WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER

THE ESSAYIST IN THE WILDERNESS

I HAD WON THE LOTTERY, the ultimate deus ex machina. My wife was stunned by our good fortune, disoriented and faintly miffed for she had always scoffed at my lottery tickets, explaining that a person was more apt to be bitten by a rattlesnake while plummeting to Earth in an airplane -- "Do the math," she would say -- than get that winning number.
I had won, we were rich, and I was very pleased with myself. I could see that Audrey still thought I was dead wrong, that lotteries were the opiate of the people, a game for probability-challenged chumps. However, had events demonstrated the rightness of Audrey's position, we would still be toiling in the English department at Clayton College, a dreary four-year diploma mill with a lovely campus, a mummified faculty, and a student body derived almost entirely from the Church of Christ contingent in certain small towns in Pennsylvania.
We had only settled on Clayton because it offered jobs for the both of us. Audrey had sacrificed the most for that berth. While I taught the glamor stuff, Shakespeare and Spenser and Renaissance poetry, my wife tried to introduce English grammar into the minds of adolescents raised on television and movies -- minds that were very nearly immune to syntax.
It didn't take Audrey long to embrace our good fortune. Now we were free. A much smaller sum would have set us free; our desires were modest. We wanted to get away from the infernal ever-busy world, to find a quiet niche where we could read (the unalloyed pleasure of selfish reading, the decadence of perusing books and tossing them aside half read, the dirty thrill of reading novels of no critical merit whatever or old childhood treasures from which the narcotic of nostalgia could be slowly sucked) and, of course, to write.
We bought a house on twenty acres of land in a town beyond the reach of city commuters. We were far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife and spared the reinvented Main Street, the historical markers on every house, the hideous quaintness of the polished past. Our town was a little run-down; the unimaginative might even have found it ugly. We loved it.
We lined our rambling, three-story farm house with bookshelves throughout and furnished it with stuff foraged from neighborhood yard sales and junk shops (dressers, mirrors, end tables, a writing desk, a vast old sofa that was as good a representation of Queen Victoria in decline as any sofa I have ever seen).
Once settled, neither of us rushed into writing projects, although Audrey was by far the more industrious. One evening she read me a passage in which her nine-year-old self had accidentally been locked out of the summer house in Sag Harbor during a thunderstorm while her parents partied within. She had only been outside a short time, a minute perhaps before her absence was discovered, but it was time enough to get thoroughly wet and abandon a belief system that included loving parents. I thought it was a powerful piece, and I was impressed with the book's tentative title, Spite, which struck me as everything a memoir's title should be, forthright, unsparing, monosyllabic.
While I hadn't gotten so far as to conjure a working title or turn any of my thoughts into something as substantial as a paragraph of prose or some lines of poetry, I had spent considerable time deciding just what I intended to write, what genre I would inhabit. As a youth of fourteen, I had wanted to be a lyric poet, but I had failed at that early, discovering that my poetry repelled girls who had initially been drawn to me. In college I considered becoming a novelist, but I was no good at character and if by sheer perseverance I managed to create some sort of fictional personage, I didn't have a clue what to do with him, sending him lurching off down the street like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, inevitably parking him in a cafe or bar where he would talk interminably to some other sadly cobbled-together creature. Nope, not novels. I toyed with the idea of a memoir, but my past bored me. I had no wish to revisit it.
By a process of elimination, I was closing on my vocation. I was reading voraciously, ecstatically, and I had been at it for two months. I expected to find my blushing Muse in the next book that came to hand.

ONE NIGHT WE were both reading in the study when I heard a sharp intake of breath and looked up from my book to see Audrey staring wide-eyed in my direction. Her Henry James (Washington Square, if memory serves) was open on her lap. It was late, about eleven I would guess, and we sat at opposite sides of the room, each of us enclosed in the light of our separate lamps while the books that surrounded us were imbued with dusky mystery and an almost erotic sense of solace.
"Jonathan?" She slapped a hand to her breast as though assaulted by a sudden pain. I assumed she had been taken with some particularly powerful passage and was so expressing herself, for we were both guilty of melodrama in our passion for literature, but then she toppled forward, the book (a Modern Library with those almost transparent pages, those tight thickets of immortal prose) fluttering as she fell.
I marked my place and rushed to her aid. She lay sprawled on the carpet, her flowing blue robe in sweet disarray, her red hair gloriously unbound, as though she were a Victorian heroine felled by the news of her lover's death in a foreign land, the child within her still unknown to the inflexible society of her peers.
I bent down and taking her shoulders lifted her gently, turning her toward me. Did I say that Audrey is beautiful? When I read Jane Austen, I think of my wife, the logic of her cheekbones, the wit of her mouth, her unequivocal eyebrows.
Her eyelids fluttered. "Jonathan?" She seemed incapable of anything else, her mouth open in amazement. Her chest heaved; she gasped. "I can't -- I can't breathe."
A series of desperate phone calls revealed that the closest hospital was forty-five miles to the west but that a Dr. Bath would be willing to rouse himself from sleep and meet us at his office at the corner of Maple and Main, a mere five minutes from our home.

A ROUNDISH WOMAN swathed in black fabric and wearing a nurse's white cap opened the door before I knocked. She bent forward and clutched Audrey's hand, drawing us both into the room and informing us that she was the doctor's wife. The room was like every doctor's waiting room I have ever seen, a coffee table strewn with old magazines, sofas pining for better days, and a harsh, sourceless light, the cruel illumination of purgatory.
