The Fly Trap (3 page)

The real difficulty turned out to be explaining my happiness to the uninitiated.

In his short story “The Man Who Loved Islands,” D. H. Lawrence writes:

The years were blending into a soft mist, from which nothing obtruded. Spring came. There was never a primrose on his island, but he found a winter aconite. There were two little sprayed bushes of blackthorn, and some wind-flowers. He began to make a list of the flowers on his islet, and that was absorbing. He noted a wild currant bush, and watched for the elder flowers on a stunted little tree, then for the first yellow rags of the broom, and wild roses. Bladder campion, orchids, stitchwort, celandine, he was prouder of them than if they had been people on his island. When he came across the golden saxifrage, so inconspicuous in a damp corner, he crouched over it in a trance, he knew not for how long, looking at it. Yet it was nothing to look at. As the widow’s daughter found, when he showed it her.

Chapter 3

A Trap in Rangoon

Many years ago, before the island and the theatre, I took a passenger barge up the mighty Congo River. What an adventure! What stories I would tell! About freedom! But it didn’t happen. I never managed to say much more than that the forests were vast and the river as broad as Kalmar Sound. And that I’d been there. So it goes when you travel for the sake of something to say. Your eyes go weak. All I could have written were endless disquisitions about homesickness. So I kept my mouth shut.

It’s a different story with Ladäng Creek, I thought aloud to myself one morning among the bird-cherry blossoms. Then something remarkable happened.

I was in the process of rigging up my big California fly trap between a couple of over-blooming sallow bushes down by the creek—a complicated manoeuvre—when suddenly a complete stranger appeared as if from nowhere. He just stepped straight out of the lush June greenery and addressed me politely and apologetically in English. A wood warbler sang its silver song somewhere in the trembling crown of a nervous aspen, and a pike splashed in the shallow water of the creek. The mosquitoes were stubborn in the shade. He said it was me he was looking for.

“I’m looking for you” were his exact words.

I tried to accept this as the most natural thing in the world, as if strangers could be expected to seek me out wherever I might be. But I failed completely. Instead I stood there like an idiot among the sedge tussocks, amazed and speechless.

This man was in fact, and still is, the only person I’ve ever encountered by Ladäng Creek. If you want to be left in peace, it’s a good place to go. Islanders never go there, and the summer people don’t know the place exists. The paths that once led there have now vanished. The name of the creek is not even on the map. For that matter, it’s not much of a waterway, more of a ditch—overgrown, silted up and periodically dry. The meadow barns that are said to have stood there are long gone, as indeed are the meadows. Slowly but surely they’ve been invaded by fir, aspen, birch and alder. All the same, it’s a very pretty place, as rich and spacious as a cathedral when the marsh marigolds bloom in the spring. Deer meet down by the creek, sometimes moose, but never people. Except that day.

In the Middle Ages, Ladäng Creek was the channel boats used to sail to a village at the far end of the bay, which rising land elevations eventually turned into a freshwater lake. The village is still there. It’s where we live. How old it is no one knows, but there were probably people living here as early as Viking times. The inner parts of the long bay, where the humus-brown water is very deep, must have made an ideal harbour—a sanctuary that seafarers with base intentions surely hesitated to venture into. The granite cliff drops straight into the water. The village was easily defended against attackers from the open ocean to the east.

What ships anchored here outside my window? Who rowed up the creek where today a pike can hardly make its way?

“I’m looking for you.”

Who had told him I would be right here? How very strange. Why hadn’t he called first, as other people do, or at least sent a letter or an email saying he wanted to arrange a meeting? A fly person, of course. News travels fast and globally in our line of work.
Criorhina ranunculi
has not yet been observed in England, and
Blera fallax
is a rarity, a fabulous creature that collectors there can only dream about. Here it is not uncommon. There is no shortage of reasons. It struck me that maybe it was my seven specimens of
Doros profuges
that explained my standing here eye to eye with a fully equipped Englishman, complete with an oilskin coat of that indeterminate colour favoured by military quartermasters. Middle-aged, balding, foolishly bareheaded, waving his arms like a semaphore.

