IOWA BESTIARY

MELISSA FEBOS

And I’ve never found a way to say I love you,

But if the chance came by, oh I, I would

—DAR WILLIAMS, “Iowa (Traveling III)”

1.

As I drive over the hills of Iowa for the first time, Donika reads me a list of the animals that inhabit our new home. I am struck by their overall mildness—no bears or wolves or poisonous snakes. Maybe a bobcat or a coyote—much smaller than the coywolves of the Northeast—but nothing fierce enough to pose any threat to, say, a five-foot-tall woman on a jog through the woods. Are there woods in Iowa? I ask her to look it up.

Early in our consideration of a move to the Midwest, my brother, who works in sustainable technology, told us it was probably the most pragmatic place to relocate to in light of sea level rise. I have lived in the coastal Northeast for my entire life and spent most of my adult years joking ruefully about how those of us at sea level were going under any day now. It mostly stopped being funny in 2012, when Superstorm Sandy flooded south Brooklyn, a mile or two from where I lived, and ravaged the Jersey Shore, where I worked, rendering many of my college students homeless. Maybe it should never have been funny at all, but humor is one way to cope with powerlessness.

I sometimes think in geologic time when I get scared, try to forget the anthropocentric view entirely. I envision a time-lapse reel of the post-human Earth, its terrain undulating with millions of years’ worth of natural revitalization and annihilation, the framework of human values refreshingly obsolete. If I zoom out far enough, the tragedy wrought by human life shrinks to a wretched moment, or simply a moment of transformation, like the Pan-African orogeny that formed supercontinents some 600 million years ago, or the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which wiped out three-quarters of Earth’s plant and animal life 66 million years ago. When I find a frame in which neither I nor anyone else seems to matter, the powerlessness I feel hurts less.

I wept as we drove out of New York City on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. For months, I’d feared the pain of leaving. Call it heartbreak, if that is what follows the choice to leave something you still love. The city has been fused with my self-conception for my entire adult life. However ready I may feel and though I know the reasons, departing is a process of prying myself apart—more cleaving than leaving.

As we exited the metro area, through the smelly industrial parts of New Jersey, into the lush mountains of Pennsylvania, my grief evaporated, though I know it isn’t gone for good. Grief isn’t always possible for me to feel while still in the process of losing something. Sometimes it arrives too late to say goodbye, once I am already gone, or they are.

We arrive in Iowa in early July and the temperature and humidity seem to rise daily. It is hotter here than Brooklyn in the summer, but the heat is softer somehow, without all the glass and concrete—like convection taking place inside a mouth instead of an oven. I enjoy being wrecked by the heat, which makes it harder to think, or to feel anything else.

Our first week here, I sit in the backyard, listening to the leaves, waiting to feel sad but not feeling much of anything but the quiet, which is draped like a soft green blanket over everything. I inhale the smell of outside—trees and dirt—and watch a mosquito hover around me. She is huge and lethargic, hanging in the air as if from theater wires, lurching toward the smell of my blood, which must babble to her like the nearby creek—where she was probably born—does to me.

When the mosquitoes multiply, I go inside and read about a study out of Iowa State that has found a new species of mosquito, Aedes japonicus japonicus, likely drawn to the area by the rising temperatures and increased rainfall.¹ An invasive species, they are also robust vectors of arboviruses—the kind carried by insects—and have been known to transmit West Nile and multiple kinds of encephalitis.

Climate change helps some species to flourish. As vectors like Aedes japonicus japonicus and ticks thrive in warmer temperatures, so do diseases like Lyme and West Nile. When exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide, even poison ivy surges in size and breadth and produces a fiercer strain of its rashy chemical.

And yet, arboviruses scare me a lot less than those spread by humans.

In the months before we left Brooklyn, rubber gloves and paper masks littered the sidewalks. Ambulance sirens rang all day and night. The windows of our favorite restaurants wore hasty plywood shields with spray-painted crests. At sundown each night, fireworks exploded in the alleys of our neighborhood and sometimes continued until dawn. Our dog shook under the bed in which we slept a fragile sleep and awoke brittle with exhaustion. A scaly rash emerged on my hands from frequent washing, and stress hives bloomed on my chest and neck. We weren’t going because of the pandemic, but sometimes it felt that way. So little of our life there remained.

When we left New York, my sorrow mingled with relief to be leaving the worst of the virus behind, despite all the predictions that it would follow us to the Midwest, which, of course, came true.

2.

I am thriving here. I go for long runs outside and roam the massive grocery stores, drunk on the bounty after twenty years in the narrow aisles of Brooklyn bodegas. Each week, when I return to the midwestern supermarket, it has the same things in stock that I bought the previous week. The reliability lulls me into attachment, creates the illusion of other things staying unchanged. I eat the exact same foods every day, every week, with the gusto of the previously deprived.

One morning around six, on my favorite jogging route along the trail beside the Iowa River, I cross one of the footbridges and see a hummingbird. I think of that Mary Oliver poem “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond,” which reads:

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,

sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds

flying among the scarlet flowers.

