The Fixed
- Alternate name for this chapter: A Bunch of Messed-Up Stuff About Bugs.
- Dillard's started collecting praying mantis egg cases, putting them in her pocket, and carrying them home.
- This probably saves a bunch of butterflies and bees, because that's what mantises eat; afterward, they clean their faces like cats.
- Oh, and another thing female mantises like to eat? The heads of male mantises during mating. That's right: during.
- Dillard got pretty obsessed with mantises a few years ago when she saw one laying eggs in a wild rosebush. Long story short, they shoot what looks like frothy spit bubbles out of their abdomens and the bubbles harden into an egg case.
- She kept visiting the egg case every day, because who can ever get enough hardened spit bubbles? We certainly can't.
- After a long winter of waiting for the mantises to hatch, the neighbor mowed down the rose bush, and with it the egg case. Womp womp.
- That's what's up with her current egg case collecting: She ties them to the branches of the trees outside her cabin with white string so nobody can mow them down. She's going to see some baby mantises or else.
- She remembers how, as a ten-year-old kid, her friend Judy found a Polyphemus moth cocoon and brought it to class.
- It was January, but as all the kids passed the cocoon around and warmed it in their hands, it started thrashing around; the moth was hatching.
- Their teacher put it in a jar, where it couldn't spread its wings and shake off the goo, so its wet wings hardened to its back.
- When the teacher set it free on the playground, it tried to walk away, because it couldn't fly.
- And now, for some thoughts on shadows: Islam, says Dillard, considers representational art sinful, particularly sculpture, because it casts a shadow.
- Casting a shadow = realness. Okay, back to bugs.
- When wasps eat bees, the dying bees stick out their tongues, and the wasps lick the honey off. Sometimes a mantis comes along like Chuck Norris and eats them both.
- An entomologist named Howard Ensign Evans wrote about the staggering cluelessness of dragonflies, who dip their abdomens into wet surfaces to see if the liquid is water.
- In California, they dip their abdomens into the La Brea tar pits, and if they manage to free themselves, they do it again. The tar pits have a shimmering coating of dead dragonflies.
- An entomologist named Jean-Henri Fabre watched caterpillars called pine processionaries make their way through the woods.
- The caterpillar in the lead lays down a thread of silk, and the other caterpillars lay down threads as they follow.
- One day, Fabre caught the caterpillars climbing up a vase in his greenhouse. As the caterpillar in the lead made its way to the rim of the vase, he swept away the caterpillars that were still climbing.
- The caterpillars left on the rim of the vase kept circling it for a week, even when he laid food beside it. They kept doing what they do, despite being hungry and exhausted.
- To Annie, this seems like a nightmare of fixedness. She hopes never to become fixed, unable to use logic and improvisation.
- She sees that Tinker Creek is fixed as well—the water never stops flowing over the same old rocks.
- Still, the frozen woods and the winter moon are beautiful, and when she walks outside, she feels the same staggering awe at her surroundings.