the bug

by Catherine Lutz

As clear in my mind’s eye today as it was for me as I sit on the ground in my backyard at the age of thirteen, a small flying insect alights close by on a small, shriveled fig-purple berry. Winter has had its way with the bush on which the berry hangs, denuding it of its leaves and stripping the fruit of any seeming life.  From the bug’s mouth, suddenly, comes a delicate tube it attaches to the berry.  I can see it begin to drink the nectar secreted inside.  The air is still and stiff in the late winter cold, but the world opens itself a bit and tells me that here is more here, a mystery beyond the eye. 

This opportunity comes to me because I have been sent to sit and observe the natural world by my 8th grade biology teacher. 

I can still see her as well in front of our classroom.  She is large, androgenous, and gently in charge.  Wearing a permanent half-smile, she looks straight at us as she speaks. Her loose, tent-like clothes and sturdy shoes make her look like an expeditioner as she moves around the room between lab stations where we are dissecting earthworms, the first step as we build up to studying fetal pigs.

“What do you see?” she asks, as we stand over pungent formaldehyde-scented trays. 

We look and begin to see the dead animals’ delicate splayed-open structures, the worm’s narrow cream-colored ganglion and its tiny multiple hearts.  The baby pig’s greige lungs, liver, and larynx. 

At the chalkboard, she pulls down a colorful roller shade anatomical display.  “Try to match what you see with these pictures,” she encourages us.

Another girl and I use the tweezers and scissors from our individual dissection tool kit to gently pull the tiny worm brain and attached nerve cord away from the rest of the body to see it more clearly.  We feel our maturity.

Months after these moments in the classroom, in the chill of early spring, our teacher sent us into the world outside.  She handed out a sweet and sour-smelling mimeograph sheet that gave us our own expeditionary assignment.  “Find a 10 by 10-meter section of earth. Mark it off with stakes and string.  Carry a small notebook and pen. Sit and watch inside its perimeter. Write down everything you see each day for the next four weeks.”

“Everything you see.  Everything matters.”

I sat in the damp cold of my chosen site: a small, wooded section of our backyard and, though initially I saw nothing but winter’s denuded and blandly colored branches and a mass of indistinguishable brown ground cover, I sensed that mysteries lived in that small square and that the long sitting would reveal them.  Our teacher had suggested as much and I believed her. 

And so, I wrote and sat and sat and wrote.

Slowly, revelations.  The branches on one low bush, on closer inspection, had bizarre, stiff wing-like structures running their length.  Over the days of sitting, the frozen ground began to soften and open the wet, musty scent of decomposing vegetation.  The brown mass on the forest floor began to distinguish itself into the distinctly shaped leaves of the varied tree canopy overhead, of elms and maples and beech. As the weeks moved the backwoods into March, the hopelessly dull tips of what I still remember later identifying as the winged bark euonymus, began to balloon out ever so slightly.  The regular watching let me see, a few days later, a hint of color in those tips, and their swelling soon into the plumpness of buds. 

And then the lesson from the insect world.

I went on to become a cultural anthropologist, living with and learning from people in several places around the world, a Pacific island village and a number of former war zones elsewhere. I watched and listened and asked questions and was astonished each time I encountered the miracle of another, unimagined world. 

I don’t remember the teacher’s name, except that it started with Miss.  Would that I could retrieve it, search for her in the cyberworld and tell her that, from the ground up, she shaped a life.

BIO: I am a retired cultural anthropologist with a number of books of non-fiction (e.g. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Beacon Press), Reading National Geographic (University of Chicago Press), Unnatural Emotions (University of Chicago Press), Schooled: Ordinary Extraordinary Teaching in a Time of Change (Teacher's College Press). Each of these books won an award, and I am also the recipient of several national awards including a Guggenheim, National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship.