The Flight of the Iguana (2 page)

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.

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).

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 faces.

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.

And the question was, How should a human behave toward the members of other living species?

•   •   •

The Jain religion of India has a strong teaching on that question. The Sanskrit word is
ahimsa,
generally rendered in English as “noninjury” or the imperative “do no harm.”
Ahimsa
is the ethical centerpiece of Jainism, an absolute stricture against the killing of living beings—
any
living beings—and it led the traditional Jains to some extreme forms of observance. A rigorously devout Jain would burn no candles or lights, for instance, if there was danger a moth might fly into them. The Jain would light no fire for heating or cooking, again because it might cause the death of insects. He would cover his mouth and nose with a cloth mask, so as not to inhale any gnats. He would refrain from cutting his hair, on grounds that the lice hiding in there might be gruesomely injured by the scissors. He could not plow a field, for fear of mutilating worms. He could not work as a carpenter or a mason, with all that dangerous sawing and crunching, nor could he engage in most types of industrial production. Consequently the traditional Jains formed a distinct socioeconomic class, composed almost entirely of monks and merchants. Their ethical canon was not without what you and I might take to be glaring contradictions (vegetarianism was sanctioned, plants as usual getting dismissive treatment in the matter of rights to life), but at least they took it seriously. They lived by it. They tried their best to do no harm.