It is, of course, a poem about death.

This hummingbird whirs around the bars of the fence that lines the footbridge, hovering at the corner of the interstices. I assume that she is drinking water, as it rained in the night and glimmering drops still cling to everything. When I get home, the internet tells me that she was more likely collecting bits of spider silk to build her nest. After glomming them all over her beak and chest, she’d have returned to her nest-in-progress, where, combined with lichen, feathers, moss, and fur, the silk would provide an adhesive, like duct tape, to cohere the tight little cup in which she’d hatch and tend to her offspring.

The rising summer temperatures here, and everywhere, are a problem for hummingbirds, who are reluctant to search for food (and subsequently pollinate) and to mate when it gets too hot.² If the nights are cool enough, their body temperatures sink by half and they slow into torpor to conserve energy and recover. But these balmy nights limit the energy their small forms can save.

Just as rising temperatures cause plants to bloom earlier in spring, they narrow the window between the hummingbirds’ winter respite and their return. Scientists estimate that within two decades, hummingbirds will miss the first blooms of spring entirely.

Some days, I am in a kind of torpor, too. While my body moves almost constantly—unpacking boxes, running alongside the Iowa River for miles and miles, calming only at night or when I stand outside, looking—my thoughts thicken like hot cereal as it cools; my emotions indecipherable, as if being in a strange place has made me a stranger to myself.

Still, I try to notice more. Self-recognition is not the only form of recognition. Perhaps it isn’t even the most important.

3.

Spider silk hangs from everything here, gauzily haunting doorways and tree branches to remind us of careful work undone, of lives washed away in the ferocious storms of this region.

For a whole month after we arrive, we watch an orb weaver build a web between the decorative metal pillars of our small porch. A member of the spider family Araneidae, Larinioides sclopetarius is a beefy but elegant spider with striped legs who prefers to build on steel, and is thus sometimes called a “bridge spider.”

Once, when I was eight, after I had called my father into my room to kill a spider, he explained to me in his effective but not always comforting didacticism that, if not for spiders, we would all be eaten to death by mosquitoes. Until then, it was as if I’d never really seen a spider. I haven’t intentionally killed one since. It wasn’t the fear of a terrible death that changed my relationship to them. I nurtured a new gratitude for spiders after that conversation, yes, but more profound was my recognition of their lives as both connected to mine and differentiated from it. The lives of spiders had structure and integrity utterly discrete from my own. Whenever I spotted one on my bedroom ceiling, instead of yelling for my father I silently thanked the spider, politely requested that it avoid crawling on my neck while I slept, if at all possible.

A recent study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests that extreme weather, such as tropical cyclones and hurricanes, increases aggression in some kinds of spiders.³ More common and more alarming is the research that shows male spiders maturing earlier in the season due to warming temperatures. Their female counterparts rely on food supply to trigger maturation. The result is a missed connection that means fewer baby spiders, with grave consequences for both the species and us.

Donika and I had, only days before noticing our spider, finished reading Charlotte’s Web—a childhood favorite of mine—to each other before bedtime. When I tell you that I begin thinking of our porch spider as Charlotte, know that I am surprised myself at the unoriginality of this, the human instinct to not only anthropomorphize other creatures, but romanticize them with projections of our own childhood archetypes. I try not to judge too harshly the small ways we attempt to cultivate the precious among so much anthropogenic devastation, though I know these instincts to romanticize, project, and make precious have often served as justifications for that same devastation.

On the afternoon of August 10, an unpredicted storm batters the windows of our house with fallen branches. A few moments after the lights flicker off, the sky goes dark, the sun eclipsed not by another celestial body, but some nearer cloak swept in by the thunderous winds.

Not a tornado—but equally devastating—the rare derecho is known for its long duration of hurricane-force winds. For nearly an hour we sit in our dark basement as winds clocking in some places at 110 mph roar over eastern Iowa and northwest Illinois.

When the wind ceases, we stagger upstairs from the basement and fall asleep almost instantly, though it is only midafternoon, as if the storm has ravaged us in some invisible way. We awaken to the growl of chain saws, wielded by the industrious midwestern dads of our neighborhood, eager to chop the broken tree limbs.

Our spider, of course, is gone.

The economic price of damage incurred by the derecho—which is estimated in the days that follow at $7.5 billion—renders it the most costly thunderstorm disaster in U.S. history.⁴ The scale of most disasters, I observe, is estimated by their cost to human economies.

After three nights without power, I insist that we check into a hotel for a night so that I can get some work done.

I jog around town and see power lines swinging in tangled snarls over the sidewalks. Enormous trees have split down their trunks and caved in the roofs of houses, crushed cars in their driveways. Weeks after the storm, thousands will remain homeless in the cities of eastern Iowa.

In the words of one climate scientist quoted in The Des Moines Register: “It’s going to get A LOT worse.”

