S
howing off for the bridesmaids at my sister's wedding reception years ago, I caught and ate a large black cricket. Later I mentioned the incident in a book I wrote. At a talk I gave recently, someone who had read the book asked if the story was true. My sister happened to be present, so I pointed her out and told the questioner he should ask her himself. All heads swiveled to look at her where she was sitting by the aisle in the back row. “He eats bugs,” she explained shortly, her lip curled in understated disgust.
Well, I do. Not all the time, of course, but sometimes, when the opportunity is at hand. And I don't think of them as bugs but as whatever specific kind of insect they happen to be. My friend Don and I are the only people I know of who have eaten insects until we were full. Those were brown drake mayflies, snatched from the surface of a northern Michigan trout river just as they hatched from their aquatic form into winged insects. They appeared in great numbers, and the fish went crazy chasing them, and somehow that afternoon instead of fishing we joined in. I could understand why the fish
were acting like that: If you're into mayflies, it's hard to eat just one. I would not go so far as to call mayflies delicious, but they do have a satisfying crunch and a taste like the soft part at the bottom of a stalk of grass.
This wasn't something I started as a kid, to gross out rivals on the playground. When I was growing up, decades ago in northern Ohio, you didn't experiment too much with what you ate. You had your peanut butter and jelly and your meat and potatoes, and that was about it. I didn't even have pizza until I was fourteen. A year or two later, my cousins moved to a fancy Connecticut suburb of New York City and at Christmas sent back sophisticated presents from the East. For me, my aunt chose an assortment of gourmet snacks I'd never seen before, including a box of chocolate-covered ants and bees. They came in cubes of chocolate wrapped in red foil or silver foil, depending on the insects inside. I waited awhile before giving them a try. I didn't even know for sure if I was really supposed to. It was an unusual present for a grown-up relative to give. But I was a teenager, and the time the 1960s, and the unusual seemed to be happening every day. So what the heckâthe taste was chocolate, mainly, with a chitinous crunch to it and a slight bitterness underneath. The important lesson I learned was that you can eat quite a lot of ants and bees and still be fine.
Like many discoveries of the sixties, this one had been made before. Throughout history, we humans have eaten bugs. Although they have been out of fashion in our recipes for a while now, that wasn't always so. Archaeologists who study diet in pre-Columbian America say that in parts of the West at certain times of year, grasshoppers appear to have been the staple food. The terrifying dark clouds of hoppers that descend on Western farms may have meant breakfast in
earlier times. Frontier travelers in the nineteenth century reported that Indians liked to eat insects and knew how to fix them. A man named Edwin James who traveled in the Rockies in 1820 said that Snake Indian women collected a certain kind of ant from anthills in the cool of the morning when the insects were easier to catch, put the ants into a special bag, washed and cleaned them of dirt and bits of wood, put them on a flat stone, crushed them with a rolling pin, rolled them like pastry, and made them into a delicious (to the Indians) soup.
Then of course there's the insect-eating in the Bible. The dietary laws in the Old Testament book of Leviticus list as foods forbidden to eat not only the rabbit and the pig, but also such unlikely table fare as the osprey, the pelican, and the weasel. “Flying, creeping things,” i.e., insects, are also generally unclean and forbidden. But a single verse makes these exceptions: “Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.” As loopholes go, that's pretty good-sized; it suggests the lawgiver was responding to a real demand. The most famous wilderness dweller of the Bible, John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins as he wandered about preaching the coming of the Messiah. His food, we are told, was locusts and wild honey. The wild honey is not a surprise, but note his choice of insect. Even living off the land, John the Baptist kept kosherâa wild man, but still a good Jewish boy.
The truth is, aside from that black cricket and the chocolate-covered ants and bees, and aside from some night crawlers
(annelids, technically not insects) that I sliced up and fried to leathery inedibility, and aside from one or two others I have forgotten about, the insects in my diet have almost all been mayflies. If you know nothing about mayflies, it may be hard to understand their appeal. The “fly” in the name, for starters, is misleading; they are nothing like the house or bluebottle variety. Mayflies spend most of their lifespan underwater as swimming insects called nymphs. Their presence in a river or other freshwater is a good sign that it is well oxygenated and passably clean. They range in size from an inch and a half to almost pinhead small. Mostly in spring and summer, they come to the surface, hatch from their nymphal forms into winged insects, mate, lay eggs, and die.
