elizabethlevett

When I was small we lived in Florida, Texas, Illinois and Georgia. I could tell you more about the bugs in those places than about anything else, including the houses we lived in or the people who lived nearby. It’s not that I was a particularly dull child, nor that our houses or neighbors or surroundings weren’t of interest to me. I remember the forts we built of left-over cinder blocks, the arroyos and sandy expanses of the desert, the meandering Georgia creek beds, and the deep pine woods that went on and on. But when I dip my hand into the pool of childhood memory, there on the surface are the bugs – so vivid every time. We played outside at any opportunity, all summer and every day after school. We always found the best fences and trees for climbing, the best lakes for catching bluegill or skipping stones, the drainage sloughs, the weird old buildings to mar with dirt clods, the best places to be until the streetlights went on and we had to go inside. We always, always found the best bugs.

Childhood flies by night ever faster, as on the silent wings of secret bugs; of dizzy lightning bugs, fuzzy orange-and-black beetles, velvet Luna moths, massive palmetto bugs, geometric stink bugs and graceful, angular water skaters. I used to bring home shiny black beetles or June bugs with their fragile, iridescent bellies and carry them into the kitchen to show my mother.  She’d say, “That’s lovely, dear, now take it outside and play with it in the yard.” I would put them in my wagon along with whatever pebbles and interesting seed pods I’d picked up, and roll them around the neighborhood. 

In the desert there were spiders — huge, furry and very impressive. I remember one night my father had a tense fight with a giant tarantula looming just outside our living room. We watched from inside as our hero wielded his broom, protecting his young from the beast in the shadow of the porch light. It wasn’t till many years later I learned that the venom of a tarantula is not that dangerous after all. You couldn’t have told my father that he needn’t have killed the exotic creature, as big as his fist. It was conquest in the desert. We were, as always, vindicated in our war with the mysterious, creeping enemy.

I used to play with a boy named Billy Paul who always wore an under-sized striped tee shirt and a flat top. One day Billy Paul and I found a particularly well-developed ant hill. The ants were huge and terrifying. Their stings we knew well. These were not the tiny little guys that swarm around my California garden, these were western desert ants, just like in that movie – THEM! They were nearly half an inch long and a menace to any eight-year-old in Ked’s and ankle socks. I stayed back a safe distance. Suddenly Billy Paul got up and began to stomp as many as he could into the next world. I was horrified. After all, if you were scared of something, you just kept your distance. When he suddenly stopped, he looked solemnly into the sky. “That old God up there.” That’s all he said. Just that. Billy Paul is probably a security guard somewhere now. I don’t know.

In the deep South we learned to respect the tenacious and the slimy. (Why do creatures in the humid climates seem to cling once they’re on you?) We spent hours in the Georgia woods exploring streams, unearthing old things under forgotten logs, looking for relics of the past. Once in the house, we were subject to a ritual of checking each other over for the inevitable tick–so easy to pick up, so hard to take off. The creepiest part was always thinking, “What if we missed one and it’s still on me?”

There is lyric poetry in the dragonfly, music in the cricket, exotic artistry in the June bug. They can do magical things we can’t understand. When we were little kids we couldn’t believe fireflies, but there they were. Bumblebees are not supposed to be able to fly but there they go visiting poppy after poppy. They experience entry into a perfect golden womb of light we can only try to imagine, and emerge like drunken pilots in a crowded airport. I know lots of people who are terrified of bees. In Neolithic times the bee was a sign of regeneration and life seeming to spring spontaneously from animal carcasses. When the progeny of the great mother goddess find themselves buzzing helplessly at the inside of my windows, the best I can do is to trap the confused creature in a glass and put it outside. There is a holiness to coming on a bumblebee suddenly out of gas on a sidewalk, stilled by the torpor of a chilly shadow. We pick it up on a leaf and place it carefully in a sunny spot, safe from foot traffic.

It’s when we’re children that we’re still able to appreciate small, crawling things. Once in the early Fall I went to a picnic with some friends. The grown-ups sat around talking or fussed over the food while the kids played with the usual suburban array of bikes, scooters, balls, etc. They went from toy to toy as their interest shifted. Suddenly one of the kids discovered a beautiful, spiky caterpillar. Everything else suddenly fell away from their focus. They crowded together to watch it, discussed it very seriously, and finally worked out a plan to ferry it on a leaf to a place under the bushes out of danger. It was the high point of the day. 

