble, and some lie twitching and injured. The blackbird was “anting,” an avian habit of squeezing an ant until it sprays formic acid, an irritant used to curb enemies and prey. Anointing its feathers with this caustic bath helps the red-winged control parasites, so anting is hygienic, but birds can become so addicted to it that when ants are scarce they’ll use orange peels, mothballs, cigarette ash, walnut husks, lemons, bombardier beetles, and even beakfuls of smoke. Honeybees make their own formic acid to kill mites in the hives, and we humans sometimes add it to livestock feed to curb bacteria.
Many animals use nature’s apothecary. Starlings sanitize their nests with sprigs of herbs. I’ve seen capuchin monkeys rub themselves with millipedes as an insecticide, lathering on some millipede juice and then passing the bug along to a neighbor as if it were a bottle of Cutter’s repellent. Brown lemurs use dill weed to keep mosquitoes at bay. In Tanzania, chimpanzees sometimes eat the leaves of the shrub Trichilia rubescens, which has anti-malarial properties; and they chew on the pith inside the stems of a plant known as bitter leaf to cure intestinal ills, just as the local Tongwe people do. I recently heard a Kenyan’s story about hunters pursuing a small group of elephants and shooting a large bull. As it lay dying, the other elephants began hurriedly packing the wound with mud. Wild camels, colobus monkeys, chimpanzees, and other animals forage for charcoal left by fires to eat as a remedy for poisons. Wounded animals—from elk to bears—roll in clay, or dip a limb in freezing water to speed healing or staunch bleeding. Deer rub their wounds against sweet gum trees, whose resin is antiseptic. In fact, so many wild animals use medicines that there’s a field of study devoted to it: zoopharmacognosy.
In my cruel and heartless days, before I appreciated the sleek beauty of garden slugs, I put out bowls of beer for slugs to crawl into and drown. Unfortunately, raccoons would find the bowls at night, eat the beer-basted slugs, and get drunk; it became their tapas bar. But I once saw a blue jay spritzing itself with the beer. If that sounds peculiar, consider this: we rub ourselves with pungent ooze from the anal sacs of civets, gargle with peppermint oil, and spritz ourselves with pig pheromone in order to attract mates. That’s equally strange. And for all I know, there may also be humans who ant.
There’s nothing like a fall sky to snatch the wool of familiarity away from my eyes. The intricate twigs and branches of leafless trees cage the pale blue—a crystalline sky—and the weeping willows weep at their most beautiful, with cherry-brown bark full of gnarls and bulges that create faces. Dry leaves, fallen onto the dark road, glow like golden minnows. It’s cool this morning, in the low 40s and misty, with here and there a white rainbow, a mistbow. The air stretches my nostrils and my mind utters smoke, wood, chimney fire, and pictures a man bending at a hearth to agitate the luminous coals.
The trees, the streetlamps, the doe with a tag in her ear, the houses, the worms that unsaddle to mate—how strange, how wonderful to be a part of this flutter in the eye of the cosmos, this tiny planet that spawned life. Here only this once and never again, I want to stop ten times a day, stop whatever I’m saying or doing, and behold the human pageant with its uncountable dramas, step back and marvel that life evolved, the shapes and strategies it pursues, marvel at how possessed people stay, by choice, with feats of distraction and the rigors of daily life, willingly spellbound, racing to life’s end.
Where several driveways meet the road, short brown sentries squat: bags of raked leaves, with True Value printed in bold red letters. Garbage that’s true value? It seems a contradiction, except perhaps to draw our attention to what passes for value, and the beauty we reject just because it has aged and fallen. Finally I arrive at a glowing yellow street sign announcing DEAD END. We come to this knowledge late, most people not until the end of their life, when, like my mother, they say wistfully, more lament than comment, the genuinely felt mystery: “Where did the time go?” It seems only poetic that the woodpeckers love to peck at the yellow sign, drumming their whereabouts, claim, and desire to all comers on a rusty metal sun.