Sometimes they hatch en masse, like seniors graduating or couples marrying in June. A hatch, as it's called, is one of those events when, beneath nature's customary inscrutability, you can hear her saying, “Par-r-r-r-r-ty!” Mayflies start to pop up on the surface of the riverâfirst one, then a few, then more, then hundreds of them floating downstream like runaway cakes off a conveyor belt in that episode of
I Love Lucy.
New creatures in a new environment, they're dazed, and their wings are damp, and in the moments before they get their bearings and fly they're the best free lunch a fish ever had. Trout of all sizes, from minnows on up, begin to feed with a growing sense of exultation that soon draws even the wise and reticent big guys from their cover. I've seen trout pursue mayflies with splashes and fillips and show-offy flourishes of the tail, just for joy. Swallows come swooping down and take the mayflies as they float, and dragonflies hit them in the air with a little crunching zip. Robins zigzag overhead, braking so suddenly when they catch one in mid-flight that their feet skid
forward in front of them. In webs along the bank, spiders wake up to a sudden windfall and hurry to subdue the captives. In the spring air, the new mayflies float and shimmer like soap bubbles. The whole scene usually makes me want to get busy and catch some fish; sometimes it makes me want to just lay back my head and open my mouth and let the bounty fall in.
Once, when I was just starting out as a reporter in New York, I attended a grossly expensive dinner to promote some movie or other. It was held at an Indian restaurant, and for the last course, after the desserts and the teas, waiters brought out linen-covered trays on top of which were small foil rectangles of silver. Silver, the metal. Waiters served each guest a sheet of foil, and then, following our hosts, we put the silver on our tongues, savored, chewed, and swallowed. Silver is not tastyânot a dessert metal, really. But eating it causes your awareness to expand, as the implications proliferate and ricochet around in your brain. You register each second of the experience; you think, “I'm eating
silver!
”
Eating mayflies is a lot like that for me. Say that I find a small, newly hatched mayfly floating down the Clark Fork River in Montana. I lift it from the surface tension with the ball of my finger. As it tries to fit its filament-fine legs among the whorls of my fingerprint, I identify it as the blue-winged olive,
Ephemerella flavilinea
. Its name alone is prettier than silver. Its wings are a semigloss, cigarette-smoke bluish gray, a color mentally delicious in itself. In my mouth, its actual taste is tiny but real, and its resistance to teeth and tongue less than a single egg of caviar. I'm part
of a group that includes John the Baptist and Paleo-Indians and the Snakes of the Rockies. Like the ancients, I'm taking what the wilderness provides. I'm eating bugs, just as natural as can be.
(1997)
O
n one of the long motoring vacations my family used to takeâfive kids on a mattress in the back of the station wagon, our parents in front sharing the driving, heading down a highway in the Yukon Territories or on the Canadian prairies or some other far-flung place of the sort my father preferredâI saw my brother Dave writhing and wincing in pain. Of the siblings, I am the oldest and Dave the second oldest. In those days, I found certain of his sufferings to be of scientific interest: on occasion, I even did what I could to increase them just for my own information. In this case, I observed him screwing up his features, muttering to himself, and once in a while shaking his head like a horse in a cloud of flies. Finally I asked him what was wrong. “I can't stop thinking about the words âinclined plane'!” he said. “No matter what I do they keep running through my head: inclined plane inclined plane inclined plane!” Our mother turned around and tried to comfort him, suggesting that he just think of something else, but Dave replied that trying to think of something else only caused him to think of inclined plane
more. He sat there, beset and wretched, the golden inclined plains of Canada (or wherever) rolling past our station-wagon windows.
The day eventuated, as travel days do. We stopped at a point of interest, ate at a little restaurant in a little town, checked into a motel. After the bouncing on the beds, the putting on of pajamas, the listening to of stories read by our father, Dave and I got into one twin bed and the three younger kids into the other. As the lights went out, and our eyes adjusted to the single beam falling through the opening in the door between our parents' room and ours, a wicked realization crossed my mind. “Dave,” I whispered, “
inclined plane.
” I was rewarded with a moan like the moan of the damned.
The old saying about history occurring first as tragedy and the second time as farce seems to work in reverse order for me. Jokes I make, often at someone else's expense, have a way of turning up later as real and strangely less funny problems in my own life. My brother's affliction proved to be contagious: getting a name or a phrase or a few bars of music stuck in my head has become one of the minor banes of existence for me. At certain moments I have practically prayed for a distraction to dislodge whatever happens to be stuck, much as hiccup sufferers hope for an unexpected and curative fright. For years I lived in New York City and had distractions to spare; in New York no idea survives in the mind for any length of time. But then I moved to a rural place where the distractions amounted to (1) the smell of pine needles and (2) time to put gas in the car. In such a distraction-free environment,
idées fixes
float through the air and catch in the folds of my brain like invisible wind-borne cockleburs.
One afternoon not long ago I was out fishing. The day was warm and sunny, the river clear and wadable, the fish rising.
In short, nothing about the day or the fishing conditions needed improvement. As I worked my way up a brushy bank, I saw, in a patch of light among the bushes' underwater shadows, a large rainbow trout slowly appearing. He materialized in the patch of light so clearly that I could see his greenish-gold back, his regularly spaced black speckles, the steady pulsing of his gills. In the next second he was back in the shadows, invisible again. Almost simultaneously, I became aware that I was thinking obsessively of the name Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.
Well, that did it. I knew how the rest of my fishing afternoon would go. “Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel ⦠Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel,” said my brain, matching the syllables to the mechanics of my cast. I looked about hopelessly for a change of subject. With a high-pitched cry, an osprey coasted overhead, plunged down, and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogeled a fish from the shallows. The Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel ripples widened and grew. Do you know who Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel is? I'm not sure I do. She's a society person in New York, I think. Her name is as infectious as pinkeye. Running now on inertia alone, I joylessly fished through the perfect afternoon, inwardly, unstoppably praying,
Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel
Forgive us for what we have done.
Further, this is the kind of malady that qualifies the sufferer for no sympathy at all. That afternoon I may have caught fish or I may not; I can't remember. I know that I arrived home when I had said I would, outwardly intact, with no obvious grounds for complaint. And yet inwardly, how flummoxed I
was, how vexed! What could I answer my wife and children when they asked how I had enjoyed my afternoon? “It was okay, but I couldn't stop thinking of the name Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.” Or, more honestly and more pitifully, “Help me! The name Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel is about to drive me insane!”
Studies have shown (or would show, if they existed) that among outdoor enthusiasts between the ages of forty and fifty-two who do repetitive-motion activities like rowing, long-distance cycling, jogging, or hiking, fully 37 percent have the words to the song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” echoing in their brains. Those shrink-wrapped cross-country bicycle riders you see strung out for miles along state highways in the middle of the country are an internalized procession of the peskiest and most viruslike of Top 40 tunes from the past. Do you recall, by any chance, the robotic “I'm Telling You Now,” by Freddie and the Dreamers? Almost certainly, cross-country bicyclists of a certain age do. The next time you see one stopped by the side of the road, pull over and roll down your window and sing a few bars of “I'm Telling You Now” for him. He may curse you and and carry it with him all the way to Minneapolis-St. Paul. On the other hand, he may thank you for driving out what had been torturing him before, a song that went something like “Why do you build me up, Buttercup, baby, just to let me down, mmmm mmmm mess me around,” and so on, to which he could recall only the tune and a smattering of lyrics but not the title or the name of the group. From the brain's point of view, imperfection of memory is no obstacle. The brain runs through the little it does recall
quite cheerfully and endlessly just the same. It likes the dumbest things. Why doesn't it replay great symphonies, in full one-hundred-piece orchestration? If we had only known, in the sixties, that these three-chord hit songs on the radio were going to accompany us into eternityâwell, I'm sure back then we wouldn't have cared.