When we were small, my sister found a beautiful and intricate egg case. She couldn’t help wanting to keep it as a treasure. We woke up one morning to my horrified mother hollering about the zillions of miniature praying mantids that were crawling out of my sister’s dresser drawer. Mantis comes from the Greek word for prophet. Is it any wonder so many superheroes are named for bugs? There was The Green Hornet, the Tick, the Blue Beetle, and of course, Spiderman – the dude could catch thieves “just like flies!” Being a kid in the early sixties meant a steady diet of Sci-Fi movies. The ones I remember with deepest awe and relish? Tarantula, of course, or the one where giant grasshoppers invade Chicago, or the one with the woman who turns into a wasp. That’s the stuff my best bad dreams were made of. 

In high school biology our wonderfully eccentric teacher taught us all about insects and spiders. Along with the slide-making equipment and a real darkroom, the classroom had a huge “cockroach condo” – a wood and screen structure with a teaming heap of the honkers. For one of our photo projects you had to reach in and catch a cockroach and then photograph it. (I never thought of football players as being all that tough after that.) We made microscope slides, developed our cockroach photos and figured out mystery spiders all with Patsy Cline on the stereo.

Any teacher could do a lot worse than get some bugs for the classroom. We grow up. We forget about bugs. I’ve been fortunate, teaching little kids in a big city for years. Each year my students and I catch bugs in jars and watch them for awhile before we let them go back to wherever they came from. We raise caterpillars till they transform into butterflies. Watching them fly away is a moment of total wonder.

You may not suspect it, but schools are routinely assailed by outbreaks of those tiny, side-stepping reproduction experts, head lice. I have scoured so many heads in my tenure that I can spot one on a child five feet away. The itch we feel when we find them on one of our kids does not go away, even after we check each other carefully. It takes racing home after meetings and paperwork to a hot shower. It subsides for a week or so until whatever eggs that remained on the infested heads hatch into a new and more resistant generation and then we start all over again. More than one spontaneous haircut has been noticed on a teacher who was just recently talking about “letting it grow out.” Young children are very affectionate– there’s no way we want to change this. But why is it that the one you just hugged is the one with the bugs? We don’t have dress-up boxes or listening stations. Head phones and funny hats are used with caution. Tragically, the parents are often furious. At the bottom of their rage is that terror again, it’s the bugs.

More than 90% of all animal life is insect life. We only know about a few of them. Flowers strain themselves to look gorgeous for them (not for us). The bounty of fruit and vegetables we enjoy is thanks to their work. Humbling though it may be to realize the birds and bees are not pollinating on our account. We’re fortunate enough to enjoy the fruits (and vegetables) of their labor. Yet we’re hell bent on investing billions in pesticides.

Legions of scientists are at work right now to find new ways of wiping out the insects that threaten us and our crops. When I was little my mom would make us come inside the house when the DDT jeep was driving around the neighborhood spraying everything with a huge white plume. We always protested – the other kids got to stay outside. Thanks, Mom.

I think part of the magic and mystery is that bugs are doing their thing when we’re asleep. We are children when we realize this at first, and much older folks when we remember at last. Those summer nights when the air is warm and still and children are put to bed under protest because, “it’s not dark outside yet,” the bugs are just coming out to play under a sweet evening sky. While we’re tucked in safely, crickets are chirping, fireflies are flashing each other, and spiders are building fabulous webs we won’t know about until morning. Mostly, whether in the desert or the forest or a grassy field, night is their domain, not ours. No matter how smart we think we are in the light of day, we know none of the secrets the insects do. Theirs is the club that meets as we sleep. They are building, singing, mating, foraging, surviving in fabulous variety.

I remember fighting sleep, indignantly and then it would start – the crispy song of cicadas or the rhythmic ticking of crickets and their soft drones would lull me into peaceful forgetting. Someday I will be very, very old and in a hospital somewhere. The lulling sound of someone operating an autoclave or maybe just the air conditioner will filter through the layers of my consciousness like a kitten between the bed sheets. It will become for me the sound of cicadas on a warm southern evening when everything is pink and gold and peaceful and I will fly away that night, ever faster.