An Extravagance
We built a small concrete pool on our place, which is locally known as Dry Hill, and so brought the life of water a little closer to us. In the summertime the pool nurtures a migrant population of green frogs. I have put nothing in it except some sunfish that subsequently died, so that the occasional signs of new life it shows, like a water strider, or some nymph or larva of an insect that flew by and deposited its eggs, always strikes me as a dispensation from the sky. It is a proof of life’s pressing, inescapable need to drive into every opening.
Thinking of draining the pool and cleaning it out for the approach of spring, I find a life so surprising and sudden as to take all human propriety out of my system. There, on the brown, algae-fringed edge of the pool, something moves, telling me that this well of water is more than ornamental. Light olive-colored insects, scum-covered, goggle-eyed, stalk on the edge, or skate very slowly through the water—the strangest kind of revelation. What could I clean up now without a sense of shame?
The dragonfly larva, or nymph, which turns into an adult after a series of molts, is a fantastic-looking creature. I take one out of the pool and put it in a jar for observation. What I observe has no familiar meaning for me. It stays motionless, except when the jar is moved. I wonder again, as I did with a robber fly in the summer, what an insect is. Is it only a stereotyped pattern on the changing screen of nature? This one exhibits itself as a sort of embodied suspension, careless of death or time, like the process of evolution itself. There is no hurry.
The nymph lives for more than a week without food. Through a magnifying glass, I look at the flat-bottomed, skiff-shaped body made shaggy by algae-covered hair, the jointed legs, the upended tail. It is striped, and there are brown markings over and across its goggle eyes, and brown on its strange mouth part, which sits in front of its face like a catchers mask. This part, or device, is called the labrum. It is hinged, equipped with hooks, and can be shot forward rapidly to grab and hold the animal’s prey. In the nymph’s case, as with so many other things in nature, seemingly endless waiting and suspense precedes occasional spurts of lightning rapidity.
As I peer at it, greatly enlarged behind my magnifying glass, its jointed legs suddenly flail up in front of me, and I actually feel a tremor of alarm—which might be humorous, except for my sense that this small dragon is timeless in some awesome way.
As March is proving a seasonal release, at least in starting, so it also reveals an extravagance in the form of a dragonfly nymph, and what will come from that little insect shows that extravagance may have no end. After a series of molts, the number and duration of which depends on the species, a nymph will climb up on some green stalk spiking out of the water, the skin on its back will crack, and it will emerge from a sheath which it leaves behind, a dry, empty counterpart, and turn into a big, gauzy-winged dragonfly. It is given two worlds, water and air. Its embodied transformation from one into another is as rare a thing as the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly; and is evidence of a daring like the flight of Icarus toward the sun, but more successful.
Nature takes the nymph out of itself. It is no goggle-eyed inhabitant of some other planet, no knight doomed to expire by weight of armor. I see the fantastic in it and also a miraculous reality, which will not rest with own products. This water predator will turn into a brightly colored, great-eyed hunter, skimming everywhere over land and water, darting across the roaring traffic of a city, flying over the surface of the ocean miles from land. Time seems suspended in the nymph; and this may be appropriate enough. It is the result of ages; but its metamorphosis is fresh and new, a successful act of endless creativity.