I find the hopeful bee-agribusiness visitors touching and appealing; many of them are young and they bring out the mother in me. They are often working at dull jobs they do not like, and the idea of owning a bee farm in the country is a sustaining fantasy. I try not to discourage them, but sometimes I have to. Almost any kind of farming dooms newcomers to bankruptcy these days, particularly bee farming, because of the market conditions. About the only quicker way to go broke right now is to raise pigs, so when a man came to seek my advice a month ago and told me he was ready to spend ten years’ worth of savings from a factory job to buy a farm where he would raise bees and pigs, I had to admit it was the worst idea I had heard in a long time. He went away saddened; I don’t know whether he bought the farm or not.
The Ozarks, wild, undeveloped, inhospitable, keep being discovered. A lot of people who figured it was better to be poor in the country moved here during the 1930s; others, richer, thought FDR was the devil incarnate and wanted to put their wealth in land before he could take it away from them. Since then waves of people who find the cities too complicated have come here, meaning to lead lives of simplicity. What they have not yet discovered is that a life is as simple or as complicated as the person living it, and that people who have found life in the city overwhelming will find it even more so here, where it is much harder to make a living. When a person has money coming in regularly, his mistakes may make him unhappy but they do not threaten his survival. Here, where there is little money, every decision counts and there is no room for mistakes.
The people who live here have been idealized by the back-to-the-landers while they still lived in cities, but they are not simple people at all. Ozarkers lead lives as complicated as those of people anywhere else. However, they are competent and resourceful about living in these hills; they are quiet about it, too, so it looks easy and … simple.
Ozarkers are of mixed mind about the newcomers. The Simple Lifers always have a theory or two that they are not at all shy about expounding—theories which differ in details but always come down to knowing better how to live in the country than the peasants do. Understandably, Ozarkers often resent this. On the other hand, over the years the Simple Lifers have come to represent a cash crop like no other. They come with a bundle of savings to back up their theories, and it goes so quickly that it is good not to let one’s resentment show too much. It is better to be able to profit from them before they return, dreams shattered, to their cities and paychecks.
Ozarkers have a saying about back-to-the-landers: The briars get their clothes, the hillbillies get their money and they leave with an empty suitcase in their hands.
I’ve lived both sorts of lives and have sympathy with both points of view, so I try to be tender with the Simple Lifers when they show up on my doorstep. But they take up time, sometimes too much of my time, and I have had to learn to say no and not feel guilty about it when I have to get on with my own not-so-simple life.
At the end of one day last summer a woman telephoned when I was in the middle of the honey harvest. It was late, but I was still out in the honey house and answered the telephone there. My feet ached from standing on the concrete floor all day, and I was sticky and tired. She introduced herself, said she had heard about me and wanted to ask a few questions. Should she tip the man who drove the road grader? No, she should not. It would embarrass him. Might she come out for a visit? No, she might not, I said as kindly as possible; I was just too busy. She sounded so lonely that I asked a few friendly questions; she told me she had just bought a farm and moved here, that she had lived all over the world, most recently in New York on the city’s Upper West Side, and that life was very different here.
“And now you are experiencing culture shock?” I asked, trying to picture the move from a genteel old brownstone to an Ozark farm with an outhouse.
“Well, it’s not as bad as Afghanistan,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.
The woman really was lonely and overwhelmed. I tried to find some consoling words, and invited her to call later in the year when I might not be so busy. I was truly grateful for her call. For a few minutes I had forgotten my aching feet, and I have lived here so long that I sometimes forget how life in the Ozarks appears to outsiders. It was good to be reminded.
My brother Bil is a large man with unruly dark brown hair, and I am a small woman with unruly light brown hair. In addition to the generally rumpled appearances we present, we share a similar outlook on the world and enough affection toward and understanding of each other to be able, sometimes, to do things together without ever saying a word. Yesterday, while we were going down to the river to look at some ferns, we acted in instant and silent cooperation to save a newborn fawn.
We were walking on an old road bordered by a fence. Tazzie and her brother, Zenas, Bil’s dog, were playing rowdy puppy with one another and did not immediately notice that Andy and Chocolate, Bil’s older dog, were examining something bunched up in the tall grass next to the fence. But Bil and I did. We identified it—faster than the dogs did—as a recently born fawn, his absolute motionlessness his only defense. The dogs were on the brink of understanding that this dappled something was potential excitement. There is no way to know whether this understanding was complicated and classificatory—“Aha! Here we have the small specimen of that larger creature whom it is so delightful to chase”—or whether it was simply “Ah! What have we here? I do believe this small spotted object might be roused, run to the ground and torn to bits.” Whatever the process, Bil and I knew that whichever conclusion the four dissimilar dogs arrived at, it would change them into a murderous pack. In the fraction of a second before this understanding was reached, Bil and I spoke sharply enough to our dogs to divert their attention to obedience, and I hustled them on down the road while Bil scooped up the fawn and unceremoniously stuffed him through the woven wire fence, the fawn’s gangly, fragile legs getting in the way everywhere. On the other side of the fence he was safe from the dogs, and he ran off unsteadily.