Mrs. Bath left us on the sofa and went to fetch her husband. By now Audrey's face was red and her breathing was an agony of effort, shaking her small frame. A wheeze that made my ribs ache underlined her every inhalation.
Mrs. Bath returned with her husband, a stout, balding man. He shook my hand and said, "Yes, I am Dr. Bath. And this is your wife, the emergency?"
We both looked at Audrey, and I said, "Yes." The doctor wore a black suit and seemed disappointed, although whether this was because Audrey didn't look like emergency enough or looked like more emergency than he had bargained for, I couldn't tell.
Mrs. Bath helped Audrey up from the sofa where she was hunched forward in private communication with her lungs. Flanked by the doctor and his wife, Audrey was led past the reception desk toward the hall. Something in their progress, their tentative exit, put me in mind of two skaters guiding a novice across the ice.
I waited on the sofa while the doctor and Mrs. Bath attended my wife. I shuffled through the magazines on the coffee table, seeking something to occupy my mind, but I was certain I didn't want to read anything about infants or celebrities or health or crafts, and I was growing irritated with this foraging when -- I found my Muse!
My Muse resided within the unlikely confines of a thin, battered paperback entitled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by someone named Annie Dillard. I noted a number of laudatory blurbs on the back and began reading. I had no premonition, no shiver of recognition on opening the book, that my inspiration would lie within.
I was instantly intrigued. So engrossed was I that I did not notice Audrey standing over me, flanked again by the doctor and his wife. All three were smiling. Audrey's smile was weak, relieved more than celebratory, but it lifted my heart.
I wrote a check for $85 while the doctor talked. He was more animated now, hearty and pleased with himself. "Your wife, she has the spider bite!" he said. "Right there on the ankles. Hah! Or maybe the bee sting or a, what you call, centepeeder? Not everyone are allergic. Most, they just say, 'Ow!' and forget about it." Here the doctor shrugged to indicate a cavalier attitude toward such attacks. "But your wife, she has the reactions, so I give her the shot and these pills, samples while the drugstore does not open. Problems? You must call."
I asked Mrs. Bath if I might have the paperback I was holding in my hand, and she sold it to me for five dollars, which seemed a little steep. I didn't haggle.
Driving back to our home, slowly, keeping an eye out for nocturnal creatures that might race from the surrounding woods and hurl themselves beneath our wheels, I could not contain my enthusiasm.
"I know what I'm going to write," I told Audrey. She turned her head, her cheek flat against the backrest, her red hair matted in thick ribbons. She was clearly exhausted, and she regarded me with blue eyes that were uncharacteristically blank. Ordinarily, Audrey would have expressed delight, urged me to elaborate, but she wasn't up to it that night. I understood, and I should have left it till morning, but I couldn't contain the good news.
"I am going to write essays! Nature essays. You know, thoughtful pieces in which nature serves as a sort of jumping off place for larger topics. Caterpillar-to-butterfly stuff about transformation, a little something from Ovid or Hazlitt or Burton thrown in. 'The world is but a school for inquiry,' after all. So. We've got a classroom in our own backyard! Our property has woods, a pond, a small creek. I haven't seen the creek yet, but the real estate agent said it was there, no reason to doubt her. And here we are in April, everything coming alive. 'When that Aprile with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,' that sort of thing."
Audrey rolled her eyes, snorted derisively.
"What?" I asked.
My wife exhaled (the tiniest trace of a wheeze still there) and looked at me as though I'd just announced that I intended to run for President.
"What? I think the essay is the perfect vehicle for my temperament and--"
"Nature, Jonathan. What do you know about nature?"
"Well." I was caught off balance by this attack, so unlike my wife. I realized later that Audrey was speaking in the immediate aftermath of a life-threatening encounter with a tiny piece of nature. No wonder she was unenthusiastic regarding my new allegiance. At the time, however, I was hurt.
"I believe I have a layman's knowledge of the natural world," I said, hating the prissy tightness in my throat.
"No one would ever describe you as an outdoors person," Audrey said.
"I don't believe I need to be climbing mountains or rafting down the Amazon to write about nature."
"No," Audrey said. "I don't suppose so. But you need...." She paused. She stretched the tip of her tongue to touch her upper lip, a habit she had when looking within, and one I generally found endearing. She smiled. "Name three trees."
"What?"
"Come on, name three trees. That's an easy one."
Yes, an easy one, insultingly so, beneath reply. Mistaking my silence for ignorance, her smile enlarged, so I snapped back, "Juniper, Christmas, Mimosa!" and she continued to grin, as though she had won somehow, and I found myself fretting that juniper might be, technically, more of a shrub than a tree. But I wasn't going to have my Muse belittled by continuing the conversation. I changed the subject.
"I'm glad you are all right," I said.
"Not as glad as I am," she said, which probably meant nothing, but it felt like a rebuke. I drove the rest of the way in silence, and when we pulled into our yard, Audrey said, "All out for Walden."
