IT WAS ALMOST SEPTEMBER. Most kids in Kansas were going back to school, but my mother surprised me one afternoon after Oprah by saying that due to our geographical circumstances, I would not be among them.
"I've signed you up for homeschool," she announced. "The nearest public school is simply too far away. You'd be riding a bus in darkness over bad roads twice a day. It's too much of a risk, not to mention a hardship. I, for one, do not want to be making bologna sandwiches at four o'clock in the morning."
"But Mom," I said, "how will I ever meet anybody my own age? It's like we're living on an ice shelf near the South Pole. Except we don't even have penguins."
"I'm sorry," she replied. "It's the best we can do right now. Maybe next year our lives will change."
When my pictures came back from St. Louis, I went to my room to open the package.
There was one shot of a spider eating a moth that was extraordinary. The light was perfect. The spider looked terrifying. The moth appeared to be a tiny rag of dust and parts.
The picture of the deer was a blur. The peeling paint could have been an abstract painting hanging in a big city museum. But it was the portrait of Ma Puttering's cottage that made me gasp, for there, in the foreground, was Ma Puttering herself, using a long-handled hoe to chop weeds in her squash garden.
This is no mistake at the lab, I realized.
This was something much, much bigger.
They say that people who are confined to prison cells or hospital rooms look forward most of all to meals and mail. At least, the optimistic ones do. Even when the postal service brings nothing and the food is cold, boring, and undercooked, there's always tomorrow.
As the last kid in Paisley, Kansas, I felt a lot in common with the incarcerated. Solitary confinement versus solitary freedom. What's the difference? Either way, your world is very small.
In part because of the danger involved, I decided to shoot an entire roll of film on bees.
The pumpkin flowers attracted several varieties, I noticed: honeybees, bumblebees, and several other kinds of very small bees that one could easily mistake for flies.
The technical challenges proved greater than I'd imagined. To get a good macro photo you have to be within a couple of inches of your subject. You also have to shoot at a slower shutter speed than normal, which means your subject can't be moving.
Try telling that to a bee!
As with all worthwhile endeavors, my work required patience.
"Look at it this way," Chief Leopard Frog said. "If you were fishing, you might sit for hours before you got a bite."
"True," I replied.
"Anyway, what's the rush?" he added, using a phrase that was well on its way to becoming my personal motto.
In the morning hours, in late summer, a pumpkin patch is a very busy place. The broad leaves of the pumpkin plant are bigger than the hands of a man, and the vines twist and turn and angle themselves to capture sunlight.
Underneath, even on the hottest days, is a cool jungle floor teeming with life. Toads hide here, as do mice, lizards, and skinks, and because they're here, snakes come. Crawling insects, arachnids, caterpillars, worms, and once in a while a rabbit all move quietly beneath the floppy leaves.
Above is an insect airport with takeoffs and landings going on constantly.
I sat on a wooden crate and staked out a flower that was close enough for me to lean in to when the time came.
Patience, I told myself.
What's the rush?
Twenty-four exposures on a single strip of celluloid film. One pumpkin flower. Hundreds of bees. And all the time in the world.
Actually, that last statement is more of a euphemism, or perhaps an attitude, than a statement of fact. Pumpkin flowers prefer early sunlight.
By ten o'clock in the morning, they begin to close, folding their star-shaped petals into an impenetrable yellow cone. At that time, the bees are forced to search elsewhere, perhaps to seek out honeysuckle or clover.
On the first day, I made three shots, of which one—I was hopeful—captured the image of a pollen-covered bumblebee.
After that, all I had to look forward to was the mail and lunch, neither of which proved to be particularly eventful.
I spent an entire week on bees. I got portraits of seven different bees of three different varieties. Now, of course, I wanted to learn more about bees. It's one thing to know what they look like—alien creatures with huge compartmentalized eyes—but it's quite another to know what they do.
But there is no library in Paisley.
I did get stung once, right on the tip of my right thumb, which hurt like the dickens and made my thumb swell up to twice its normal size.
"You're obviously allergic to bee stings, Spencer," my mother said, wrapping my thumb in a cool compress and giving me an antihistamine to ease the pain. "I don't want you playing with them anymore."
"I wasn't playing," I explained.