1. Saving the Beetles

The healing water of Hope Springs gushes from the ground at 165 degrees Fahrenheit. It flows through a series of long tiled tanks until it reaches 98.6, and then it empties into a cold mountain stream and rushes down a steep thirty miles to the Pacific Ocean.

Hope Springs rests in a wooded valley five miles outside the village of Tecolote, in southern California. The place was founded in 1900 by Joel Hope, a young Santa Barbaran who had already made millions in avocados and lemons. He engineered the pipes and pumps that drew the hot, smelly water from the ground, built the tanks to cool it down, and erected a village of little wooden bath houses, each big enough for one person. Joel Hope’s dream was to attract the wealthiest people in the world to his sulfur springs. He built an elegant mansion and staffed it with doctors, nutritionists, masseurs, cooks, waiters, maids, gardeners, mechanics, and musicians. Within a few years he was hosting the finest families from the East Coast, and even royalty from Europe and Asia. They came to Hope Springs by rail, by ship, by stage coach, and by motorcar to soak in hot sulfur water and cure their psoriasis, their acne, their liver spots, their melancholy and alcoholism, their constipation or diarrhea, their complaints of all sorts, because the healing water of Hope Springs is generous and general.

———

Professor Livingston Pomeroy, a tall, rangy, bald-headed and bespectacled scientist, and his demure and fragile wife, Mathilda, had been all over the globe before they discovered Hope Springs. They had spent most of their lives and half of her fortune investigating hot sulfur springs in search of cures and insects. She suffered from acute nervous headaches; he suffered from the insatiable need to collect specimens of every beetle he could find that lived in the vicinity of hot water. He had jars and jars of them, trunks of jars of them, and trunks of other stuff too: bottles of ether and formaldehyde, microscopes, tweezers, journals, reference tomes, maps, tents, pith helmets, wading boots, briars, latakia tobacco, Lapsang Souchong tea, and gin. They took all their equipment and provisions everywhere they went, hiring porters to push wagons up mountain paths in search of isolated hotspots, guided only by local legends. Or, when Mathilda got her way, they settled for a few weeks at a time at luxury spas, so that she could soak and be pampered while he poked about the countryside with a net and a magnifying glass. Once a year they managed to return to Hobart, so that he could find homes for a year’s worth of specimens on his endowed laboratory shelves at the university, and so she could spend time going over accounts with her frustrated solicitors.

Bugs—he was pleased with his nickname—was searching for something, and he had no idea what it was. Each year in Hobart he would publish the journal of that year’s search, a list of all the insects discovered, and a catalog of the features of their native habitats: the climate and the temperature and mineral contents of the water. His bookshelf contained dozens of pamphlets he had written and published, describing hot springs primitive and posh: in Sumatra, Japan, Mongolia, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Palestine, Arabia, the Congo, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Lapland, Iceland, England, and a series of spas across the United States from coast to coast.

———

In the spring of 1916, they stopped in the Tecolote Valley, in Southern California, at a serene and elegant if sulfurous establishment called Hope Springs. Mathilda found the sulfur fumes therapeutic, and she spent her mornings receiving massages in the hotel and her afternoons in one of the private bath houses, immersed in the finest hot water she’d ever found. Her headaches disappeared, and her spirits soared, which pleased her husband greatly, and she even flirted with Joel Hope, the dour proprietor of the establishment, which amused her husband as well. He’d never seen her so lively, or heard her laugh so much.

As for Bugs Pomeroy, he was in heaven sloshing up and down the steamy stream collecting specimens, leaving his wife in the care of his host. Pomeroy felt that he was close to finding the bug of his dreams, although he hadn’t seen it yet. There was something about this place, a smell mainly, that told him this was where he should end his days.

When they had been at Hope Springs for three months, Mathilda Pomeroy realized she was pregnant. She was already in her mid-forties (Bugs was in his late fifties), and as this was her first pregnancy they decided sadly that for her safety they must return at once to Tasmania. They promised each other that they would travel again, but Bugs knew it was unlikely. Children tie one down.

Before leaving the Tecolote Valley, he took one last hike with Joel Hope, up to the source of the water. Mr. Hope was a taciturn bachelor with an eye for his lady guests. Having abandoned lemons and alligator pears, he now was fascinated by hydro engineering. He showed Pomeroy the elaborate machinery he had brought to the source: pumps and valves and pipes and dials. He could control the temperature of the water after it came out of the ground by altering the speed with which it flowed down into the holding tanks in the valley. He could control the mineral content of the water, too, by adding chemicals and powders as he pleased. Having grown tired of farming and never having discovered the joys of marriage, he was content to be an eccentric host who tampered with water (and the occasional guest) for the rest of his days.