In spite of my wife's sarcasm, I was convinced that the essay was the form for me. For one thing, I was wealthy. With wealth came leisure, and leisure encouraged reflection. It occurred to me that one of the great charms of the essay was this conveyed sense that its author had all the time in the world. The authors of essays drifted in a fog of indolence, contemplating objects and events, pursuing literary allusions with scholarly languor. The average reader, hustling to get his car to the Jiffy Lube on his lunch hour, could only dream of some faraway retirement when time would cease to flog him with errands and obligations. To read an essay was to enter a world of literary and philosophical loafing, to wade in that slow river of time. Readers of essays could, for the span of the piece, escape their deadline days.
I had every confidence that I could give the reader his money's worth in reflection, but I thought I might have trouble with the nature part. While I didn't feel I was as ill-equipped for the job as Audrey believed, it is true I never had warmed to nature as a child. I never had an urge to climb a tree, own a turtle, look under a log, or catch a fish. I wasn't immune to the beauty of autumn, with hills transformed by garish yellows and reds, and spring, with its thousand shades of green, was a wonder of renewal, no doubt about it, but I didn't wish for any deeper connection. In fact, I had always kept a cool distance from the natural world, which I perceived as deadly and erratic, the rotting rabbit by the side of the road, festering with maggots, the yellow jackets that buzzed around the picnic table, climbing down the throat of the open Coke bottle.

NATURE COULD BE hostile, as Bob, of Bob's Bug and Vermin Blasters, reminded me. Audrey and I had decided to purge the house of bugs to prevent a second occurrence of that harrowing night, and Bob's Bug and Vermin Blasters was the only local establishment for such services.
Bob was a large man outfitted in olive drab camouflage, his pants stuffed into gray rubber boots. He had laughed, an incredulous, seal-like sound muffled by his mustache, when Audrey expressed her reservations regarding the contents of the canister that he intended to spray inside and outside the house.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "This here is deadly poison. That's a fact. Might be you want something organic." His eyes, bright blue and winking out from under bushy eyebrows, showed deep amusement. "Just sprinkle some garlic on the bastards. Or say a prayer. You know what the word organic means to a bug? It means dinner."
Bob made more seal sounds. Audrey turned and left the room without saying anything, and I accompanied Bob on his rounds, watched him go through the house, crawling under the kitchen sink, squirting death behind the refrigerator, in the cupboards, along the baseboards. When he headed off to the basement, I left him to his work and went outside. I sat on the porch reading some more of the Dillard book until Bob came outside and I tagged along again, watching him as he drilled deep holes into the cinder block and squirted poison into the holes. All the while, he supplied me with a wealth of anecdotal material about his trade. "Ants are mad about electricity," he said. "I've known them to eat the insulation off wires. I've found dead clumps of them in air- conditioning units and around electrical terminals. All the lights go off in your house, it could be ants feeding their addiction. And the thing about ants, the thing about a lot of bugs, is they don't give a goddam whether they live or die. That's an edge they got in the war. And you might think war's an exaggeration for it, but I've been in the business a long time, and war's the word. And there ain't a clear winner yet."
When Bob had finished with the house, he said, "I'll just mosey around the property, see if there's any problems brewing, maybe a big hive. There's a hell of a lot to be said for a preemptive strike." I watched him set out toward the woods, the canister balanced on his shoulder, an American warrior, and I went back in for dinner.
Audrey was sitting in the kitchen, her elbows planted on the table, a book open before her. I looked over her shoulder and experienced a shock. She was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. I just stood and stared until she sensed my presence, turned around and looked up.
"What?"
"I thought you hated Hemingway?"
Audrey looked a little sheepish, then defiant. "He has hardly any commas."
I raised my eyebrows in query.
"I can't handle commas right now," she said. "I can't breathe on a comma. And Henry James...all those commas. I nearly fainted trying to catch my breath."
I didn't know what to say, so I just nodded my head and moved on to the refrigerator. In retrospect, I guess it was a warning I should have heeded. But retrospect and two dollars and fifty cents will get you a latte at Starbucks.

THAT NIGHT I was reading in bed when I heard an engine cough into life. I knew it wasn't someone making off with our Camry; that would have been a different sound entirely. This was the distinctive rattle of a diesel engine in need of a tune-up. I slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake Audrey, and went to the window in time to see red taillights curve down the driveway and disappear past the trees. I realized that I had just seen Bob leaving in his truck. I had forgotten entirely about Bob. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past midnight. I marveled at such dedication. Say what you will about country folk, their work ethic is admirable, an example for the rest of us.
I returned to the bed and decided that I'd better get some sleep myself. Tomorrow I planned to confront nature, armed with a notepad, a pencil, and a will to revel in her wonders, no matter how stony the soil, how overgrown the path.
As I moved toward the bed, Audrey stirred in her sleep, stretched and turned on her side, rolling the bedsheet with her and pulling it up past her feet. I bent to pull it back down and noticed something on her ankle, a pale green patch of light. I leaned closer. Between her ankle and her heel, an area of skin the size of a quarter glowed with the yellow-green luminosity of a night clock's hands. As I studied this glowing spot, it dimmed and disappeared. Odd, I thought. I pulled the covers over her feet, resolving to mention it in the morning. I remembered that the spider or mite or whatever had launched its assault on her ankle. No doubt this was a related effect, nothing to worry about. Still, it might signify the onslaught of infection. Audrey might not be aware of the phenomenon if it only manifested itself while she slept. Another consultation with Dr. Bath might be in order.
