Editorial 6.4, April 2004, by Deirdre Helfferich Come and Look One summer day, when I was very young (three? four?) I was playing in our parking lot on Ester Dome summitt, and I saw a butterfly, an enormous yellow butterfly, huge, bigger than a swallowtail butterfly, with no tails, no blue spots or black lacing. It was paler than butter, with white veining, and, as I excitedly exclaimed to my mother when I ran to get her, “as big as my head!” Well, perhaps not that big, I admitted, but bigger than my hand! My hands then were much smaller than my hands now, but still, it was an unusually large butterfly. I’ve never seen one like it since, although cabbage moths are close in coloring, if paler, and, of course, much tinier. Many years later, distrusting my younger self and my memories, I began to convince myself that it really was a swallowtail, and now I have two distinct memories in my mind: the original, with all its sunshine and excitement, and the second, with its disappointment and ordinary beauty. A year later, or perhaps two, I was waiting, with some boredom, for my father to fix the flat tire on our Land Rover. We were on Sheep Creek Road, which was then nothing but a high bed of tailings, and very rough, with the occasional tire-puncturing rock. Flat tires were not unusual. Traffic was almost nonexistent. I was being a pest, so my mother suggested rather firmly that I go and play, perhaps on the other side of the road. So I wandered over to the other side, where a small turnout provided a sheltered and sunny spot to examine stones and plants and other interesting things. Hunkering down, motion caught my eye, and to my amazement, I saw an enormous black beetle, fully an inch and a half long, with a vivid iridescent purple and green and blue carapace, with enamel green and red touches here and there, iridescent gold and deep blue on its thorax, jet black legs and head and underside. It was boggling, this huge and spectacularly colored insect determinedly trudging across the tailings. I squawked loudly and called my mom and dad to come over and LOOK at this bug! I didn’t dare take my eyes off of it, for fear it would vanish. Naturally, my parents, engaged in the hot and dusty business of car repair on the road, with inadequate tools and concerned about our lateness to wherever it was we were going, weren’t instantly at my side to see what wondrous thing their child had discovered. I had to yell and insist loudly for quite a bit before my mother decided that she had best come over and see, if for no other reason than to keep me from having a screeching fit. So she walked over, somewhat annoyed, and asked, “What is it?” I pointed at the beetle and said, “Look!” Next thing my father knew, he had both his daughter AND his wife squawking and whooping with excitement and insisting that he come and look. He did, and since then, we discovered that it was a Spectacular Search Beetle (an apt name). We didn’t know what it was for several years, and had to reassure ourselves from time to time that yes, we really had seen it, until my mother finally found a book that described it, complete with picture. They are extremely rare, or at least, are rarely seen, because they usually crawl along under the top layer of litter in a forest, and almost never come out into the hot sun as that one did. It is a curious thing that this ordinary beauty has such a profound place in my memory. The butterfly and the beetle made lasting impressions, I suppose because of the emotions around them and the rarity of the glimpse. I have seen perhaps three spectacular search beetles in my life, and they are the most astonishing creatures, brilliant jewels of the insect world. I’ve seen countless swallowtail butterflies, but I am almost always reminded of that first, ambiguous vision of a yellow butterfly that might or might not have been a swallowtail. These intense memories of small moments infuse my life with a vividness and an awareness of the living things around me. It is the indelible understanding of the aliveness and perfectly ordinariness of small creatures like these that has informed my adult politics. Warily avoiding annoying a yellowjacket, I might suddenly get distracted from the potential danger it presents by seeing its abdomen moving with its breathing. Walking along the road to go to work, my eye is arrested by the pattern of shadow and green made by aspen leaves. Walking on the university campus, the smell of decaying leaves or the sight of a liquifying mushroom or perhaps the light reflecting off the golden bark of a birch tree calls the entirety of interaction to mind. I, as are these things, am alive, decaying and growing, part of a greater whole, a completeness that thrives both on death and birth. I describe it here using abstractions, but when this awareness comes to me, its only expression is a sense of fulfillment, of connection, of the sheer pleasure in being alive. Funny that bugs are what make me aware of this the most. | ||
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