Bugs Pomeroy knew this was the place where his dreams would have come true. One could make this water perfect for any insect. Alas, he had never found the perfect beetle to nurture, and now it was too late. His quest was finished, unfinished.

Joel Hope took them to the train in the nearby city of Anacapa. He shook Pomeroy’s hand and said, “I want you both to come back.” Then he turned to Mathilda Pomeroy and kissed her lips. “And I want you to bring your child with you. If your child is ever in need of anything at all, you must let me know.”

———

The Pomeroys returned to Hobart during the first blizzard of winter, and the following summer their daughter was born. They named the baby Livingston Pomeroy and called her Libby.

Following the birth, Mathilda’s nervous headaches, which had been mercifully absent during her pregnancy, returned with a vengeance. When winter arrived, Mathilda caught pneumonia and died, leaving behind two devastated Livingstons.

After a year of grieving with no improvement to his mood, Bugs decided to take another journey. When spring arrived, to the degree that spring ever arrives in Tasmania, he left his daughter in the care of servants, assembled his gear, and booked passage on the ferry to the mainland. There he boarded a train north to the end of the line.

Civilization ended at Alice Springs, so Pomeroy poked about there for a few days. No decent beetles at all. Not a one. He heard rumors, though, of springs to the north, and so, just as summer was approaching its blazing zenith, he engaged mules and porters and set off into the mountains and deserts of the unexplored Northern Territory.

After a week’s trekking through the most hostile, godforsaken landscape he’d seen in a lifetime of travel, he smelled paradise. By this time all the beer was drunk and all but one of his porters had abandoned him and turned back. He and his remaining porter, who was too stupid to turn back, had just made tea, using water from the stream they had followed for two days. They sipped together, and both of them gagged and spat at the same time.

“Good lord, man,” the professor exclaimed to his astonished companion. “Good lord!” The porter was less astonished by the taste of sulfur in his tea than by the wide smile on his employer’s face.

Pomeroy looked ahead up the stream and saw steam rising on the horizon. “This is it,” he yelled, and the porter knew he was being pulled along by a lunatic and would never taste beer again. The professor threw his tin cup down and leapt to his feet, taking off like a rangy mantis. The porter sighed and packed the gear and persuaded the mules to move again. When he caught up with the old man, they were at the daemonic confluence, where their stream was joined by another, a stinking, steaming yellow river of piss, is what it looked like. A sewer full of rotten eggs, is what it smelled like.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Professor Pomeroy panted. “Doesn’t it smell like Eden itself?”

“I’ll leave you two of the mules and half the provisions,” the porter said, having found his spine at last. “Me and Jenny have a prior engagement to the south, thank you very much indeed.”

Pomeroy hardly noticed their departure. He and his mules forged ahead upstream into the canyon, where the odor grew sweeter to his nostrils and his head grew ever lighter with dehydration, exercise, and the homing flight of his heart. By the end of the day he was naked, up to his chest in warm mud, chatting ecstatically with small smiling black men who had never seen a white person before and had no idea what he was babbling about.

He had no idea either.

He was holding one hand up before his face and he was watching a perfect, perfect yellow beetle crawling up and down and around his outstretched finger, and tears of bliss were flowing off his face and plopping into the mud.

———

Pomeroy returned to Hobart in the autumn of 1919 looking shaggy and weathered and beaming with joy. He cleaned himself up and got reacquainted with his daughter, who was walking and even talking now. They spent hours together in his laboratory, where he showed her his specimens and taught her to handle things carefully. The toddler was fascinated by insects.

He wrote and published a pamphlet entitled Paradise Found, announcing to the world that a new beetle had been discovered. No one cared, of course, and the pamphlet would have gone the way of all the others, had Pomeroy not, in his enthusiasm, described the landscape in such detail, had not published the mineral analysis of the water in the fragrant creek he had named after his dear, departed wife.

In September, when the weather was warming up a bit, Livingston Pomeroy once again gathered his gear and oiled his traveling boots. This time, to the horror of his household staff, and against the advice of his solicitors (but what could they do? Professor Pomeroy was now a very rich man, having inherited the rest of his wife’s fortune), he took the child with him. Libby’s nurse, who had the face and the stubbornness of an English bulldog, insisted that he come to his senses and then insisted on coming along for the good of the child. She traveled like a rusted wheel.

