An Untangled Web

The single silvery thread seemingly streams upwards from a green pool, each slow whirl glinting in the slanting rays until ending mid-air, a loose end to an incredible feat.

How could a tiny spider unspool such a lengthy line from her spinnerets? The total mass of the proteinaceous thread is seemingly as large as the spinner herself. Some weaving spiders have to eat some of what they've just made for the energy to produce the next strand. Is that her trick?

What is her design with a line cast from an overhanging tree down to a remote swimming hole? An orb or sheet web would have to span an unlikely fifty-foot space. A funnel, tube, or tangle web would be a similarly impossible task. Some spiders have been known to jettison themselves to a new location, but a wide pond in a fast moving stream seems an unlikely destination.

What is she planning to snare? The creek is teeming with flies of progressive sizes - may-, deer-, horse-, damsel-, and dragon-. Such a single thread would snare exactly none of them, and who's to say that spiders are only functional builders? Each October adventurers travel from all over the world to nearby Fayetteville, West Virginia to leap off  the longest single arch bridge in North America. If people do it, why not arachnids?

There's my most likely explanation for the free floating web strand above my favorite swimming hole. I've discovered the base-jumping spider, and I hope she can get one of her weaving compatriots to build her a safety net.

Why do I say she's a she? Only female spiders drop a pheramone-laden drag line to reel in mates, unlike some people we know and love.

Clumsy Crow

On yesterday's mid-summer walk to work I encountered a crow. It was apparently dead in a grassy ditch beside the road. Then I saw a dark eye blink.

The big black bird was beautiful, with glossy feathers from the neck down gleaming in the sunrise and no such reflection from fluffly, greyish down of the head. It's thick, down-curving beak looked lethal, especially when opened wide to try to take my thumb as I began the physical examination.

The neck was supple, with full range of sidebending left and right as she tracked my movements. Shoulders had full range of motion as she flapped to try to evade my touch. The chest was symmetrical, with a burst of expansion at each cawing protest to the indignity of my inspection. The abdomen was soft and flat, with no signs of distension or trauma. Hips and knees had intact ranges of passive flexion and extension. Despite a noticeably low body weight, an avian adaptation to levitation or maybe just a sex difference in body mass, she seemed full of vibrant energy. The only discernible abnormality was in active range of motion of the lower extremities - she could not move her own legs or talons.

It was tempting to bring this injured bird home. In humans, paralysis below the waist could mean a lower spinal cord injury, tumor, or infection. Without trauma or other signs of cancer, infection becomes the most likely cause, and crows are particularly susceptible to one that causes just these symptoms.

The West Nile virus is being carried to the temperate world by expanding ranges of tropical mosquitoes. In humans, a bite from one can bring on a fever, body aches, and fatigue. In most cases the febrile illness resolves in a few days and the recovering person never knew what hit them other than a bad cold. In a tiny percentage of infections, less than 1%, the virus manages to circulate to the central nervous system causing the worst headache of your life (meningitis) or sudden paralysis of one or more parts of the body (encephalitis). With no effective treatment other than hydration and time, a small percentage of people with a central nervous system infection die. Most survive with minimal disability.

The percentages are reversed in crows. Once injected by an infected mosquito, the virus rapidly replicates and the beautiful big black bird rapidly declines. More than 80% of infected crows will die from paralysis, dehydration, or predation from being unable to fly.

On my run home from work I carried a dropper bottle of spring water infused with antiviral and immune boosting herbs. My corvid charge was laid up in behind the wall I had moved her to, legs still useless behind her. She flapped her wings as I held her from behind, but each successive caw of protest became a little less vigorous. All two inches of her strong black beak snapped at the approaching eyedropper, barely failing to shatter the glass. A dark eye looked up in surprise when her latching on allowed me to squirt a dropper full down her throat. For the next rounds she snapped but didn't hold, and I was able to get a half dozen squirts mostly in her mouth.