I slept poorly and dreamed that I was back at Clayton teaching a class on biology, and Francis Bacon had come to demonstrate to my students just how to stuff a chicken with snow, this being the famous experiment that had led to his death by pneumonia. I found myself disliking Bacon, who was pompous and rude and wearing an ugly blue dress, and I asked him to leave and he took a swing at me with the chicken, but then the dream's logic broke down, and the chicken, while still looking like a chicken, was much larger, was, in fact, my old high school drama teacher, Mrs. Unger, and I woke up. It took me half an hour to get back to sleep, and the sleep I gleaned was shallow, the dregs of rest.

I WASN'T FEELING entirely fit in the morning, but I probably would have remembered to mention the ankle business after my first cup of coffee. Audrey, no more of a morning person than I, lumbered down from the bathroom where her morning ablutions had taken an inordinately long time. I looked at her and was...well, puzzled.
We men know that sometimes the women in our lives will look different. I can't speak for all men, but I know that I have an uncanny sensitivity to this new-look thing. I become instantly alert, like a deer in the forest on hearing the snap of a twig. New hair style? New lipstick, new eye shadow? Is this alteration for my benefit? Is a compliment in order? It can be a panicky moment. Not all new looks are planned or, if planned, executed with success. If some new hair style is, in Audrey's opinion, a great disaster, or if -- an early learning experience -- she has simply slept funny on her hair, producing a fuzzy, disheveled effect, a compliment can precipitate tears.
I was more baffled than usual. Audrey looked like Audrey and then again, quite different. She seemed to have a higher forehead, a just-scrubbed look, a nakedness of feature and a new bluntness to her gaze.
Audrey is very intuitive, and we have been married for ten years I we were married just after we got our undergraduate degrees -- so she sensed my confusion.
"Eyebrows," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"I shaved off my eyebrows. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and, I don't know, they looked superfluous."
I had one of those revelations which, despite several bad experiences, I always share. "Like commas!" I said.
"What?"
"Well, eyebrows are sort of like commas, and you've been having this thing about commas, not liking them."
"That's the craziest thing I've ever heard," Audrey said.
"Is it?" I jumped up, ran into the living room, and returned with For Whom the Bell Toils. I plopped the book down in front of her and flipped the pages.
"Okay, I'm crazy. What's this?" Every comma had been sliced with a short red line, that little mincing flourish that is the copy editor's delete symbol. There were a lot of red deletes, more than I would have expected in Hemingway.
Audrey stood up suddenly and snatched the book from the table, clutching it to her chest. "A marriage is not an invitation to abuse another person's privacy."
"It's just a book; it's not your diary."
Audrey sniffed. "And I suppose that The Great Gatsby is just a book?"
She had me there. My copy of The Great Gatsby is a very personal, passionately annotated book, and I had thrown -- I winced to remember -- a fit when I found Audrey reading it.
"You're right," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm a lout. I don't know how you put up with me."
Audrey is not one to hold a grudge, and we hugged each other and kissed.
I drank the rest of my coffee standing up. I set the mug down, grabbed my backpack, and moved to the door. "Today's the big day, off into the wilderness to bag some inspiration."
"Yes, I can see. Good luck." Audrey wiggled her fingers at me.
Then I was out the door and walking across the tall grass toward a pale meadow and the vibrant green of the trees beyond. I was a little nervous, so much seemed to ride on this venture. Did I really have the stuff it took to be an essayist?
I had made preparations for the journey (journey may be too extravagant a word for an outing that doesn't leave home). I wore heavy khaki pants, hiking boots, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, a backpack containing a first-aid kit, a packed lunch (baloney sandwich, apple, cheese), a flashlight, a spade, two jars for specimens, several balls of twine, my notepad and pencils, a pocket knife, a compass, and a bottle of spring water.
I entered the meadow. The straw-colored grass reached to my waist. I ignored the disquiet that came with a sudden sense of vulnerability. The pale blue sky loomed over me, tattered scraps of cloud moving slowly, animated by the same wind that stirred the grass. Waves of amber, I thought, pleased with the metaphor, then chagrined, realizing that the image wasn't original.
But I was getting the hang of this, marching along, my initial trepidation eased by the comforting weight of the sun on my neck and shoulders.
The gods lie in wait for the overly confident, and just as I was loosening up, living in the moment, something exploded in front of me with a great whirring and fury, a brown blur aimed at my head, and I stumbled backward and fell, my heart banging around in my chest.
I scrambled back up and saw a bird flapping its way to the clouds. I remembered a movie I had seen in which hunters with shotguns and dogs had hunted birds -- were they called wrens? That doesn't seem quite it -- in a meadow like this, the birds blasting out of the ground with the same whup-whup-whup sound that I had just experienced.
I was briskly heading back to the house as I thought this, my rational mind trying to retake the higher ground. I scolded my inner coward. Are you going to let a blasted bird send you running?
I continued on course to the house, but I managed, by an act of will, to veer right and down a hill toward the small pond and the clump of sentinel willows -- there's another tree, Audrey -- and by the time I reached the muddy, weed-strewn bank, I was breathing heavily but relatively calm again. Thoreau got a lot of mileage out of a pond, and I saw no reason why I couldn't squeeze some fine writing out of my own pond. Unfortunately, up close, its charms diminished. The pond had no precise boundary, at least not where I came upon it. Green weeds marched into the water which was filmed with a yellow-green scum. When I stirred this with a stick, the end of the stick came away with fleshy, dripping blobs of goo. My research brought me too close to the edge, and I was suddenly ankle deep in black, stinking mud, flailing my arms to keep from falling forward, yanking my hiking boots free with rude popping noises while a primal sound of disgust came unbidden from my throat. Small gnats buzzed up in a peppery cloud and rushed at my mouth, nose, and eyes with suicidal abandon (they don't give a goddam whether they live or die, I heard Bob saying).