As mentioned earlier, the mosquitoes were annoying.

But in that case, I thought, he’s come way too early.
Doros
doesn’t appear until the first week in July. If we’re lucky, that is. Sometimes it never appears at all.

The Englishman then initiated a conversation that gradually dispelled my questions—and left me embarrassed at my own presumption. But to start with, the whole thing grew even stranger. He stepped towards me across the mud with a book in his hand that quickly revealed itself to be a well-thumbed copy of
Stockholmstraktens Växter,
a guide to the plant life of the Stockholm region, published in 1912. As if it were a perfectly natural continuation of his puzzling opening remark, he approached me eagerly with the book opened to a page showing local trees. And it was only then that I realized it wasn’t me he was looking for, and that what he had said was not “I’m looking for you,” but rather “I’m looking for yew,” a tree that, according to his guidebook, grew “abundantly” on this island.

I’ve run into any number of strange botanists over the years. It’s usually orchids they’re searching for—lady’s slippers, red helleborine, marsh helleborine. And they get lost. Especially if what they’re looking for is white adder’s mouth, not to mention the musk orchid, which no one has seen on the island since 1910, when Sten Selander, a botanist and member of the Swedish Academy, found a single specimen. I have answered their questions, sometimes a little evasively in order to save the orchids from getting trampled to extinction, but this one was new. So when I had told the man where the island’s yews might be found, I ventured to ask how it was that his curiosity had taken such an unexpected turn this lovely summer day.

“Why yew?”

“Well, you see,” he said, and went on to explain quite openly that he was freelancing for a French pharmaceutical company that had assigned him to investigate this and other areas of Northern Europe for the possibility of harvesting taxol, a substance found in the inner bark of the yew, which has shown itself to be an amazingly effective agent against various forms of cancer. I knew quite a bit about taxol from a book I had translated—enough to have quite a satisfactory conversation about it. Moreover, I could tell him with great certainty that the yews here on the island were too few and too frail to be of use. He was looking for large stands. There were none here. The Baltic states might be worth a look, I suggested. (It was just a guess, plucked from thin air.) The man listened attentively as he waved his arms. Yes, he was on his way in that direction. By way of Gotland, if I understood him correctly. Then we talked for a bit about ferries and about the weather before he thanked me for my help and walked on, to the southeast, towards the limestone outcroppings by the mouth of the creek. An odd man. And the last thing he said was as remarkable as the first.

“By the way, it’s a large one, your Malaise trap.”

Say what you like about Englishmen, but they are often cultured people. In the course of our brief conversation, we had not touched upon what I was doing there in the undergrowth by the creek. We had not said a word about insects. Of course he had noticed my hand net, but unlike all my fellow Swedes, he had clearly seen it as no more than a perfectly natural part of what a gentleman is expected to carry with him when wandering field and forest. He had not felt the need to ask questions. How pleasant! His comment about the trap was merely an acknowledgement. He did not ask what it was, not even if it
was
a Malaise trap. Simply observed in passing that it was large.

That was the last thing he said. And I stood there in the sedge, as noted earlier, quite speechless.

…

The point is that he was right. My fly trap is American and for that reason so disproportionately large that my friends on the mainland were under the impression that I had purchased a party tent. The model, called the Mega Malaise Trap, is six metres wide and three metres high. In addition, it has double collecting vessels. A real monster. A more effective trap does not exist.

For a long time, I wouldn’t hear of it. In the early years, I was openly hostile to traps of every kind. There was something unsportsmanlike about them, something greedy, and moreover it seemed to me that anyone reduced to using a trap was missing the more poetic dimensions of fly-collecting—anticipation, repose and slowness.