That night I slept a dreamless sleep under the full Wort Moon, our black cat hovering around my head until awakened, uncharacteristically, later than usual.

"Are you going to work today?" my partner called from the bedroom door.

"Yes, thanks," I called back while resisting the pull back into the darkness of our canopied bed.

She was still there behind the wall. I pulled out the dropper bottle, held her thin body behind unprotesting wings, and tilted back her head. One dark eye stared up, unblinking, as I buried her black body in a bed of white pine needles.

What Does The Early Worm Get?

One of the joys of flaneury is an intimate relationship with worms.

Walkers will come to know the earthbound annelids of their region, and not just on rainy days. On some Appalachian summer mornings the roads are crawling with the two familiars of my childhood in New Jersey, your garden-variety brown and tan earthworms and the bulging burgundy night crawlers. Here in West Virginia, well below the line of continental glaciation, there are also blood red wrigglers, cachectic beige strugglers, and numerous other varieties in size, color, and vigor.

There are eighteen, count them, eighteen species of earthworm in West Virginia including Lumbicus cantaneus, Amynthas diffringens, and Dendodrilus rubidus. My favorite is Bimastos heimburgeri, and I'm hopeful the species name references a person or place and not the delicacy of this worm with multiple citelli, those bulging saddles sometimes mistaken for hearts (they have none).

A former girlfriend with a big one, heart that is, would stoop to save worms from sidewalks and roads on our dog strolls. Walk duration aside, you've got to love this urge to help the geotactic flaneurs, but did those wrigglers really want a return to dirt?

The conventional wisdom is that earthworms surface when the soil is too wet to hold enough oxygen, begging the question of why do it when it hasn't rained for days. That riddle, unlike the scraped-earth theory of limited northern species, will not be solved by the musings of an addled ambulator.

Driving Will Get You Elsewhere

My early summer walk to work today is cool, green, and bloody. Nighttime exhalation of caves in this karst region brings moist morning air at a steady fifty-two degrees fahrenheit, watering thirsty trees, shrubs, and grasses even when it hasn't rained. Cave exhaust also brings out the critters.

Aerial scavengers eye a parade of the dead - the lump of a lime-laden deer, the smashed shell and splayed limbs of a snapping turtle, the sideways stare of a permanently frozen opossum, the red splash of a crushed cardinal, the sinuosity of a flattened black snake. Vultures in red or black, small hawks, and big black birds hop from one foot to another at the tops of trees and telephone poles, impatiently awaiting my passing,

It's a gruesome display, one that is laid out every morning on millions of miles of roads. All I can say as I lay the bodies into the roadside wildflowers is what a fellow flaneur might have if he had survived into the era of the automobile:

"Ya drives yer car, ya takes yer chances." - Popeye the Sailor Man

Nowhere Becomes Somewhere

Some days, when there's no need to be somewhere, you keep walking. Maybe it's the sublime beauty of a sunrise or the cooling breeze blowing away your uphill steam. It might be the pregnant push of a hectic household or the seminal pull of horse chestnut blossoms. It could be the serrated ridges of high cirrus clouds, harbingers of an early autumn. Whatever the call, in the daytime or in your lifetime, you just keep going, ending up miles from nowhere.

One time it was onto a hidden path into the meadow of a failed subdivision. A half mile trail snaked around a karst sinkhole that had halted construction of another half dozen houses. The coal baron owners mowed for hay twice a summer but otherwise tolerated occasional foot traffic onto this forgotten land. The simulated grazing spurred on the yarrow, motherwort, red clover, and wild oregano, staples of a growing home apothecary.

Another wandering took me down a dirt lane and out onto a rock pile overlooking an old quarry. My lunch time intrusion into this deer sanctuary startled them at first, but they soon tolerated the bearded picnicker ducking under the barbed wire fence behind a Chinese take-out place.