That did it for the day, and I headed back to the house, depressed and angry with myself. I found Audrey on the porch in the rattan chair. Her head was down as she wrote furiously on a legal pad, and when I hailed her, she looked up, smiled abstractedly, and returned to her writing. Her industry seemed a reprimand.

I DIDN'T GIVE UP, didn't let nature win the game in the first encounter. Every day I would arise, drink my coffee in the kitchen, kiss Audrey on her forehead -- there was something endearing in her eyebrowless state, a subtext speaking volumes on humanity's restless experimental spirit -- and I would set off into the wilderness.
I grew comfortable with the pond and the meadow. I was no longer spooked by birds or apt to let mud demoralize and defeat me. I sprayed myself with liberal amounts of insect repellant -- Audrey said I smelled like poisonous oranges, even after a shower -- and the hordes of hovering midges, mosquitoes, and gnats kept their distance. I grew less fastidious. My gag reflex relented. I could pick a tick off my sleeve with nonchalance and expertly crush it between my fingernails, flicking it away. If I thought that the blood on my fingers might be my own, siphoned from me by the creature, I felt only a satisfied sense of revenge, no horror- induced queasiness.
But I was troubled. Despite this new ease, I found no subject for my essay, nothing that spoke my name. I began to have doubts that I ever would, and I was trying to escape an unsettling conclusion: Nature was boring. Turtles sat on logs soaking up the rays of the sun, as listless and devoid of interest as a pile of dirty socks. They'd sit so maddeningly still that I'd be compelled to hurl rocks at them until they showed some life by flopping into the pond and disappearing. And that, in itself, wasn't wildly entertaining. Nature's infinite variety was beginning to look like a rut. If you thought about it, even the seasons, rolling around every year in the same damned order (spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter), suggested a dearth of imagination. The pond was stupefied with routine. Fish endlessly rose to dimple the pond's demeanor while small, sunflower-seed creatures with wire-thin legs skipped pointlessly across the water's surface. Bugs whirred over the weeds; small round birds darted down from the willow trees to eat them again and again and again.
I wasn't ready to give up, but I was having my doubts, my crisis of faith. I decided that the woods, still unexplored, might be my salvation.
I had been reluctant to enter the woods. There is a primal fear of nature when it closes ranks. Dante's dark wood is a place where only the lost find themselves. Who would seek it out?
The night I resolved to enter the woods the next morning was the same night that Audrey shared several pages of her manuscript with me. She was burning with the fever of creation, moving around the living room as she read, gesturing dramatically with her free hand. Her hair, cropped short with a scissors and wild abandon, was a red, spiky flag of rebellion that would have won my heart had she not already owned it.
It became apparent, as Audrey read these fresh pages, that her physical appearance didn't mark the full extent of her experimentation. She had discovered a new approach to the memoir, a surreal language that captured the dissociative state produced by abuse.
I confess I couldn't follow it all. I did not recognize all of the words (Latin? Joycean synthesis?) and the narrative was disjointed. As soon as Audrey finished reading, she flopped down on the sofa and began writing furiously on her legal pad, not waiting for my response. I didn't disturb her or try to take the loose pages from her so that I could conduct a more careful reading. I doubt she would have let me. She almost never relinquished a work-in-progress for my scrutiny. I got up and went into the study where I wrote down the sentence that I had committed to memory, but even as I wrote the words, I distrusted their accuracy. This is what I wrote: "My brood brother committed the sin of threes and had no smoothness so that I wished he had splintered into hoosith hostoth [?] and I was shamed by my parent wheel and uttered an asymmetrical harmony that generated sadness back to the last falofath [?] where the latent ones hooted and sent their sound-scents throughout the burrow."
You can understand why I can't vouch for the accuracy of my transcription. But I think that does capture the tone.
I set out with a will the next morning, spurred on by a new competitive spirit. I didn't want Audrey to leave me in her literary dust.
I tied the free end of the string around the trunk of a tree and let the ball unravel as I entered the woods, stepping gingerly over logs and avoiding the larger, more formidable clumps of vegetation. Far from the menace I had imagined, I felt an immediate sense of serenity. Light fell through the overhead canopy of leaves, dappling the mossy ground with green, shifting shapes. Aside from a few birds scraping around in the bushes and the faraway chittering of an insect or bird or frog, there was a sweet, almost reverent hush. I inhaled the rich scent of earthy decay and the green life that fed on it.
I was pleased with myself for thinking up the ball-of-twine trick. I could simply follow the string back, winding it around the cardboard core as it returned me to the meadow. I had several balls of string, so I could easily extend my range by tying the end of one to the beginning of the next. And, as a failsafe measure, I had a compass and had ascertained on the map that I could march east for less than a mile and discover the dirt road that ran parallel to my property and that would lead me back to my house.
I expected that days, perhaps weeks, would be needed to scout these woods as methodically as I had explored the pond and meadow, but on my first day I found the creek and, following it northward, encountered a clearing and the creatures that were to be my subject, creatures so fascinating, so complex in their behavior, that they promised a whole book of essays.
