The Flight of the Iguana Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction: A Mouse Is Miracle Enough

  Author’s Note

  I. FACES UNLIKE OURS

  The Face of a Spider

  Thinking About Earthworms

  The Thing with Feathers

  Nasty Habits

  Stalking the Gentle Piranha

  See No Evil

  Turnabout

  The Selfhood of a Spoon Worm

  II. WILD NOTIONS

  The Descent of the Dog

  Street Trees

  The Ontological Giraffe

  The Lonesome Ape

  Stranger than Truth

  Deep Thoughts

  III. FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

  Island Getaway

  Talk Is Cheap

  Icebreaker

  Agony in the Garden

  The Poseidon Shales

  The Beautiful and Damned

  Provide, Provide

  The Flight of the Iguana

  IV. THE MORAL ECOLOGY OF A DESERT

  The Beaded Lizard

  Drinking the Desert Juices

  The Desert Is a Mnemonic Device

  V. CHAMBERS OF MEMORY

  The Miracle of the Geese

  Swamp Odyssey

  The Siphuncle

  The Same River Twice

  Partial Sources

  About David Quammen

  Endnotes

  to Kris

  In view of Baboquivari

  INTRODUCTION

  A Mouse Is Miracle Enough

  The pageant of nature: Sometimes it seems like a freak show. You hear the nasal chant of the barker, you follow the pull of a prurient curiosity, you pay the dime, step through the flap of the tent into musky darkness and nose-flute music and when your eyes have adjusted you see there, sure enough, these garish living shapes. The spoon worm. The okapi. The red-footed booby. The plant that eats frogs. The chambered nautilus, ancient and unrecognizable, hovering in its aquarium, a snail-like critter with octopus arms who gazes back at you quizzically from two squinty eyes. The scorpion, armed and dangerous, glowing a luminescent blue-green. The rogue bedbug Xylocaris, with its almost unspeakable (though we will speak of them) sexual practices. But nature is not a freak show.

  And this is emphatically not a book full of geeks, though in places that impression may offer itself.

  Please don’t be misled. There will be giant earthworms, yes, there will be dogs without voices and chimpanzees talking in sign language, yes, there will be an iguana that sails through the air, needless to say, but the whole point of exhibiting such creatures is not for us to peer shudderingly at some sad monsters, or to examine the quirks that result when natural processes go haywire. On the contrary, the point here is simply nature itself on a good day. On a normal day. Quirks and haywire don’t even enter into it. These unpopular beasts I seem to have gathered here, for your contemplation, are the natural and true-born practitioners of life on this planet, the legitimate scions of organic evolution, as surely as are the white-tail deer or the parakeet or the puppy. If we ourselves can fathom them only in the context of carnival canvas and hootchy-kootchy music, the problem is probably our own.

  One name for that problem is xenophobia: fear or hatred of what is foreign or strange. The term is applied most often in connection with attitudes toward folk of the wrong skin color, but it’s applicable also to nonhuman characters with the wrong number of legs or eyes, the wrong shape of face or jaws, the wrong sexual or alimentary deportment.

  And I certainly don’t exempt myself from this problem. You are in the company here, as you’ll see, of a fellow who is guilty of a lifelong and deep-seated revulsion toward spiders. Mere spiders. Harmless innocent beneficial unassuming house-and-garden spiders, as well as the other kind.

  Which brings us to Latrodectus mactans, a spider but definitely no mere one. Latrodectus mactans is the black widow. Among other superlatives, it is America’s most famous and possibly most venomous arachnid. Having just forced myself to reread the book you are holding, I’ve discovered somewhat to my surprise that Latrodectus appears recurrently throughout it. Sometimes in a featured role, more often in cameos. There’s a reason for that. The black widow is not just a spider, not just a poisonous spider, not just a poisonous spider that happens to have a high degree of menacing but undeniable beauty; it is all those things and more. To me it’s a synecdoche, representing its own vivid self as well as other and broader meanings. Dangerous but not malicious, exotic-seeming but in truth rather common, ruthless as a mate, tender (and sometimes again ruthless) as a mother, death-dealing and life-seeking, fierce and vulnerable, gorgeous or hideous depending upon how we happen to see it, the black widow spider is nature.

  • • •

  Two primary subjects tangle their ways throughout this book: first, the surprising intricacies of the natural world, and second, human attitudes toward those intricacies. I’ve been intrigued for a long time not only by the sinister beauty of the black widow but also by my own—and your—reactions to it. I’m fascinated not only with the Galápagos marine iguana, as it sails through the sky on Chapter 22 - Flight of the Iguana, but equally with the young Englishman who got it airborne, and with the cluster of human ideas and attitudes closely connected to that flight. Facts are important to the appreciation of nature, because “appreciation” without comprehension is often a shallow and sentimental whim; and the essays that follow do contain, I think, their reasonable share of facts. But many of those essays are also full of opinion, bias, personal emotion, and what I offer as an earnest—if highly unsystematic—examination of attitudes. Within the term attitudes I include both emotional affinities and questions of principle. Not to wax portentous, but it seems to me that almost nothing bears more crucially upon the future of this planet than the seemingly simple matter of human attitudes toward nature.