He was the youngest fawn Bil or I had ever seen in the wild. He may have weighed ten pounds, but probably not more. His glossy, reddish-brown coat was freshly spotted with white. He was a newcomer to the world. We both would have liked to have watched him longer but the doe must have been nearby and seen her offspring’s rescue. Although she was invisible to us, she would not long be so to the dogs, and we wanted to hurry them away before they discovered her or recollected and understood the fawn, so we walked briskly on down the road to the limestone ledge where the ferns grow.
This peninsula is home to a number of natural rarities. A seldom-seen wild orchid grows here. Pileated woodpeckers, large prehistoric-looking birds with big red crests, are common here and uncommon elsewhere. And walking ferns, scarce in many places, grow here in thick, matted profusion.
The walking fern, Camptosorus rhizophyllus, is the only species on the American continent of this small genus. It is a curious little fern in other ways, too. All true ferns reproduce by spores, alternating asexual and sexual generations, but the walking fern has discovered a second means of reproduction, a short cut to proliferation. It is low growing, and when its long, narrow, fine, pointed, arched leaves touch the ground, new plants spring up from their ends, plants which in turn sprout more plants on their leaf tips. Old-established parent ferns are often surrounded by several generations of attached plants “walking” away from the center.
There was this sort of colony of walking ferns at the place where Bil and I were going. They grow under the trees near the river, in cool shade where underground water seeps, keeping the rocks moist. The trees and undergrowth screen them from the view of anyone floating by in a boat or canoe, but the evergreen, leathery-leafed ferns are not likely to attract notice anyway among the mosses and lichens that also grow on the rocks where the ferns find roothold.
Bil and I scrambled down the cliffs. Bil lit a cigarette and talked about ferns, while the dogs raced on ahead to the river, splashing about chasing each othe
r and fish, real and imaginary.
Walking ferns, like other true ferns, bear sori, or fruit dots, on the underside of their leaves. The sori contain sporangia and the sporangia contain spores. When they are ripe and the surrounding air dry enough, the spores burst forth and disperse on air currents. A spore lucky enough to settle in a shady, moist spot puts down a rootlike hair to hold it in place, while cell after cell of green plant tissue grows from the spore. On this tiny gametophyte sprout separate male and female organs containing sperm and eggs. Moisture breaks open the mature male antheridium; at the same time the female archegonium opens and exudes a chemical attractive to the sperm, which swim toward the egg. From the fertilized egg a new fern grows.
In this manner ferns reproduce without seeds, clinging to a more ancient way of duplication worked out even before Devonian days when the first fossil fern records appear, and long before there were flowering plants with seeds.
In Europe in the Middle Ages the reproduction of flowering plants by seeds was understood, but thought to be universal for all plants. No one, of course, had ever seen the seed of a fern plant, but in those days, when magic could explain all, this simply meant that fern seed was invisible. As a result by a neat transfer of properties, it was held that fern seed could convey invisibility. It was a custom to spread linen cloth upon the ground on the eve of Midsummer Night to catch fern seed, for there are any number of occasions on which invisibility could have its advantages.
As late as Shakespeare’s day, Gadshill, laying the groundwork for Hal’s comic robbery in Henry IV, Part I, boasted, “We steal as in a castle, cocksure; we have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.” To which the inn’s chamberlain scornfully replies, “Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible.”
Our talk, Bil’s and mine, turned to other plants, and as we walked down to the gravel bar on the river Bil began telling me about the trees of New Zealand. He was just back from there, having collected material for a magazine article, and was full of his unwritten story. Bil has a compelling personality. He is a good talker and even better storyteller, and while he talked and smoked the banks of the river disappeared and we were, in truth, in New Zealand. I sat and listened to him tell of exotic trees and of the people whom he had met who held them in sacred awe, and of others who found them of commercial interest. At last his stories were told, and we sat in silence. Bil smoked one more cigarette and we both watched a pair of kingfishers flying in Union-blue formation, quartering the river looking for minnows, their rattling call sounding as though it were a necessary mechanical part of their synchronized flight.
At last we whistled up our dogs and walked back up to the cabin. We stopped by the fence where the fawn had been, but there was no sign of the youngster or his mother. The bent grasses where he had lain had sprung back, and even his scent must have been gone, for the dogs waiting near us, quiet and tired, took no notice.
A year ago, on an afternoon late in springtime, I was walking on the dirt road that cuts across the field to the beehives. I noticed a light-colored, brownish dappled something-or-other stretched across the roadway ahead of me, and decided that it was a snakeskin. I often find them, crumpled husks shed by snakes as they grow. They are fragile and delicate, perfect but empty replicas of the snakes that once inhabited them. I started to turn it over with the toe of my boot, but stopped suddenly, toe in air, for the flecked, crumpled-looking empty snakeskin was moving.
It gave me quite a start and I was amused at my own reaction, remembering that Ronald Firbank wrote somewhere that the essence of evil was the ordinary become unnatural, the stone in the garden path that suddenly begins to move.