I had come upon the clearing at midday, stepping into full sunlight from under the arch of a fallen tree, dazed, delighted, charmed. My creek, which had seemed, in the shadow of the forest, rather too dark and slippery for close inspection, was transformed. Now as lively and lovely as something from a fairy tale, it ran glittering through the middle of this verdant swale.
I proceeded to unpack my lunch and eat it, sitting on the green grass and smiling at my surroundings. Having been disappointed by my meadow and its forlorn pond, I had lowered my expectations, and this clearing, with its picture-book beauty, was a fine surprise, a reward, perhaps, for pushing on. I quoted Rilke to the air: "The earth is like a child that knows poems."
While eating my lunch, I became aware of a steady low drone that filled the air. The sound was like nothing I had heard before. Most of nature's noises confirmed my belief that nature was just going through the motions: the repetitive Whatever, Whatever, Whatever of a bird that had lost its mind or the mechanical buzz of thousands of insects in thrall to a numbing need to procreate. But the sound that filled my ears in that clearing carried a profound emotional content, as though all the inhabitants of a great monastery were mourning the loss of paradise.

ON FINISHING my lunch, I wadded up the paper bag and thrust it into my backpack. In my forays into the wilds, I had been delighted to find that this action was reflexive. I am sure no author of nature essays litters.
I had the instincts for my calling. I now employed those instincts to locate this poignant chant that so intrigued me. At first the sound seemed generalized, permeating the air, but I determined that it came from the creek, more specifically from that portion of the creek that disappeared into a thicket of squat shrubs and crooked trees brandishing new, pale-green leaves.
Carefully, not wishing to make any disturbance that would alert the maker of the sound, I pushed through thorny underbrush, crawling on my hands and knees like a soldier behind enemy liens.
I could not have come upon them from a better angle had I planned it knowing their location. I peered from behind a screen of leafy vines and was rewarded with my first view of the crayfish, perhaps fifteen of them scurrying in and out of their burrows on the opposite bank.
I did not know, then, that they were crayfish. Later that evening I called Harry Ackermann, and he supplied me with the name. Harry taught biology at Clayton and had been doing so for many decades. I caught him at home, and he was in a hurry to get back to his bridge game where the possibilities for a grand slam invested his voice with an excitement I had never heard before (dear God, how our lives narrow in the home stretch).
I described the creatures and would have supplied what I knew of their habits from this first encounter, but Harry cut me off. "They're not insects," he said. "They are crustaceans, crayfish. That's the only freshwater animal that fits your description. That armor you are describing is an exoskeleton. The --" I could hear someone hollering in the background, a shrill female voice that I recognized as belonging to old Dean Winfrey Podner, a lesbian according to student legend, which I found fanciful, for it required thinking of the dean in sexual terms. "Look, I've got to go," he said and hung up.
I watched my crayfish all that afternoon, retreating only when I became aware of the sinking sun and realized I'd be making my way through the woods in the dark if I didn't call it a day.
Those hours of observation on that first day were strewn with epiphanies. My Muse hugged herself for joy and sang within my head.
The sad hum that filled the air was clearly generated by the crayfish who vibrated in a minor key as they scuttled over the bare clay soil, diving into holes in the bank, leaping in and out of the bright water of the stream.
Sometimes two crayfish would encounter each other, hug, their bodies shivering more rapidly while their antennae waved wildly. Whether this entwining was sexual or served some other function, I couldn't determine. Later I learned that this activity had to do with enlisting other members in what I came to call a meld, intending to seek out the proper term at a later date.
Before leaping into the water, the crayfish would remove parts of their armor -- what Harry called their exoskeletons -- revealing smooth flesh, white as toothpaste, that boiled with tiny tentacles. I would have liked to discuss this removable exoskeleton with Harry and would have broached the subject on the phone had his manner been less abrupt. Was this common to crustaceans, this ability to doff their exoskeletons? I was almost certain that other creatures couldn't do this. Turtles couldn't shed their shells and snails...well, maybe snails could. I mean, that's what slugs are, right?
That evening, when I arrived home, I found Audrey working zealously in the neglected vegetable garden by the side of the house. Neither of us had ever thought to resuscitate this garden, hadn't spoken of it. Audrey didn't like gardens of any kind and had hinted at unpleasant experiences with vegetables in her past, but that evening her face was streaked with black dirt, and her shaved head shone with honest sweat -- so few women have the bone structure to carry off a shorn look; Audrey does -- and she smiled at me with the pride of a hard day's labor done and, turning away, hefted her hoe again and had at the weeds. I didn't tell her about my crayfish. I wanted to surprise her with the essay.
I entered the house and went straight for the kitchen where I grabbed an apple and a box of crackers. Then it was off to the study and to work. I began my essay:
We are human and we think in human terms. Draw a line from a stone to a star, from a dinosaur bone to a dead ant, and wherever the lines intersect, there lies the human heart. Are we hopelessly self-referential or does the world truly speak to us?
