I have always loved bugs, spiders, newts, salamanders, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also birds and mammals—humans are iffy. I think it helped that my dad was a scientist. He lived with us for the first 6 years of my life, and during our many jaunts into nature, I learned to investigate and engage all of these critters without fear.
My dad had an immense roll top desk filled with all things natural. Cubbies and wooden boxes erupting with shells, fossils, seed pods and rocks. My favorite thing was a giant 3½-inch potato bug floating in a 4½-inch bottle of formaldehyde. When it was my turn to hold it, I had to stay right by the desk and stand very still. Something about “busy little fingers” and “deadly poison.” Anyway, I remember feeling slightly resentful. I wanted to take it everywhere with me, but Mr. Potato Bug lived inside my dad’s desk, something to ooh and ah over, a sacred object.
By the age of 1 1/2, I had decided that when I was outside, anything of interest would be on the ground, usually underneath something else. There are dozens of photos of me at that stage, wearing springy little floral frocks, bent completely over. Thank God those lacy diaper cover-ups were all the rage in the 1960’s. Dad took us on nature hikes, usually up to Tilden Park. My trouble was I just didn’t have the muscle to turn over objects like logs and rocks, which is where the wild things dwelt. So I used two words I had recently learned—probably at Christmas—and getting my father’s attention, I would point to various objects and order: “OPEN IT!”
The results were amazing.
Hidden worlds appeared before my eyes. Live creatures nestled amid the flotsam of leaves, sticks and dirt. Orange centipedes, blue-bellied lizards, roly-poly beetles, chocolate brown salamanders, all leading secret lives right along side of us! I learned which things could be picked up, and which could only be watched. I learned that any rock or log that was moved must be carefully lowered back in place. I learned never to curl my hands underneath the object I was turning over. This lesson was brought home when at the age of two, I rolled over a rock that housed a large scorpion, and dad realized I could’ve been stung. I was stung by the strength of his anger, but in retrospect I understand. Consequently, I was able to pass his wisdom on to my own daughter in a gentler fashion.
Last week when my daughter was home from college, we took a walk in Briones Open Space. Climbing over (or in my case under) a barbed wire fence, we wandered through an abandoned walnut orchard strewn with fallen branches. As we quietly turned them over, I was a child again. We discovered huge red-bellied newts, a baby ring-necked snake, a striped skink, a potato bug (of course!) and a fluffy little Field Mouse. Together we carefully put each “top” back on these magical hidey-holes teeming with live treasures. Leaving behind what, to the rest of the world, looked like a field full of dying trees.