  Human attitudes toward the black widow spider and the marine iguana, if you like. It is all ineluctably connected.

  Apropos of the matter of attitudes, this is the place to insert a quote. “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,” wrote Walt Whitman, “I stand and look at them long and long.” It’s from “Song of Myself,” of course, that great epic hug bestowed on mid-nineteenth century America by our crazy-wild poet of inclusiveness and enthusiasm. The full section is worth remembering:

  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  Walt Whitman never met a snake or a sea cucumber that he didn’t like, and this Whitmanesque attitude toward nature is exactly the one that seems to me exemplary. It is highly unscientific, it tends toward anthropomorphism, but then scientific objectivity and abstention from the anthropomorphic metaphor are not absolute virtues; those two forms of cold intellectual purity can help us understand nature, sure, but they shouldn’t necessarily define our relations with i
t. The Whitman view is more inclusive, more daring, and ultimately more salubrious for all concerned. Few of us lesser souls, though, are fully capable of it. Some of us come to the sticking point over spiders, some over grizzly bears, some over rattlesnakes, or cocker spaniels, or house cats. But we can try. More about all that in the essays that follow.

  In recognition of the Whitmanesque ideal, I considered at one point labeling the present volume for the title of the essay about scorpions and their feeble eyesight, “See No Evil.” But it wasn’t right. There’s too much human nature in this book for that title to apply generally—as you will have sad occasion to see in Part IV, “The Moral Ecology of a Desert.”

  You will also find some quiet and mundane creatures that don’t seem at all like they might ever be mistaken for freak-show attractions. The common European earthworm Lumbricus terrestris. The tepary bean of Sonoran agriculture. The nameless tree that grows from a sidewalk pit on West Forty-fourth Street in New York City. The Canada goose. In my personal view, each of these has the same import and the same mysterious resonance (though in more elusive ways) as Latrodectus mactans or the marine iguana, and each raises the same sort of questions about our relations with nature and with each other. Each one is a set of Chinese boxes, seemingly only more complicated and suspenseful as we work down toward that hidden center. The mystery and magic we’re chasing in this collective entity called nature is really everywhere; like the God of the pantheists, it inheres somehow in every leaf, every mite, every cell. In that connection, it’s time to quote Whitman again:

  I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

  And the pismire [ant] is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

  And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,

  And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven . . .

  And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,

  And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

  This book is a gathering of portraits and questions and thoughts. It is populated with a spectrum of creatures that, to my own eye, constitute the biological and aesthetic and philosophical equivalent of tree toads, pismires, leaves of grass. If it doesn’t somewhere among these pages make you angry, and somewhere else make you laugh, and somewhere still else make you sad or worried or vaguely inclined to rethink some matter of attitude, I will be disappointed. I don’t ask for sextillions of infidels. But I’ll be very gratified if the mouse is enough, on closer inspection, to stagger you.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Each of these essays was first published, in similar or slightly different form, in a magazine. But that is not quite the same, please note, as saying that they were all written for magazines. On the contrary, most of them were written to be eventually part of this book. At least, they were conceived and shaped—though for magazine publication initially—with this book ultimately in mind.

  The large majority appeared first as installments of the monthly column I write, under the title “Natural Acts,” for Outside magazine. It’s probably not possible for me to state adequately the depth of my indebtedness and my gratitude to the people of Outside, but here’s a concise attempt: extreme. I’ve had unimaginable freedom and opportunity as Outside’s natural-science columnist these past six years. And when I mention that gratitude toward “the people of Outside,” I have in mind not just a few editors, not just them plus the owner and publisher, not just the whole staff at Outside world headquarters in Chicago, but also and preeminently the magazine’s readers, who seem to me an interesting and mentally vigorous group of folks, and who have certainly made this book possible. Thank you for the dialogue, people.

  As with a previous volume of these essays (Natural Acts, 1985), I have resisted the temptation to try to update every fact or statement, changing numbers, adjusting for inflation and entropy, making follow-up calls about matters that are best left unfollowed-up. So it should be understood that a reference to “now” or “the present” in an individual piece might refer to any time between 1984 and 1987, and that any temporally contingent assertions made will reflect the state of things at that given time. Some of the situations may have since changed incrementally, but not, I believe, drastically.

  Thanks are due most especially to John Rasmus, Larry Burke, and Renée Wayne Golden, the three good souls most responsible for giving me rope enough to move between subjects like a kid on a Tarzan swing. If the rope has also occasionally been used to hang myself, that’s not their fault. Thanks also to Marc Barasch, David Hirshey, Lee Eisenberg, Lewis Lapham, Gerald Marzorati, Barry Lopez, Jackie Farber, Loretta Barrett, Tom Parrett, John Fife, Jim Corbett, Peggy Hutchison, Phil Willis-Conger, Bob Hirsh, Bill Roberson, John Crawford, Dick Murless, Marc Young, Allan Ostling, E. Jean Carroll, and of course Steve Byers.

