The Flight of the Iguana (38 page)

None of us was being published. Nothing happened in that town between October and May. The man and I played chess. We endangered our lives hilariously cutting and hauling firewood. We skied into the backcountry carrying tents and cast-iron skillets and bottles of wine, then argued drunkenly over whether it was proper to litter the woods with eggshells, if the magpies and crows did it too. We watched Willie Stargell win a World Series. Sometimes on cold clear days we put on wool gloves with no fingertips and went out to fish. Meanwhile the woman sequestered herself in a rickety backyard shed, with a small wood stove and a cot and a manual typewriter, surrounded by black widow spiders that she chose to view as pets. Or the three of us stood in their kitchen, until late hours on winter nights, while the woman peeled and ate uncountable grapefruits and the man and I drank whiskey, and we screamed at each other about literature.

The spring creek ran cool in summer. It ran warm in winter. This is what spring creeks do; this is their special felicity. It steamed and it rippled with fluid life when the main river was frozen over solid. Anchor ice never formed on the rocks of its riffles, killing insect larvae where they lived, and frazil ice never made the water slushy—as occurred on the main river. During spring runoff this creek didn't flood; therefore the bottom wasn't scoured and disrupted, and the eggs of the rainbow trout, which spawned around that time, weren't swept out of the nests and buried lethally in silt. The creek did go brown with turbidity during runoff, from the discharge of several small tributaries that carried meltwater out of the mountains through an erosional zone, but the color would clear again soon.

Insects continued hatching on this creek through the coldest months of the winter. In October and November, large brown trout came upstream from the main river and scooped out their spawning nests on a bend that curved around the sheep pasture, just downstream from the car bodies. In August, grasshoppers blundered onto the water from the brushy banks, and fish exploded out of nowhere to take them. Occasionally I or the other fellow would cast a tiny fly and pull in a grayling, that gorgeous and delicate cousin of trout, an Arctic species left behind by the last glaciation, that fared poorly in the warm summer temperatures of sun-heated meltwater rivers. In this creek a grayling could be comfortable, because most of the water came from deep underground. That water ran cool in summer, relatively, and warm in winter, relatively—relative in each case to the surrounding air temperature, as well as the temperature of the main river. In absolute terms the creek's temperature tended to be stable year-round, holding steady in a hospitable middle range close to the constant temperature of the groundwater from which it was fed. This is what spring creeks, by definition, do. The scientific jargon for such a balanced condition is
stenothermal:
temperatures in a narrow range. The ecological result is a stable habitat
and a twelve-month growing season. Free from extremes of cold or heat, free from flooding, free from ice and heavy siltation and scouring, the particular spring creek in question seemed always to me a thing of sublime and succoring constancy. In that regard it was no different from other spring creeks; but it was the one I knew and cared about.

The stretch of years came to an end. The marriage came to an end. There were reasons, but the reasons were private, and are certainly none of our business here. Books were pulled down off shelves and sorted into two piles. Fine oaken furniture, too heavy to be hauled into uncertain futures, was sold off for the price of a sad song. The white-stockinged mare was sold also, to a family with a couple of young barrel-racers, and the herd of trap-lame and half-feral cats was divided up. The man and the woman left town individually, in separate trucks, at separate times, each headed back toward New York City. I helped load the second truck, the man's, but my voice wasn't functioning well on that occasion. I was afflicted with a charley horse of the throat. It had all been hard to witness, not simply because a marriage had ended but even more so because, in my unsolicited judgment, a great love affair had. This partnership of theirs had been a vivid and imposing thing.

Or maybe it was hard because two love affairs had ended—if you count mine with the pair of them. I should say here that a friendship remains between me and each of them. Friendship with such folk is a lot. But it's not the same.

Now I live in the city from which college students flock off to the Fourth of July rodeo in that little town, where they raise hell for a day and litter Main Street with beer cans and then sleep it off under the scraggly elm in what is now someone else's front yard—the compensation being that July Fourth is quieter up here. It is only an hour's drive. Not too long ago I was down there myself.

I parked, as always, in the yard by the burn barrel outside the
stucco house. The house was empty; I avoided it. With my waders and my fly rod I walked out to the spring creek. Of course it was all a mistake.

I stepped into the creek and began fishing my way upstream, casting a grasshopper imitation into patches of shade along the overhung banks. There were a few strikes. There was a fish caught and released. But after less than an hour I quit. I climbed out of the water. I left. I had imagined that a spring creek was a thing of sublime and succoring constancy. I was wrong. Heraclitus was right.

Magazine formats generally do not allow for bibliographical acknowledgments or footnoting. This is too bad. Facts and quotes don't come out of thin air; they all have to be quarried or borrowed or stolen from somewhere, and most of us journalistic pirates would prefer whenever possible to credit our sources. For any essayist who publishes his work first in magazines, therefore, one of the good things about collecting the same pieces into a book is that, finally, proper acknowledgment can be made.

Still, even this bibliography is not complete. In addition to the sources listed below, for instance, I am indebted also to a number of scientists and others who gave me their thoughts over the telephone, and to broad reference works upon which I depend habitually. Foremost among the latter is
Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia,
a monumentally useful work edited by Bernhard Grzimek and published by Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Besides giving credit where credit is due, the following list is also offered as a guide, to the zealous, for further reading. Within each chapter heading the individual works are listed in (roughly) the order of their importance to my own idiosyncratic purposes; that ordering doesn't necessarily coincide with either their full scientific value, or with chronology, or with the alphabet. The
technical sources should be mainly distinguishable from the works of general interest by their titles. I haven't noted that distinction explicitly, because in some cases the supposedly technical papers are precisely the ones that deserve a wide general audience. Gold is where you find it. Pan for it here at your own leisure, according to your own intuition.