Now that he knew the way and knew why he was going there, the journey was easy, except for the nurse. They stopped briefly in Alice Springs, where the nurse tried the beer and vomited. Pomeroy took the child with him to the shops and purchased provisions and horses. After two days they proceeded north into the wasteland, Libby riding with her arms around her father’s waist, shrieking with pleasure at each jolt to her rump. The nurse followed behind on another horse, the first horse she’d ever sat on. She was acrophobic, hippophobic, saddlesore, and furious.

When they came to the steaming confluence, the nurse held her nose and said, “That’s it. Give me the child. I’m taking her back.”

Both Livingston Pomeroys laughed at her, and the trip continued farther and farther into paradise or hell, depending on one’s point of view. There was a glorious purple sunset covering the valley like an umbrella when they reached the community of naked savages. The nurse dismounted and watched with horror as her employer and his daughter removed every stitch of clothing and walked into a lake of mud, laughing all the way.

The following day, Pomeroy left his daughter in the care of one of the black women and escorted the nurse back to Alice Springs, a horseback journey that took two days. He put her on a southbound train. When he returned to Mathilda Springs, little Libby had found a circle of playmates and was the darling of the Wanqong community.

———

It was a happy life. They had their own stone hut. Libby spent most of her time with the children and the women. Bugs spent his time with the men or following the yellow beetles about the landscape. One of the women, Nqa, cooked for them and cared for Libby in ways Bugs knew nothing about. She also cared for Bugs in ways that Libby knew nothing about. Nqa also cared for two other men in the same way, one of them probably her father (Bugs surmised) and another one who was both an uncle and a cousin and very possibly a half-brother as well.

Life in Mathilda Springs revolved around the life cycle of the sulfur beetle. The women did what women do, and the men continually tended to their beetles. In the fall they built dams in the stream farther up the canyon, forming a pool for the larvae to live in through the winter; they were able to control the temperature of the pool by governing the rate of flow. When chrysalises formed on the reeds beside the pool in late winter, the Wanqong carried the firm little cocoons, thousands of them, to the trees on the sunlit side of the valley, to let them bask in warm sunshine while waiting for spring. There was the swarm celebration on the equinox, enjoyed equally by bugs and men—and women—with dancing and singing and drinking and rutting. And all summer long the Wanqong enjoyed poetry and stories and philosophical conversation, in a language enriched by beetle metaphors throughout.

They were a gentle people, these squat Wanqong, the kindest and wisest people Bugs Pomeroy had met in a lifetime of worldwide travel. He was proud to see his daughter raised by them, although he continued to speak English to her and gave her lessons in penmanship and sums and took her occasionally into Alice Springs to buy new clothing for her growing body. Clothing that she wore only on her trips to Alice Springs. Otherwise she dressed like a Wanqong, wearing nothing in warm weather and wearing warm mud in cold weather. Bugs continued to wear his civilized clothes and smoke his pipes and drink his tea. His newfound friends thought he was hilarious.

In the spring of 1920, when Libby was three and a half years old, the woman Nqa gave birth to a boy whom the women named Nqong. The Wanqong had no notion of paternity, and the nuclear family consisted of the entire population (Bugs counted eighty four, including himself and Libby). So little Nqong had no father, but Nqa always paired him with Libby in the sibling games that the women organized for the children. Libby looked after him with a passionate affection.

———

The second white man the Wanqong had ever seen arrived in the fall of 1926. The women found Bugs and brought him out of his hut to meet this stranger, who was holding his nose with one hand and a rifle with the other.

“You Livingston Pomeroy?” the man said.

“Yes indeed I am,” Bugs answered. He offered the stranger his hand and said, “Welcome.”

The stranger sheathed his rifle behind the saddlebag on his horse, and the two white men shook hands. The stranger said, “Then this is Mathilda Springs? It’s sulfur all right, isn’t it.”

“How did you find us?” Livingston Pomeroy said. “Do you mean to tell me that Mathilda Springs is now on a map?”

“It’s on our map,” the man explained. “Not an official map, mind, but a map the company drew up, based on the description in that booklet of yours, Paradise Found. I read that booklet. Most extraordinary. My name is Henry Parker. I represent the New South Wales Mining Company. Do you own this land? Have you filed the papers? Show me your papers if you own this land.”

“Own?”