I carry guidebooks with me when I hike, to identify flora and fauna that catch my eye. Once identified, their names escape from me in an instant, like the names of strangers at a crowded party. Over the last year, I have learned the dog-toothed violet, the serviceberry bush, and the false morel mushroomâonly a tiny percentage of all the specimens that I have looked up. Although I refer to a conifer guide when I'm cross-country skiing, I am still not trustworthy on the difference between a spruce and a fir. (Now I rememberâa fir has short, flat needles and a spruce has short, pointy needles that aren't as flat. I think.) But let the smallest piece of commercial-packaging trash appear along the trail and I can give you the species, genus, and phylum every time. That fan of reflected light, for example, flickering stroboscopically in the rippling current of the creek, comes from a flattened part of a beer can on the creek bottom, a beer can that even at this distance I can identify as belonging to the genus Budweiser and the species Bud Dry.
That's the hard part: living with the realization that we have junk-filled brains. Much of the litter we bring with us into the wilderness is of the mental variety; past a certain point, our minds really cannot grasp places that are completely trash-free. The Fanta grape-soda can drawing bees in the middle of a supposedly pristine wilderness campsite provokes our outrage and disgust, of course. But underneath those feelings, and less comfortable to admit, is a small
amount of recognition and even relief. The Fanta can is
us,
after all. In the nineteenth century, when the cult of the Scenic had just begun, advertisers (especially in New England) took to plastering giant advertising slogans on the scenery itself. Hikers who reached lofty lookout points in the Adirondacks or the Berkshires would see the words VISIT OAK HALL on a rock face in the prospect before them. (Oak Hall was a Boston clothing store.) Even more remarkable is how few of them seem to have complained.
The other day, while enjoying one of my two distractionsâputting gas in the carâI noticed that a candy company had managed to set an advertisement into the previously neglected space between the top of the gas pump handle's grip and the base of the nozzle. It featured a full-color photograph of a candy bar and the words “Hungry? Try aââ.” I wondered: If I asked, do you suppose they would buy space on the inside of my eyelids? Nowadays advertisers no longer bother to afflict the scenery. Today they think small and specific; they know that the best medium is the individual consciousness itself. With so much of our commerce trying to inveigle its tiny way into our waking and sleeping thoughts, some of it is bound to stick, adding to the random detritus, songs and phrases and floating bits of near-nonsense there already. We will never get rid of it all. We can only be thankful that it follows its own slow cycle of decay; at least we no longer murmur, as we drift off to sleep by the campfire light, “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet” or “Visit Oak Hall.”
We can be thankful, too, that it stops with us. Most animals, for example, do not like to watch TV. What a blessing
that is! Bad enough that the raccoons show up regularly to plunder the garbage cans out back; how much worse if they showed up regularly in the branches by the living-room window to catch the Thursday-night lineup on NBC. With TVs in every cage and caged animals staring at them, zoos would be even drearier places than they already are. What we have in common with the rest of nature goes deeper than advertising, deeper than words. One way to regard the annoying phrase stuck in the mind is as a boundary marking where the not-human begins. The last time I fished I caught big brown trout one after another, prehistoric-looking battlers with bananayellow bellies and inky spots the size of dimes on their sides. Several of them jumped at me when they felt the hook, appearing suddenly in the air and fixing me with their wild eyes. As I revived them before releasing them, my two hands barely able to fit around the breadth of their sides, I looked again and again at their eyes. They held a concentrated intentionality, a consciousness I could only guess at. And yet I knew for absolute certain that (
Everybody was Kung Fu fighting
) unlike me the trout did not have the words (
Those cats were fast as lightning
) to a 1970s pop tune (
In fact it was a little bit frightening
) called “Kung Fu Fighting” (
But they fought with expert timing
) running through their brains.
(1998)