Things That Are by Amy Leach

Author:Amy Leach [Leach, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Essays, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781571318640
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2012-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

You Are Going to Fly

Once, a friend and I followed a moth that trudged across a whole grocery store parking lot. It was nighttime—not really a safe time for trudging moths, people generally being too tired, by then, to stop the car and wait. I said to it: “Moth, why don’t you fly? Why do you waste your wings?” But my friend, much better than me at allowing winged things to walk, said that maybe it missed being a caterpillar. We decided this: it is a good thing that the caterpillar stage comes before the moth stage, instead of the other way around; moths, if they like, can take long nostalgic walks across parking lots, while caterpillars could never indulge in long nostalgic flights to Mexico.

“Caterpillar, you are going to fly,” everyone says to caterpillars. “You will be transformed!” People think of them as protomoths and protobutterflies and are impatient for them to convert into their more extraordinary selves. This is understandable, of course: when that which is like a plodding lozenge turns into that which is like an angel, everything that belongs to the lozenge’s time seems mere preliminary. But think of the nervousness for the lozenge! What sort of disposition could bear the pressure of such a drastic and imminent exaltation? Caterpillars, nonetheless, remain calm, eating their tobacco and milkweed, enviably imperturbable in the face of a brilliant future.

Yet they are perturbable—if not by the future, then by elements of the present, for they are little and plush-soft, crushable, eatable, drownable, freezable. A few have spines, like the hickory horned devil, or intimidating tufts, like the dagger moth; a few have antifreeze to keep their blood from turning to icy slush, but most do not. Most can only inch away from danger, antifreeze and intimidating tufts notwithstanding. Any danger that cannot overtake a caterpillar is no danger at all, a trifle.

Because they cannot run (for caterpillars have only six real legs—the rest are fake: mere stumps to keep their hind parts from dragging and getting scuffed), caterpillars have to do other things when threatened. Some make themselves unpleasant: black-etched prominent caterpillars send out two foul-smelling pink tentacles from their back end and wave them around. Monarch caterpillars are foul-tasting. (Entomologists use that word “foul” often when referring to the flavor of a caterpillar. They are rarely more specific than “foul” or “tasty.” I expect that is because they are leaving the assessment up to birds, and birds have a very binary approach.)

The azalea caterpillar, a black-and-white plaid caterpillar with a cherry-red head and legs, when disturbed, arches up its head and thrusts it back, like a hairpin, and arches its tail up like an S. To be honest, it looks more electrocuted than scary when it does this. The yellow-necked caterpillar twists itself into the same shape, except that the yellow-neck vibrates as well, which really brings electric trauma to mind.

Many caterpillars defend themselves not by striking fear in the hearts of their predators, but rather indifference. The large maple spanworm looks like a twig; the viceroy caterpillar looks like a bird dropping.

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