“No, I didn’t think so. We checked that out, you know. In that case, I claim this valley, this Mathilda Springs, in the name of the New South Wales Mining Company. You’re witness to that until I file the papers.”

“But you can’t own this valley!” Pomeroy exclaimed.

“Don’t want to own it,” Henry Parker said. “Just want to claim the mineral rights. Damned lucky I got here first. My god, what a horrible place.”

Pomeroy could feel himself grow red in the face. “This valley is owned by the people who live here.”

“People? People don’t live here,” Parker said. He glanced at the crowd of little black men gathering around them, wearing only coats of mud. “Bunch of bloody kangaroos, is all I see.”

“Now see here….”

“There’s one now!” Henry Parker pulled the rifle from his saddle, shouldered it, and fired, killing Nqa’s brother instantly and sending the other Wanqong scurrying out of sight. Parker laughed, his horse whinnied, and the clap of gunfire echoed in the valley.

Bugs Pomeroy knelt by his friend and wept.

Henry Parker mounted his horse and left.

———

Within a month there were dozens of them. Carving a crude path through the landscape, they brought the wheel to Mathilda Springs. They brought horses, pulling wagons full of equipment and beer. They built structures and gouged the earth. They rocked the landscape with explosives. They shat in the stream. They raped women and beat the men for sport.

Bugs persuaded the Wanqong to hide in the hills until it was all over, and he promised to tend the dams and keep the larvae safe through the winter and gather the cocoons when the time came. He said he would change the hearts of these white devils. But the white devils laughed at him, stole his gin, and burned his books.

One morning toward the end of winter, three miners came upon Pomeroy wading in the pool upstream, tending to the larvae. He had hoped the white men would never find this spot—they seemed utterly uninterested in exploring the countryside—but here they were. Bugs had just done minor repairs to the lower dam, and the temperature of the water was perfect. The little wigglers were happy and healthy. Pomeroy had brought a pail so that he could take some of the pool’s water to the men in hiding. Drinking the pondwater during larvae season was an important ritual.

“You’re naked,” one of the white men shouted at him. “Look at him, he’s naked!” he shouted to his mates. “That water hot?” he asked Pomeroy.

“Warm,” Bugs answered.

The men grinned. “A hot bath,” one of them said. “I could use a hot bath.”

“No!” Pomeroy cried. “This pool is not for bathing. You bathe in the mud pool, wash in the stream.”

But the men had already stripped to their underwear and were sloshing loudly into the pool.

“No!” shouted Pomeroy. “You’ll disturb the larvae!”

The men stopped. “There’s worms in this water?”

“Worms! Christ!” They beat the surface of the water, laughing loudly and killing hundreds of larvae with each blow.

Pomeroy gently scooped a few hundred larvae into his pail and rushed out of the water. He sat on the bank and bitterly watched his enemies splashing each other and destroying his dreams, their filth fouling the water, their cruel behavior wasting life.

He spent the rest of the day, after the invaders had left the pool, carrying pails of water down to his stone hut. He filled and sealed jar after jar. These little fellows might not survive in jars, but one had to take precautions, just in case one’s worst fears came true.

Which they did. The next morning when he returned to the sacred pool with his pail, he found a dozen white men splashing in the water, polluting it with their dirty bodies, and with soap. Those poor, sweet, unfortunate wigglers! Pomeroy could not bear to watch, but he could not bear to leave, and so he had to watch. He watched them dismantle both the upper and the lower dams to increases the flow and make the water hotter. That was the last straw. “You’ll kill them!” he shouted. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”

They laughed at him and splashed him with their soapy, filthy water.

A fierce wailing came out of the canyon, and black people appeared suddenly from behind rocks and bushes on either side of the stream. The pool was surrounded by the angry Wanqong. The entire community, and they were holding stones the size of oranges.

The white men sloshed out of the water and gathered their clothes in haste. The Wanqong allowed them to pass, and the whites ran down the canyon trail to the camp, shouting.

The Wanqong gravely approached the water to assess the damage and then, using the stones they had brought as weapons, they set to repairing the dams. Pomeroy warned them that they must go back into the hills and hide, but they ignored him and worked. Of course. Why should they trust him?

Little Nqong approached him and smiled. The child was six years old now, but much taller than he should have been. From his size he looked almost ready for circumcision, but he was clearly still a child. The child asked if he could visit with Libby, his best friend, whom he hadn’t seen for weeks.

Livingston Pomeroy sadly left the Wanqong at their labor and walked down the canyon, one hand holding the full pail, the other resting on Nqong’s head.

