- Of a late afternoon long ago I sat in the clearing above
the swamp, headwaters of Machodoc Creek, where my parents lived in Virginia's
Tidewater. I was reading. The air was thick with summer almost silent,
except for the occasional bird and bug going about their affairs and the
distant cough and roar of big trucks gearing their way up the hills on
Route 301. Dragonflies flittered about in light that began to slant through
the trees.
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- Odd. Usually they kept to the wetlands below the hill.
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- Something fell on my pages and thrashed awkwardly about.
A bug of some sort, but not one that I had seen, and it seemed to have
trouble walking. Above, the dragonflies flashed and hovered. I dumped the
stranger on the grass and kept reading. Shortly another of the curious
creatures fell on my leg. It couldn't walk either.
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- At last I understood. The ants were queening. Hopeful
chitinous maidens were taking wing to mate, and the dragonflies were eating
them, nipping off the juicy abdomens and dropping the rest on me. That
was why they had left the swamp.
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- I knew dragonflies well. As a boy in Alabama with a BB
gun, I had hunted them, and moccasins, in the wet region near the Valley
Gin Company, which didn't make gin but took the seeds out of cotton. The
town was Athens, then small and almost rural. The air there was alive with
snake doctors, as dragonflies were locally known, though elsewhere they
are called mosquito hawks or the devil's darning needles---fast, muscular
insects, with huge compound eyes like radomes. They are fearsome to look
in the face and, for small prey that fly, agile death. They glittered iridescent
blue and green in the sunlight. I could never hit them.
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- In Virginia, ant parts rained down. The world, I reflected,
seemed friendly only because people were too large for most things to eat.
The world we live in bears little relation to the smaller world roundabout.
In our pretty clearing with the smell of warm vegetation and the babble
of birds was a realm of nightmare mechanical monsters, unnoticed because
small. I have seen ants tear apart a wounded hornet, a mantis eating a
struggling bug held in brawny green forearms. It is well for us that mantises
don't weigh three hundred pounds.
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- I sometimes think I am the only man who doesn't understand
wherever it is that we are.
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- As the light failed and I could no long see my page,
I wandered across the bean field to where the old road, once a wagon track,
ran between high banks into the woods. A flaming sunset had come over the
sky, rolling off forever in what looked like ocean waves or burning dunes.
The air smelled of damp earth and leaf mold. Night came early in the road
cut. The first bats began to flicker through branches dark against the
flames.
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- The droning announcers of the endless nature shows on
television, full of the confidence born of limited understanding, tell
us that bats and cockatoos and locusts are the necessary consequent of
blind chance, speaking in the next breath of Mother Nature's intentions.
For them everything is simple. Starlings are drab so that nothing hungry
can see them, and cockatoos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate.
Yet I note that starlings seem to mate prolifically if drably and, given
what cockatoos sound like, it is hard to see how anything could fail to
find one that wanted to be found.
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- I think those big birds are too pretty to be accidents.
Those of religious nature have attributed such things to any of several
thousand gods, some more attractive than others. They, like the acolytes
of evolution, are perfectly sure of the rightness of their views. I am
not sure of anything. Alone in a darkling wood, with things all about flying
and hunting and growing in a vast ungraspable dance, I suspected that I
was in the presence of something above my pay grade. Just what, I couldn't
say, nor of what intentions or provenance. I didn't think it was much concerned
with me. It wasn't physics.
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- Recently I found the noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking
quoted, perhaps correctly, as saying that humanity may be on the verge
of understanding everything whatever. Physicists often say such things,
speaking of string theory, singularities, and the 3K background radiation-words
redolent of insulation and sixty-cycle hum. If one may differ with a cosmogonist,
I suggest that we understand almost nothing. And without the slightest
disrespect, I note that the brightest of a large population of hamsters
is, after all, a hamster.
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- I suppose that people believe that they understand this
mysterious universe because it is more comforting to think that one understands
than to worry uneasily that one mightn't. The faithful, Darwinian and otherwise,
persuade themselves that they have The Answer. The fury of their defense
of their creeds suggests a nagging doubt. Others focus on the here and
now and deny the question. Few say, "I don't know."
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- The sky glowed in gorgeous oranges and reds like a Chinese
lamp lit from within and slowly burned out to blues and ashen black. Yes,
I have heard of water vapor and indices of refraction, but I don't think
that was what was happening, or not all that was happening. In the marsh
below things would be coming out to eat.
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- I wish explanations explained better. There is a peculiar
wasp that kills tarantulas, buries them, and lays eggs on them. I have
tried to imagine how an infant wasp, crawling unschooled from where its
mother left it as an egg, knows how to find a tarantula, where to sting
it, and how to bury it. One would think the world would be a confusing
place to such a newborn with no experience of it and only the outline of
a nervous system. Yet they do it unerringly. More is going on here than
I think we know.
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- My idiot dog Deacon showed up and set about whuffling
in the black undergrowth. He was an agreeable if foolish brute, and appeared
to be the product of illicit coupling between a German shepherd and a boxcar.
Why he whuffled, I don't know. I didn't need to know. He did what is proper
to his place in things and I, what is proper to mine. He sniffed, and I
supervised sunsets. It suited us.
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- http://www.fredoneverything.net/Ants.shtml
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