It is easy to relate to those clear similarities, those echoes of our own mortal condition. The gorilla in his cage induces guilt when we look into his eyes. We see ourselves. The dead raccoon induces the same guilt when, at the wheels of our automobiles, we speed past its carcass, tossed negligently to the side of the road. We see our own unhappy ends. But what of smaller, more elusive creatures whose suffering is largely hidden from us? What of the low moan of little things? Can that really be grief we hear or is it an accident, harmonies with another purpose that fall upon our human ears and take the shape of sadness? I speak of the lonesome song of the crayfish, that song that the wind carries to us, that sound that seems encoded with loss and despair.
I was very pleased with that beginning, so pleased that I couldn't continue. Art should never be hurried, particularly the essay with its obligatory andante. Besides, I needed more familiarity with my subject, more detail to support my reflective voice.
As the weeks went by I was reminded of the danger of confusing the metaphor with what it illustrates. I was so fascinated by these crayfish that I often lost the essayist in the amateur naturalist.
But I think I always regained the higher ground, and, in all humility, I think these passages demonstrate that:
When I witness crayfish melding, generally in twelves or nines, more rarely in sixes, I am always amazed at how they fold into a completely new organism. The mega-crayfish seems to defy its origins, to heroically turn its back on the past. Single crayfish eat their exoskeletons before the meld, knowing there is no going back, demonstrating a selflessness that human societies might find admirable.
The first time I observed a mega-crayfish I had come upon it after the meld. I thought I was seeing a different animal entirely, although not one I was familiar with. The mega-crayfish comes in a variety of shapes, and this one looked something like a cat- sized spider except that it had a great many more legs than a spider and moved by collapsing a number of legs and falling in that direction, creating an odd, rollicking form of locomotion. This one dove into the water and returned with a frog which, I assumed, it was going to eat. Instead, it took the frog apart, peeling the skin back and plucking out various organs which it handed to the mendicant crayfish surrounding it. This was unpleasant to watch, since the frog continued to struggle throughout the operation, and the mega-crayfish performed the dissection with slow, finicky care. I expected the waiting crayfish to devour the morsels they had received from the mega-crayfish, and perhaps they did, but they did this out of my sight, disappearing into their holes with their treasures.
After the skeleton had been dismantled and carried away, when the frog was nothing more than a sheath of mottled skin, the mega-crayfish offered this last remnant to the last waiting crayfish, who took the skin, donned it like a Halloween cape, and dashed toward his hole with a fleetness that seemed powered by joy.
And then, of course, the mega-crayfish dismantled itself, pinching off its legs, unraveling its innards, and collapsing, finally, in a rubble of black exoskeleton, yellow blood and emerald guts. I expect this ritual has been observed by countless generations of country boys who give it no more thought than they might give to the birth of a calf or a bat caught in a sister's hair, but I must say, coming upon this gruesome spectacle with no warning of what was about to occur...it was unsettling, to say the least.
Perhaps it was the mega-crayfish's nature to tear itself apart; perhaps it was born to dissect and, lacking a subject, dissected itself. The analogy is easy, almost too easy: We human creatures deconstruct the universe and are left in the rubble of our fears, our mortality, our rags of faith.
I was pleased with that passage, and if Audrey had seen me at that moment, she might have said, as was her wont, "You look like you've just won the lottery."
But Audrey was nowhere around. She was probably upstairs reading in bed. I went outside and sat in the rocking chair and looked at the stars (Hopkins's "fire-folk sitting in the air") and thought that there were a lot of them in Pennsylvania, and I thought about how I might become very famous and hounded by fans. I might have to hire security guards or at least get a dog although I wasn't sure about getting a fierce dog because what if it began looking at me funny, started growling deep in its throat?
I sent the future marching, took a deep breath and rocked in the moment. I noticed that the night was very still. All the world's raucous frogs were silent, not a peep.

AS THE DAYS continued to pass, the exploits of my crayfish kept feeding my essay, and it grew to an unwieldy size. It was beginning to show its ignorance, by which I mean that my lack of scientific knowledge regarding these crustaceans was becoming a problem. No doubt there was a scientific term for what I called a meld. And what was occurring when two crayfish fought and the loser erupted in flames? The power of the image suggested a host of wonderful references throughout history and literature, but if I knew the mechanism -- some volatile chemical released in defeat? -- I could speak with more authority, send a telling anecdote or literary reference straight to the heart of the matter.
I needed to read up on crayfish. My decision was made on a Thursday evening after dinner. Scanning the phone book, which contained four counties and was still thinner than a copy of The New Yorker, I discovered -- I confess I was surprised -- a library in our very town. I thought it might still be open.
The parking lot was empty and dark, and the library, a small, shed-like building, appeared abandoned, although a closer inspection revealed a pale gleam of yellow light edging from beneath the window's drawn shade. I went to the door, turned the knob, and entered. An elderly woman sitting behind her desk jerked her head up as though she had been caught dozing.
"I can summon the police with a touch of a button, young man. There's nothing here but library fines, less than five dollars, not worth the loss of your freedom and good name."
I told her that I was seeking a book about crayfish.
"There are people who eat them," she said. Being a librarian, I suppose she felt obligated to contribute her knowledge on the subject.
"Not me," I said and waited for her to help with the search. She returned with two books, one entitled, The Flora and Fauna of Western Pennsylvania and the other a children's book entitled What's Under That Rock?
I checked out both books after filling out a library card application that was three pages long and expected me to know things like my mother's maiden name. I lied and got through it and made off with the books.