  First publication of each of the pieces was as follows: “The Face of a Spider,” Outside (March 1987); “Thinking About Earthworms,” Outside (June 1986); “The Thing with Feathers,” Outside (September 1985); “Nasty Habits,” Outside (February 1987); “Stalking the Gentle Piranha,” Outside (January 1986); “See No Evil,” Outside (April 1985); “Turnabout,” Outside (November 1984); “The Selfhood of a Spoon Worm,” Outside (December 1985); “The Descent of the Dog,” Outside (August 1985); “Street Trees,” Outside (April 1987); “The Ontological Giraffe,” Outside (October 1984); “The Lonesome Ape,” Outside (June 1987); “Stranger than Truth,” Outside (August 1986); “Deep Thoughts,” Outside (November 1985); “Island Getaway,” Outside (October 1985); “Talk Is Cheap,” Outside (July 1986); “Icebreaker,” Outside (June 1985); “Agony in the Garden,” Outside (February 1986); “The Poseidon Shales,” Mercedes (Spring 1987); “The Beautiful and Damned,” Outside (July 1985); “Provide, Provide,” Outside (May 1985); “The Flight of the Iguana,” Outside (July 1987); “The Beaded Lizard” (as “Knowing the Heart of a Stranger”), New Age Journal (August 1984); “Drinking the Desert Juices,” Outside (November 1986); “The Desert Is a Mnemonic Device,” Harper’s (December 1986); “The Miracle of the Geese,” Outside (September 1986); “Swamp Odyssey,” Outside (January 1985); “The Siphuncle,” Outside (January 1987); “The Same River Twice,” Outside (May 1986).

  I

  FACES UNLIKE OURS

  THE FACE OF A SPIDER

  Eyeball to Eyeball with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  One evening a few years ago I walked back into my office after dinner and found roughly a hundred black widow spiders frolicking on my desk. I am not speaking metaphorically and I am not making this up: a hundred black widows. It was a vision of ghastly, breathtaking beauty, and it brought on me a wave of nausea. It also brought on a small moral crisis—one that I dealt with briskly, maybe rashly, in the dizziness of the moment, and that I’ve been turning back over in my mind ever since. I won’t say I’m haunted by those hundred black widows, but I do remember them vividly. To me, they stand for something. They stand, in their small synecdochical way, for a large and important question.

  The question is, How should a human behave toward the members of other living species?

  A hundred black widows probably sounds like a lot. It is—even for Tucson, Arizona, where I was living then, a habitat in which black widows breed like rabbits and prosper like cockroaches, the females of the species growing plump as huckleberries and stringing their ragged webs in every free corner of every old shed and basement window. In Tucson, during the height of the season, a person can always on short notice round up eight or ten big, robust black widows, if that’s what a person wants to do. But a hundred in one room? So all right, yes, there was a catch: These in my office were newborn babies.

  A hundred scuttering bambinos, each one no bigger than a poppyseed. Too small still for red hourglasses, too small even for red egg timers. They had the aesthetic virtue of being so tiny that even a person of good eyesight and patient disposition could not make out their hideous little f
aces.

  Their mother had sneaked in when the rains began and set up a web in the corner beside my desk. I knew she was there—I got a reminder every time I dropped a pencil and went groping for it, jerking my hand back at the first touch of that distinctive, dry, high-strength web. But I hadn’t made the necessary decision about dealing with her. I knew she would have to be either murdered or else captured adroitly in a pickle jar for relocation to the wild, and I didn’t especially want to do either. (I had already squashed scores of black widows during those Tucson years but by this time, I guess, I was going soft.) In the meantime, she had gotten pregnant. She had laid her eggs into a silken egg sac the size of a Milk Dud and then protected that sac vigilantly, keeping it warm, fending off any threats, as black widow mothers do. While she was waiting for the eggs to come to term, she would have been particularly edgy, particularly unforgiving, and my hand would have been in particular danger each time I reached for a fallen pencil. Then the great day arrived. The spiderlings hatched from their individual eggs, chewed their way out of the sac, and started crawling, brothers and sisters together, up toward the orange tensor lamp that was giving off heat and light on the desk of the nitwit who was their landlord.

  By the time I stumbled in, fifty or sixty of them had reached the lampshade and rappelled back down on dainty silk lines, leaving a net of gossamer rigging between the lamp and the Darwin book (it happened to be an old edition of Insectivorous Plants, with marbled endpapers) that sat on the desk. Some dozen others had already managed dispersal flights, letting out strands of buoyant silk and ballooning away on rising air, as spiderlings do—in this case dispersing as far as the bookshelves. It was too late for one man to face one spider with just a pickle jar and an index card and his two shaky hands. By now I was proprietor of a highly successful black widow hatchery.