“I’m no industrialist” was my usual reply when asked why I didn’t get myself a Malaise trap. I didn’t even like to use yellow pan traps, that is to say, shallow yellow bowls of water in which flies drown because they’re so dumb they think everything yellow is a flower. Even today I have a certain contempt for this simplest of all traps, which requires no talent, just patience in the sorting out of hymenoptera, beetles, butterflies and all the other poor creatures that keep the flies company in this quickly disgusting soup of disappointed nectar seekers.

But however it happened, the Malaise trap began to excite my imagination. Wherever anyone deployed one, even if it was only on a marsh in the trackless wastes of Lapland, remarkable hoverflies turned up. So what might not turn up here? Species whose existence on the island I’d never dreamed of might allow themselves to be captured in this way, of that I was convinced. And since it was getting harder and harder to find new thrills, my resistance weakened. When you spend two weeks in a row standing like a statue in a spirea thicket without seeing hide nor hair of an unfamiliar hoverfly, you start to think. You think, for example, about the insects you’re missing because they don’t exist right here, right now, or because they just fly past like untouchable meteors. A Malaise trap, you think finally, might at least be an interesting experiment.

Once you’ve thought that far, you’re a goner. In my case, I tried telling myself, just for fun, that a Malaise trap in the garden would simply be a belated tribute to one of my really great heroes.

Of course! It would be an act of reverence! Done and done.

René Malaise was born in 1892 and lived until 1978. He was Swedish, which few people realize. For entomologists all over the world, Malaise is a sort of free-floating concept—like Linnaeus—who stands above the limitations of national stereotype. There are innumerable insects bearing the species name
malaisei
in his honour, and his monograph on the taxonomy of southeast Asian sawflies—unreadable for the layperson, I’m sorry to say—is reputed to be unsurpassed. But fate decreed that his really fireproof fame would come to him not because of his research or his books or even his epic adventures, but rather because of an invention that was epoch-making in the truest sense of the word, an invention which, like so many ingenious innovations, was simple and seemed later to be obvious.

During one of his extensive journeys in foreign climes, he noticed that a great many insects found their way into his tent but never found their way out again, at least not the way they came in.

On one occasion, however, there was a small hole in one corner of the tent roof, and through this hole all the insects readily regained their freedom. And that gave René Malaise the impulse for his trap. He tells the story himself in an article printed in 1937 in
Entomologisk Tidskrift
(
Journal of Entomology
), written appropriately enough in English and with a classic opening line: “Since the time of Linnaeus the technique of catching insects has not improved very much…” Unwarranted modesty was not, as far as one can tell, one of Malaise’s distinguishing characteristics.

His observations from the wilderness had gradually crystallized into the idea of a gauzy arrangement of fine netting, not unlike an old-fashioned two-man tent with open sides. The peak of the roof sloped slightly upwards, and at its highest point there was a treacherous hole leading to an ingeniously constructed gas chamber. The prototype was constructed in Stockholm shortly before Malaise and his second (possibly third) wife headed off to the mountains and valleys of northern Burma to collect hymenoptera. The year was 1934, and the first five traps were sewn together in a tailor shop in Rangoon under the supervision of the inventor himself. Then they travelled north. The railroad ended at Myitkyina. With sixteen mules, they set course for the Chinese border.

Still today, scientists crouch over stereo microscopes sorting his collection. That’s how effective his traps were. Over a few months, he and his wife captured well over 100,000 specimens, mostly of completely unknown species. Three-quarters of the sawflies—the group that Malaise himself studied—were new to science.

I have no idea what’s new here on the island, and I don’t care. There are certainly hundreds of unknown species—parasitic hymenoptera, fungal gnats and others—and many of them, probably, have already been caught in my net, but I’m interested only in hoverflies. There are, of course, some other groups that I’ll collect for future use—jewel wasps, bee flies, wild bees, soldier flies—but I’d go crazy if I tried to include everything. For people like me, limits are an essential part of life. I too boarded the train in Rangoon once, but there’s nothing more to tell. I got off in Mandalay and stayed for a week in a hotel. I remember a café, that’s all.

In any case, once I’d given way to temptation, everything happened very quickly.