In the cases of books, each edition listed below is not necessarily the first edition, nor the most recent, but simply the one to which I happened to have access.

The Face of a Spider

The Black Widow Spider.
Raymond W. Thorp and Weldon D. Woodson. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1976.

Biology of Spiders.
Rainer F. Foelix. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1982.

The Religion of India.
Max Weber. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: The Free Press. 1967.

Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man.
Gordon Harrison. New York: E. P. Dutton. 1978.

Thinking About Earthworms

The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits.
Charles Darwin. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1896.

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora Barlow. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1958.

Earthworm Ecology: From Darwin to Vermiculture.
Edited by J. E. Satchell. New York: Chapman and Hall, 1983.

Soil Biology.
Edited by A. Burges and F. Raw. New York: Academic Press. 1967.

Soil Animals.
D. Keith McE. Kevan. New York: Philosophical Library. 1962.

Living Earth.
Peter Farb. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1959.

The Physiology of Earthworms.
M. S. Laverack. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1963.

The Vision of the Past.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Translated by J. M. Cohen. New York: Harper & Row. 1966.

The Thing with Feathers

“Archaeopteryx
and the Origin of Flight.” John H. Ostrom.
The Quarterly Review of Biology,
Vol. 49. March 1974.

“Bird Flight: How Did It Begin?” John H. Ostrom.
American Scientist,
Vol. 67. January-February 1979.

“The Ancestry of Birds.” John H. Ostrom.
Nature,
Vol. 242. March 9, 1973.

“The Evolutionary Origin of Feathers.” Philip J. Regal.
The Quarterly Review of Biology,
Vol. 50. March 1975.

“Back to the Trees for
Archaeopteryx
in Bavaria.” Michael E. Howgate.
Nature,
Vol. 313. February 7, 1985.

“The
Archaeopteryx
Flap.” Stephen Jay Gould.
Natural History.
September 1986.

“The Flying Ability of
Archaeopteryx.”
D. W. Yalden.
Ibis,
Vol. 113. 1971.

“Speculations on the Origin of Feathers.” Kenneth C. Parkes.
The Living Bird,
Vol. V. 1966.

“Volant Adaptation in Vertebrates.” Richard S. Lull.
The American Naturalist,
Vol. XL, No. 476. August 1906.

“Flight Capability and the Pectoral Girdle of
Archaeopteryx.”
Storrs L. Olson and Alan Feduccia.
Nature,
Vol. 278. March 15, 1979.

The Age of Birds.
Alan Feduccia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1980.

Men and Dinosaurs.
Edwin H. Colbert. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1971.

Nasty Habits

A Natural History of Sex: The Ecology and Evolution of Sexual Behavior.
Adrian Forsyth. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1986.

“Homosexual Rape and Sexual Selection in Acanthocephalan Worms.” Lawrence G. Abele and Sandra Gilchrist.
Science,
Vol. 197. July 1, 1977.

“Sperm Sharing in
Biomphalaria
Snails: A New Behavioural Strategy in Simultaneous Hermaphroditism.” Warton Monteiro, José Maria G. Almeida, Jr., and Braulio S. Dias.
Nature,
Vol. 308. April 19, 1984.

Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas.
Donald Worster. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1985.

“Drafting the Bombardier Beetle.” Natalie Angier.
Time.
February 25, 1985.

Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record.
Duane T. Gish. El Cajon: Creation-Life Publishers. 1985.

“The Scopes Trial in Reverse.” Duane T. Gish.
The Humanist.
November-December 1977.

The Decade of Creation.
Edited by Henry M. Morris and Donald H. Rohrer. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers. 1981.

Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution.
Douglas J. Futuyma. New York: Pantheon Books. 1983.

Scientists Confront Creationism.
Edited by Laurie R. Godfrey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 1983.

Parasitic Insects.
R. R. Askew. New York: American Elsevier Publishing Co. 1971.

Ecological Entomology.
Edited by Carl B. Huffaker and Robert L. Rabb. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 1984.

Stalking the Gentle Piranha

The Fishes and the Forest: Explorations in Amazonian Natural History.
Michael Goulding. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1980.

“Forest Fishes of the Amazon.” Michael Goulding. In
Key Environments: Amazonia.
Edited by Ghillean T. Prance and Thomas E. Lovejoy. New York: Pergamon Press. 1985.

“A Fish in the Bush Is Worth . . .” Thomas H. Maugh II.
Science,
Vol. 211. March 13, 1981.

The Primary Source: Tropical Forests and Our Future.
Norman Myers. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 1984.

See No Evil

Spiders, Scorpions, Centipedes and Mites.
J. L. Cloudsley-Thompson. London: Pergamon Press. 1968.

“Prey Detection by the Sand Scorpion.” Philip H. Brownell.
Scientific American,
Vol. 251, No. 6. December 1984.

“A Short Review of Scorpion Biology, Management of Stings, and Control.” Franklin Ennik.
California Vector Views,
Vol. 19, No. 10. October 1972.

“Biology of the Large Philippine Forest Scorpion.” W. Schultze.
The Philippine Journal of Science,
Vol. 32, No. 3. March 1927.