I intended to retire to the study and read these books immediately, but I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking, and so I pushed the play button and Audrey's voice jumped out. "Jonathan! When you get this, I'll be on my way to the coast with Dr. Bath and his wife. The quantum actualization of the brood wheel has come to us in a vision. It will bloom near San Clemente, and so we are on our way. These other manifestations are important, but they are not the blooming. You can be of use where you are. Please tend to my garden. We will meet again in celebration and the making of fine multiples."
I went into the kitchen, fumbled in the cupboards, and found the bottle of Gilbey's gin. It was my fault she'd left. I'd been neglecting her, lost in my damned essay about those damned crayfish. Neglected, she had fled into a crackpot religion. I should have seen it coming; the signs were there. I mixed the gin with a lemony diet drink that tasted awful. That was fine; I deserved it. Later I walked out into the yard and through the meadow and into the woods. I carried a flashlight and my backpack and trusted the familiarity of the route. There was a full moon, and I was drunk enough to fear no night thing.
I entered the clearing without incident, but I must have drifted from my habitual path, for a resilient sapling caught my leg and threw me to the ground. I turned my flashlight, and the beam revealed a silver rod growing out of the grass. I reached forward and touched the rod and as I gripped it, it began to slide down into itself. This wasn't at all like a sapling, and I studied the rod, pulling it up and then forcing it down again. It was a telescoping antenna. I retrieved my spade from the backpack and dug around the antenna, striking something hard. I brushed away the dirt to reveal a flat metal surface just under the ground. It took me well over two hours to unearth most of the truck's cab. The cab was full of dirt -- and Bob. There was black dirt in Bob's mouth, black dirt in his eye sockets. His hands still clutched the wheel, ready to go but...You lost the war, I thought, a stupid thought. I was feeling a little ill, and it didn't help, my staring at the grass which grew undisturbed over what had to be the larger bulk of the truck. How did you get there, Bob?
I heard the new sound, a sound that did not resonate with loss but seemed joyous, playful, exuberant. I crawled into the thicket and took my station. The full moon provided more than enough illumination, but I could have seen them without it, for each crayfish was enveloped in a pale green glow. They were running in and out of a fine spray of mist, for all the world like children squealing and frolicking in the spray of a hose or water sprinkler. I recognized the source of the spray, Bob's deadly canister of poison. Three of the crayfish operated it from its dug-in position high in the bank, while a dozen or more raced in and out of the toxic mist.
As always, I was entranced, and I might have crouched there watching them for hours, but something moved behind them, a shadow that shifted and, for a moment, eclipsed the moon and flooded my heart with terror. I scrambled out of the thicket, stood upright, and ran.
I stumbled through the woods, crashing into trees, toppling over logs, but always up again and moving. The meadow left me unprotected; I imagined malevolent eyes watching me from above. I ran.
I reached the porch as my stomach cramped. I eased myself down on the first porch step and blinked at the silvered grass, the meadow and the trees beyond. The spinning world wobbled to a stop as I caught my breath. Peace reigned; the stars were noncommittal and the breeze was warm and quick with the promise of spring. I glanced down at Audrey's garden and thought of going after her, but Audrey wouldn't like that. No, time would have to bring her back to me... the fullness of time (a phrase that seemed suddenly sinister; I saw this monstrous thing, bloated with the eons it had devoured).
No going after Audrey. Hadn't she charged me with the care of her garden? She had taken pains with this project, covering the ground with plastic sheets to protect the new shoots from the vicissitudes of the season. I stood up and regarded one of the sheets. I looked over my shoulder, but nothing was coming. I knelt down and peeled back the sheet and saw rows of neatly ordered little plants, white buds with blue .... No. My mind was forced to swallow the image, but it had no response ready-made. Indeed, my first reaction was to laugh abruptly, which really wasn't appropriate. What I saw were rows of little blue eyeballs, naked, unblinking, incredulous. I had never seen a garden that looked so very, very surprised.
I had no time to pursue that thought, for I turned again, prompted by a trumpeting roar that rattled my heart in its cage. The thing was silhouetted against the moon, its ragged wings outstretched, strange tentacles dangling from its black bulk, tentacles long enough to trail across the meadow as though trolling the amber waves.
I am locked in my room now, devising a plan or preparing to devise a plan or, perhaps, simply eating this bag of potato chips and reading. When all is said and done, I enjoy reading far more than writing. Not that I'm very fond of The Flora and Fauna of Western Pennsylvania. It has no pictures and it has that shiny paper that I associate with text books and the prose is almost impenetrable, and you know what? I'm an adult, and I don't have to read it if I don't want to. Hah.
Well, What's Under That Rock? is a great improvement. For one thing, it has pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. There's a picture of a crayfish in this book.
Something is on the roof...make that in the attic. The noise doesn't conjure a clear picture in my mind. Visualize a half dozen sailors, brawling while someone tortures a pig. No. I think you have to be here to fully appreciate this sound.
I keep looking at this drawing of a crayfish. Cambarus bartoni, that's its scientific name. It looks exactly like a tiny lobster. That's simple enough, isn't it? I mean, what kind of genius do you have to be to say, "Jonathan, those aren't crayfish. I don't know what the hell they are, but they aren't crayfish. Crayfish look exactly like small lobsters"? Is that so difficult?
Thanks a lot, Harry Ackermann. I hope your grand slam fizzled.
"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions." You are so right, Will.
I'm just sick, really sick and disgusted. And the essay is ruined, of course.