There was the diversion onto a game trail that wandered through a forest of fairy wands, peaking above a small cave that would become the overwintering den for a family of foxes. Or the stumbling onto an overgrown city right-of-way behind businesses, a secret pathway from my clinic to the shopping center. Or cantering down an old horse trail to a hillock of burdock and teasel, biennial roots that would serve as the basis of powerful herbal tinctures.

Some days you just keep going until nowhere becomes somewhere.

The Dame's Rocket Is So Beautiful

     My walk to work this morning took me through a tunnel of gorgeous four-petaled flowers, bringing back a regretful car conversation with a former life partner.

     Her: "The purple phlox are so beautiful this year."

     Me: "They would be if they were purple phlox."

     Her: "Hey, don't rain on my parade."

     Me: "I already told you I keyed them out as dame's rocket."

     Her: "What does it matter what they're called?"

     Me:  "It matters that you don't trust my plant identification skill."

     Her: "Leave me alone, I just want to look at the flowers."

     Me: "You got it."

     In appreciating their beauty on this late spring walk, it truly didn't matter what the flurry of soft petals in purple, violet, and white are called. Distinguishing their species only meant something to me in that former conversation because I was insecure with and fearful of the changes needed - in career, in relationship, in self-esteem. I was just beginning to discover herbal medicine as a pathway to a new life.

     Knowing what I know now, here's how I would have liked that conversation to have gone:

     "The purple phlox are so beautiful this year."

     "Yes, they're gorgeous, and I'm happy that you see beauty in nature."

Later that day, while she was working in the kitchen to make a meal for us and our two teenagers, I would have gone back to that tunnel, snipped a flower stem here and there, and placed them in a vase on the dining room table.

     Years later, after the changes are underway, a woman I've come to know and love gave me a second chance, observing "The dame's rocket is so beautiful this year." Where are my clippers?

Dame's rocket has alternate leaves

But Where?

     Deliberate walking - flaneury in French - can be both an unsettling and exhilarating proposition in a driving town such as mine, Lewisburg, West Virginia, population more-or-less five thousand in roughly two square miles.

     To get the thrills, walkers must first accept the funny looks, namely scowls from drivers who have to swerve, scorn from those who assume poverty or worse, and pity from a few who falsely empathize. It's a driving culture in most American towns and cities, and those in open opposition to it must be either odd or poor, probably both.
     In the 1970s, in my hometown in New Jersey, there was a quiet, middle-aged man who wouldn't have been all that noticeable, except he walked. Parents warned their children to be wary of this strange and potentially dangerous person. Children talked to their siblings and friends:

     He's just been released from Trenton State.

     He's a flasher when he catches you alone.

     He's a Russian spy.

     He had throat cancer and can't talk.

     He was a chemistry professor at Rutgers who blew up his lab.

So much for being a quiet, middle-aged man who likes to walk.

     A next step before reaching the joy of walking is learning to gracefully reject the ride offers that come in any weather extreme, be it heat, cold, or wet. Talk about killing with kindness, such do-gooders will stop at the apex of a blind hill or in the bend of curve, putting both the walker and themselves at risk of a collision. Expressing profuse thanks and relief at survival with an enthusiastic wave as these puzzled samaritans drive away will keep them from crossing over to the funny-looker side.

     Once accepting of scorn and mortality, the flaneur is ready for the joy of flaneury.
There are unsusual glimpses of the rising sun along with it's warming and healing rays. There's time-travel to another period of walking in life, for me to the half-mile trek to and from elementary school when friends were made, new paths discovered, and spontaneous adventures embarked upon. There are unexpected encounters with wildlife - a black-crowned night heron, a tiny snapping turtle scurrying across the road, fuzzy yellow goslings waddling behind their mother goose, a brawny red fox disappearing into the brush, a melanotic deer using black ears to swat flies. There's the uphill shift to fat metabolism, agonizing in it's urgency, slimming in it's outcome. There's insight into the right wording, the best direction, the better response. Then, after a mindful and mindless half hour, I arrive there, ready for the day's work, with these words from E.E. Cummings on the tip of my mind:

seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here