The Flight of the Iguana

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

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 it. 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,