I squatted down to see what queer thing I had here, and found that my supposed snakeskin was a mass of maggoty-like caterpillars, each one no more than half an inch long. They were hairless, with creamy white smooth skin, black heads and brown stripes along their backs. They were piled thickly in the center, with fewer caterpillars at the head and rear end of the line, which was perhaps eighteen inches long. They moved slowly, each caterpillar in smooth synchrony with its fellows, so that a wave of motion undulated down the entire length of the line.
They seemed so intensely social that I wondered what they would do on their own. I gently picked up half a dozen or so, and isolated them a few inches from the column. Their smooth, easy movements changed to frantic, rapid ones, and they wriggled along the ground quickly until they rejoined the group. They certainly were good followers. How did they ever decide where to go? The single caterpillar in the lead twisted the forepart of his body from side to side as though taking his bearings; he appeared to be the only one in the lot capable of going in a new direction, of making a decision to avoid a tuft of grass here, of turning there: Was he some special, super-caterpillar? I removed him from the lead position and put him off to the side, where he became as frantic as had the others, wriggling to rejoin the group somewhere in the middle, where he was soon lost to view, having turned into just another follower. At the head, the next caterpillar in line had simply assumed leadership duties and was bending his body from side to side, making the decision about the direction the column was to take. I removed three leaders in a row with the same result: each time, the next caterpillar in line made an instant switch from loyal and will-less follower to leader.
What were they doing? Were they looking for food? If so, what kind? What manner of creature were they? The beework that I had set out to do could wait no longer, so I went back to the hives. When I returned along the road, the caterpillars, if that is what they were, had disappeared.
Back in my cabin, none of the books on my shelves were much help explaining what I had seen, except one by Henri Fabre, the nineteenth-century French entomologist who had conducted one of his famous experiments with pine processionaries, one of the Thaumatopoeidae. Fabre’s caterpillars were Thaumatopoea processionea, “the wonder maker that parades”; eventually they become rather undistinguished-looking moths.
The pine processionaries are a European species, but their behavior was similar to that of my caterpillars, although not identical. Pine processionaries travel to feed in single file, not massed and bunched, but they do touch head to rear and have only one leader at a time. Fabre found them so sheeplike that he wondered what they would do if he could somehow manage to make them leaderless. In a brilliant experiment, he arranged them on the upper rim of a large vase a yard and a half in circumference, and waited until the head end of the procession joined the tail end; so that the entire group was without a leader. All were followers. For seven days, the caterpillars paraded around the rim of the vase in a circle. Their pace slowed after a while, for they were weary and had not been able to feed, but they continued to circle, each caterpillar unquestioningly taking his direction from the rear of the one in front, until they dropped from exhaustion. However, even Fabre never discovered what it was that could turn one caterpillar into a leader as soon as he was at the head of the line.
It was not until several months later, when I was talking to Asher, that I was able to find out anything about the caterpillars I had found in the roadway. He said that I probably had seen one species or another of sawfly larvae. They are gregarious, he told me, and some are whitish with brown stripes. Sure identification could only be made by counting the pairs of their prolegs, and of course I had not known enough to look at them that closely. Asher said that they were a rare sight and that I would probably never see them again, but if I did I should gather up a few and put them in a solution of 70 percent alcohol; then he would help me identify them. He had read about Fabre’s experiment too, but knew nothing more about their behavior.
He added, “If you ever find out what makes processionary caterpillars prosesh, please enlighten me. Maybe it’s the same thing that makes people drive in Sunday traffic or watch TV or vote Republican.”
It is springtime again. I would like to count the caterpillars’ prolegs and am prepared
to pickle a few to satisfy my curiosity, but mostly I should just like to watch them again. This time I should let the beework go. I should like to know where these caterpillars go, and what it is they are looking for. I wonder if I could divide them up into several small columns that would move along independently side by side. I have more questions about them than when I first saw them.
This spring I often walk along, eyes to the ground, looking for them. There may have been nobler quests—white whales and Holy Grails—and although the Ahabs and Percivals of my acquaintance are some of my most entertaining friends, I am cut of other stuff and amuse myself in other ways. The search for what may or may not be sawfly larvae seems quite a good one this springtime.
Acknowledgments
A book of this sort is necessarily the creation of many people whose lives have touched mine and who have helped me look at the world in a special way. But there are some few to whom I should like to make my special thanks.
Linda Skrainka’s painting and conversation helped me frame the questions, and Steve Skrainka would never let me forget that I am a writer even when I wanted to. Linda Verigan, Mac Johnson and Steve Cox, professional editors all, understood me better than I understood myself and without them I would not have had the courage to keep on writing. Liz Darhansoffand Bil Gilbert carried me, often protesting wildly, into print. Liddy Tebbens and Brian Hubbell drew the map that accompanies the text. And it was Brian, with his lifelong habit of understanding what seems to be ineffable, who gave me the assurance that the right words could be found. Marty Lightwood and Asher Treat read the manuscript in several stages and made valuable suggestions.
I am grateful to all of these people.
I am grateful, also, to Black Edith, who sat on the finished pages and watched fresh ones appear from the typewriter, for I suspect that it is strong magic to have a black cat sit on a manuscript.
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