Photo: Lloyd DeGrane
February 2006 | BackWords
Animal Instincts
How to find true love by
making space for all of creation
By Marjorie Carlson Davis
FIRST LOVE. He was 16 years old, long-haired, dark and rebellious. Steven would smoke outside our high school until long after the bell rang, only to saunter past the principal’s office, trailing cigarette smoke and defiance.
I was attracted to Steven’s wildness, his unconventionality. In reality, our romance never progressed beyond friendship. The one thing we had in common was a love of nature, or at least I thought we shared that bond. We both loved hiking and we searched out the wildest places. In my 14-year-old naiveté, I thought he was what I wanted in a boy.
One glorious spring day, we hiked along a narrow creek, breathing in the yeasty smell of decaying wood and the spicy scent of new growth. Just moments before, we had uncovered a few morels, my first experience with the gray, wrinkly fungi.
“You eat those?!” I asked when Steven stuffed them into his backpack. They looked toxic, something a wicked witch would feed to wayward children.
“Yep!” Steven said, leaping across the four-foot creek and leaving me on the opposite bank.
A few minutes later, I heard a shout. I saw Steven spring backwards and a small black snake rear up its head. Bright sunlight streamed down from a clearing, illuminating the creek bed like a stage light. Steven grabbed a large stick and brought it down with force until the snake’s head was black pulp.
I turned away, sickened, afraid to look at the dead snake, afraid to look at the gleam in Steven’s eyes. My illusions about Steven died with the snake.
All Our Relations
My grandmother Lillian was a gentle woman who loved the outdoors and believed deeply in every living creature’s right to exist. She rarely got angry unless someone infringed on that right. No one ever killed a fly, spider or other insect in her household. Insects were caught and released outside. On one occasion when we were children, my sister and I were stamping on anthills in her backyard. In uncharacteristic severity, Lillian pulled us away.
“Don’t kill the ants!” she said sharply. “This is their home!”
Those four simple words have guided the way I view the wild creatures that share the outdoor world and the dogs and cats that share my living quarters. Those words encapsulate my respect for animals’ and insects’ space, for their right to be. It has been more than 20 years since Steven killed the snake, but his action and my grandmother’s lessons have also affected the way I respond to people.
Beautiful People
Once, on vacation, I walked along a marina on Lake Huron, gazing at the large, luxurious yachts. A group of men and women stood on the deck before a two-tiered boat. Their tanned legs, expensive boat shoes, and khaki shorts gave them away as owners. As they talked, a huge cecropia moth spiraled out of the air and landed by one woman’s feet. A beautiful moth, its dusty yellow wings were the size of my hand. Glancing down and still talking, the woman lifted one foot and stamped, crushing the moth beneath her shoe. I’ve never understood that action. The moth didn’t touch her, didn’t infringe on her space, yet in her eyes, it was expendable.
Animal Measures
The Outermost House is a record of naturalist Henry Beston’s year spent on Cape Cod. Observing a flock of seagulls make a synchronous turn in flight, Beston ponders Descartes’ hypothesis that animals are unthinking mechanisms, exact replicas that react like automatons to a stimulus. He concludes with thoughts on humankind’s response to animals. “We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man … They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Squirrel Watching
In the building where I teach, windows line a hallway, displaying a refreshing expanse of green. Often I stop to watch birds hunting for worms or ground squirrels popping from their burrows like jack-in-the boxes. One afternoon I approached the window where a young man stood watching another man outside creep toward a ground squirrel. The animal stood upright, its head swiveling. Both men were smiling and I smiled too, thinking all three of us were taking a moment to appreciate a bit of nature. The man outside turned to grin at his friend, then hurled a rock at the squirrel, barely missing the animal as it disappeared into its den. The two men laughed, apparently finding more pleasure in disturbing the animal than in appreciating it. I turned from the window, my stomach clenching in dismay.
Kindred Spirits
I remember the exact moment I knew I could live with the man I married. We were camping beside a lake, and not aware that I was observing him, he had waded into the water and squatted down at a cluster of rocks near the shore. Curious, I stood on tiptoes to see a small monarch butterfly trapped on a rock, its wings saturated with water. It staggered, trying to maintain balance, and its wings fluttered, trying to regain flight. Each wave knocked it closer to the rock’s edge and inevitable death. That’s when I saw him slip one finger underneath the butterfly and lift it to a higher rock, well above the water. The monarch’s orange wings vibrated in the air, so that it could finally lift itself to resume its dance from clover to clover on the shoreline. And as I watched the scene before me — a man allowing a creature its small bit of space — I knew I had found my true love.
Marjorie Carlson Davis is a freelance writer who lives in Iowa City, Iowa and frequently writes about nature.
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