Bugs and the children were having tiffin outside his stone hut when they heard the explosion. It was the loudest noise he’d ever heard, and it echoed for minutes. Then another, even louder. The children clung to him and whimpered, and he tried to soothe them, but the grief he felt would not allow his voice to speak words. He hurried them into the hut and then ran down to the stream. Mathilda Creek, named after his dear, dear wife, once such a lovely yellow color, was now a rich orange, turning rapidly darker, darker to red, carrying clumps of dead worms and scraps of human flesh. Up the canyon he could hear gunshots and laughter.

Livingston Pomeroy sat stunned on the dirt in front of his stone hut. Libby and Nqong held his hands and tried to comfort him. All three were naked and crusted in warm mud.

Henry Parker, the captain of the New South Wales Mining Company expedition, stood before him in his black boots. He was holding the reins of a tired nag. “I have a horse and wagon for you, Pomeroy,” he said. “My men have work to do, and you’re in the way. I want you and your child out of here by sunset.”

Pomeroy looked up at him and said, “Children.”

“Children, then. Start packing.”

“Did you kill them all?” Pomeroy asked, in a meek, whining voice that made him ashamed. He felt so utterly, utterly ashamed. Of being so timid. Of being a white man. A white mouse.

“Every man jack,” Henry Parker said in a voice full of pride. “Every mother’s son. And every mother’s daughter and every mother and every black-arsed bugger in the valley. The whole festering lot of them were busy rebuilding that dam of theirs, which we needed to blow up anyway. That killed off the wogs, who were even more in the way than the dam. Now we can get on with our work, and you can get out. Start packing.”

After Henry Parker had left them alone, Livingston Pomeroy said to the children, “They didn’t kill them all, you know. They think they did, but they didn’t.” He went into the hut and came out carrying a sealed jar, which he held up to the afternoon sunlight for the children to see. Little yellow larvae wiggled in their pale yellow water. Bugs Pomeroy cradled the jar to his chest and hummed a lullaby, a defiant grin on his face. “They didn’t kill them all,” he repeated in a fierce whisper.

That’s when his daughter Libby knew for the first time, though she was only nine years old and had no real standard for comparison, that her father was quite bonkers.

———

They packed. Pomeroy placed three wooden crates on the floor of the wagon and set his glass jars carefully in place, padding them with clothing to keep them apart. He then filled the crates with more clothing, gear, and provisions, then laid a board across the top of the crates.

Libby dressed Nqong in one of her yellow frocks; despite the difference in their ages, the frock fit perfectly. The children climbed up onto the wagon. Pomeroy took the reins in his hand and led the horse away from the hut he and Libby had called home, through the camp full of jeering miners, and out onto the crude road built by the New South Wales Mining Company. Before leaving Mathilda Springs, they looked back on the ugly carcass of what had once been a beautiful valley.

Another small explosion rocked the valley, and he watched his stone hut rattle, crumble, and become a simple pile of rocks.

It didn’t matter anymore. He had all that mattered. All that was left. As the shadows lengthened, they left Mathilda Springs behind them, going downstream and downhill until they reached the steaming confluence, where they turned their wagon, with its fragile cargo, south.

———

They camped that evening on the grassy bank of the warm river. Pomeroy unpacked the entire wagon and gently removed the glass jars one by one. He set them in a shallow spot in the stream, where the gentle water could keep them warm through the night. The tops of the jars were above water, and he removed their lids so the precious larvae could feel the night air.

“Now they can breathe, you see,” he told the children. “Now they’ll be snug and warm all night long.”

“But what will they eat?” Libby asked him.

Nqong added, “I think they’re hungry.”

“We’ll fix them a nice breakfast in the morning” the old man said. “Come along. It’s getting dark, and I’m getting chilly. Let’s get us all some blankets, shall we? Look, children, there’s the evening star!”

———

Fifty-four years later, looking back on that most terrifying, uprooting day of her entire life, and remembering it in clear detail, Livingston Pomeroy, Jr. recalled the exhaustion of that moment, and the resignation she had felt to whatever might happen to herself and her traveling companions. Remembering this moment as an adult, she again felt confidence. With her eyes closed, she remembered that fugitive family in the outback of her past, and she watched her father kneel down beside her pile of blankets, and saw that she had been in the care of a saint. He may have been a bruised and broken man, with very little common sense left in him, but he was good, and if there were miracles to be had, he would have his share, enough to see them through.