Nightwatch
- What time is it? It's grasshopper time.
- Did you know grasshoppers and locusts are the same thing? Because they are. And Dillard's going to tell us about this as she hikes through the Lucas meadow.
- Lucas is the last name of a family she knows; she's come to spend the night in their cabin on the other side of Tinker Creek.
- She'll be by herself, of course. You didn't think she was going to start socializing all of a sudden, now did you?
- As Dillard walks through the meadow, she's surrounded by grasshoppers. They jump into the air in response to her steps, and she imagines herself to be King of the Meadow.
- Anyway, about the locusts: In crowded conditions, certain species of grasshoppers go berserk, change colors, and start swarming. A herd of locusts can destroy all the vegetation in its path.
- Important life lesson: Don't stress out a grasshopper if you're not prepared for the consequences.
- Dillard makes her way to the cabin and observes stuff, like she does.
- She sees a baby rabbit that's not doing such a good job of remaining stealth. It's trying, sitting there with its ears all tucked, but it has an itch and keeps flailing its back leg to scratch.
- As she sits in the dark cabin looking out the window, she sees two butterflies fighting. And then she sees something really amazing: a goldfinch, which grabs a thistle and starts emptying the seedcase, which fills the air with fluffy down.
- As the goldfinch flies away and the sun sets, the fireflies come out and Dillard's pretty much enraptured.
- She decides to sleep outside, because she don't need no stinkin' cottage, so she rolls out her sleeping bag between the cottage and the bank of the dam and listens to the cicadas.
- Lying on the ground, she looks up at the stars and ponders the fact that every minute, on each square mile of land, one ten-thousandth of an ounce of starlight hits the earth.
- She wonders how much of an ounce of starlight is falling on her body.
- When a far-off freight train shakes the earth beneath her, she says, "I nearly rolled off the world."
- She thinks of a story Edwin Way Teale told, which is that eels travel across meadows to reach salt water, remembering the sea from which they came.
- It's a nonsensical gesture, traveling all that way only to mate, release eggs, and die.
- If a bunch of eels slithered through the field that night, she wonders, would she be scarred for life? Would she ever leave home again? Or would she be so carried away by the insistence of their movement that she'd go with them?
- She thinks about the interconnectedness of the earth and all beings, and how good it feels to be a part of it all, even if you get attacked by grasshoppers.