There is so much to mourn that sometimes it’s hard to discern from where my sadness springs, or to what it belongs. The new ease of our lives sometimes feels like a betrayal of those who need it more, though I know that the guilt of privilege pays no debt.

Sometimes, becoming a stranger to oneself is an opportunity to become someone better. Over these recent months, I have become less interested in geologic time, and more interested in the people and animals where I live.

4.

During the derecho I worried about the squirrels whom I watched each morning carry mouthfuls of debris to replenish their dreys—shaggy bundles that sit in the uppermost forks of trees. What of the crane I spotted occasionally along the river as I ran? Less so the foxes, groundhogs, and chipmunks who can retreat to their dens. But most of all the small birds—warblers, tanagers, thrushes, sparrows, and finches—red and gold—who flit around our bird bath. Where does a 0.3-ounce creature go in a 100 mph wind? They knew better than me and were back at the birdbath the next day. The heavy rains didn’t scare them away, but the bigger birds did.

There are three black crows who hang around our neighborhood in a little gang. When I leave for my morning run around six, they sit atop the streetlamp down the block, murmuring to each other.

Crows are among the most vulnerable to arboviruses, West Nile in particular. A 2007 study found their numbers had declined by 45 percent across the United States since the introduction of the virus.⁵ They are known to recognize human faces, so I begin bringing a handful of dog kibble to scatter under the lamp as a gesture of friendship. As I shake the kibble out of my hand, I stare up at them, so that they might begin to know my face, and to trust it.

One afternoon, as I wash the dishes, the busy traffic and chatter of the birdbath pauses. In the stillness that follows, a Cooper’s hawk lands on the birdbath. Her talons grip the rim as her yellow irises track the groundcover and nearby shrubs. Cooper’s hawks mostly feast on small birds, which they squeeze to death and sometimes drown by holding them underwater. In the middle of the twentieth century, widespread use of the toxic pesticide DDT caused the shells of the hawks’ eggs to grow so thin that they were frequently crushed by the weight of incubating mothers.

The little birds never return to the birdbath. The irony of our sadness over this is not lost on me.

Most of us think of ourselves as good people, but sometimes I trip on the fact that I am a menace to all earthly life. If I can know, as I do, that I have blood on my hands from every war my imperialist country wages, that my whiteness is implicated in every structure that protects its privilege, that most days each article of clothing I wear represents the exploitation of someone’s labor, then I ought to more mindfully expand my conception of my life’s impact on the world beyond the human. I’m referring less to household recycling or reusable grocery bags than to a fundamental understanding of my role on this planet. I’m thinking less of rueful jokes to express and relieve my feelings of powerlessness, and more about staying in this time frame, the one in which my existence matters.

5.

I keep waiting to miss New York, but the missing never comes. I am learning how much of my love for that city is love for my own history there. As the weeks pass, I fall in love with this place, too, and less for who I am here than for what is here with me.

I’ve been assembling this catalogue since our arrival, and sometimes it feels like a tiresome exercise. Some days, I would rather just indulge a romance with my new environment, be a lover of nature, be, as Emerson described, someone “whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood,” who experiences “a wild delight . . . in spite of real sorrows.”

I could talk about the prairie grass instead, though it doesn’t have a face, and its sorrows are as great as those of any animal.

Don’t mistake me: I do feel a wild delight at my bare feet on the ground, the chorus of owls each evening, but increasingly, the delight is shot through with grief, and that is what I am finding more precious as time passes.

Sometimes grief is not worth much to anyone but the aggrieved, but I have begun wanting to love everything the way I, until recently, loved only a few mammals: as they are, with my actions, with a stake in their suffering.

Perhaps attention is not enough, though it is something. It is the beginning of all preservation. I am looking for a way to say I love you that matters. Before there is nothing left to say but I miss you, into the wind.

Notes

1.Helge Kampen and Doreen Werner, “Out of the Bush: The Asian Bush Mosquito Aedes japonicus japonicus (Theobald, 1901) (Diptera, Culicidae) Becomes Invasive,” Parasites & Vectors 7 (February 2014): article 59.

2.“Climate Change Poses Risk to Hummingbirds, an Important Pollinator,” Conservation in a Changing Climate, May 11, 2018, climatechange.lta.org/risks-to-hummingbirds-an-important-pollinator.

3.Alexander G. Little, David N. Fisher, Thomas W. Schoener, and Jonathan N. Pruitt, “Population Differences in Aggression Are Shaped by Tropical-Cyclone-Induced Selection,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 3 (August 2019): 1294–97.

4.Andrea May Sahouri, “$7.5 Billion and Counting: August Derecho That Slammed Iowa Was Most Costly Thunderstorm in US History, Data Shows,” Des Moines Register, October 17, 2020, www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2020/10/17/iowas-august-derecho-most-costly-thunderstorm-us-history-7-5-billion-damages/3695053001.

5.Kimberly Hall, “Climate Change in the Midwest: Impacts on Biodiversity and Ecosystems,” Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center, March 2012, glisa.umich.edu/media/files/NCA/MTIT_Biodiversity.pdf.