In the Yard

 

(Second of a series, see previous post for details.)

 

 

In the Yard

The weather in my part of California is cool most of the year: forties at night, sixties during the day from December to May. During the second half of May this year, it's been getting warmer, and I've been going out in the back yard to sit in a chair in the sun and read for an hour or so each morning. I like to breathe the fresh air and feel the sun warming me as I read. And I'm trying to re-establish a rhythm to my reading. The last few years I've been reading more sporadically and randomly. I start one book, then put it down and pick up another, and then a third. I alternate between books and magazine articles and online news feeds, and I find, like everyone else, I guess, that my mental life seems fragmented and discontinuous. So it's been nice to get into a routine of reading. I've managed to read and finish three recent books by Jhumpa Lahiri—I'm going to be teaching Interpreter of Maladies again this summer and I've been looking for supplementary materials—and a couple nonfiction memoirs as well.

There are two things I've noticed reading outside. One is how rarely it is ever really quiet in the way you might expect a suburban neighborhood to be quiet. It's a rare morning indeed when there is not some noisemaking apparatus in evidence: weed whackers, wood chippers, chain saws, leaf blowers. Sometimes several of them at once. I grew up in an era when the only gas-powered devices you would hear in the neighborhood other than automobiles were lawnmowers, and you'd only hear those on weekends. Now, it's a rare thing indeed to be able to sit outside and NOT have aggressively intrusive ambient noise.

The other thing I've noticed is how prolific the insect life is. As I sit in my chair, I'm always catching movement out of the corner of my eye. Bumblebees and honeybees fussing in the flowers. Hornets. Wasps. Flies. Butterflies. Dragonflies. Spiders. Beetles. Gnats. Little tiny white insects that look like dust in the wind until you see them flapping their tiny wings, zigging around at odd angles. I found myself wondering where we stand, in this age of self-generated existential crisis, as compared to the insects. So I looked up: according to Google are apparently something like 200 million insects on the planet for every human being.

I recall reading a some twenty or thirty years ago a book by David Quammen entitled Natural Acts, which contained an essay called "A Republic of Cockroaches." Quammen was one of the very many naturalists who were looking around in the 1980's and wondering where we were heading as a species. Or to put it more succinctly, he was wondering what the planet would look like after we finish the job we have set ourselves of exterminating our species. His nomination for who would be best placed to rule the New World Order? Yep, cockroaches. He envisions "whole plagues of them, whole scudding herds shoulder to shoulder like the old herds of bison, vast cockroach legions sweeping as inexorably as driver ants over the empty prairies." And he explains why.

My feeling is, if not cockroaches, then one of our other winged brethren. They've got us outnumbered, and they don't seem to care much, one way or another, what we do or don't do on this planet. They'll do fine without us.