Crawlers

Crawlers



I stand peering through my kitchen window at the abominations crawling, ceaselessly crawling, back and forth, up and down, mindlessly crawling over any surface where their tiny, sticky feet can find purchase.

Tent Caterpillars.  Some call them Bag Worms, but of course, they are not worms.  There is a scientific name for them, Malacos something or other.  It doesn’t matter.  By any name, I hate them.

I’ve always hated them.  Even as a kid, I despised them.  My Dad said they wouldn’t hurt me.  Straighten up and act like a man he told me.  I knew, even then, that they wouldn’t bite or sting or were in any way physically harmful, but still I hated the creepy crawling larvae with their fuzzy bodies and their filthy little feet.  I hated the looks of them.  I hated them crawling up my pant leg or under my shirt where some would wind up being squashed, leaving their slimy green-yellow insides plastered across a portion of my outside.  I hated the feel of their sticky feet and stiff furry bristles tickling and scratching at the back of my neck.

What purpose could they serve?  By mid April the tents appear, suspended in the trees looking like off-white cotton candy until closer inspection reveals the writhing corruption concealed within.  They move in and out of the tent feeding on the newly formed tree leaves until, fully gorged, they drop to the ground to begin their crawling.  Crawling along on my sidewalks, on my patio, on my roof, up and down and over my house.  Crawling.

Food?  Even when there were birds, birds wouldn’t eat them.  Nothing will eat them except maybe ants.  I don’t know.  I’ve seen ants trying to drag away dead caterpillar carcasses but I can’t guess what their plans might have been.  Tent Caterpillars strip the trees, they reproduce, and they die, in a never-ending cycle of purposelessness. As far as I can see, Tent Caterpillars have no place, yet they survive.  I hate them.

Through my window I see them crawling over my patio furniture, my things, my belongings.  How many?  Hundreds?  Thousands?  If I could, I would go out and kill them all.

I know I can’t.  There are far more dangerous things than these caterpillars lurking outside.  In three weeks those not eviscerated by means of their oblivious circuitousness will wind up in cocoons of their own making and a few weeks after that emerge as almost equally loathsome, ugly, brownish-red moths.  I hate them, but I have not quite reached the point that my hatred has turned to reckless insanity.  This morning, I saw, before the sunshine drove them into hiding, a small swarm of mosquitoes, maybe fifty or sixty.  I dare not leave the safety of these walls.

The planes no longer fly across the land dispensing their blue death.  A last gasp effort I suppose, but how could they really have had any expectation of defeating an enemy whose numbers are in the countless trillions.  It is of little satisfaction to know that the mosquitoes will eventually do by means of their own gluttony what we could not do using our best but still inadequate technology.

An ecological disaster the scientists called it.  Was it the acid rains?  Was it the attempt to correct the damage done to the environment?  Did raising the air’s oxygen content do it?  There were plenty of theories about how it came to be, but never a solution.

I have my own theory, certainly not scientific, but, then, there are so few of us left I don’t think it would be widely disputed.  I think we, arrogant in our claim of superiority, have failed, just as the dinosaurs failed, to prove we deserve to be the masters of the earth.  We’ve failed miserably and now it’s something else’s turn.

What happened?  Why have the insects grown to such humongous proportions?  Even those who thought they knew the answer couldn’t make a difference.  It is no longer important.  It no longer matters.  There is nothing left but acceptance that our time is nearing its end.

The birds are gone.  The deer are gone.  The rabbits are gone.  The goats, cows, horses, cats, dogs…all gone.  Even the fish and mammals of the sea are disappearing.  And soon…Man.

Last winter I gathered every bit of food I could find.  It is a pitiful store but possibly I’ll last through this summer and fall, imprisoned in brick, steel and glass, looking through my window at a world gone mad.

I stand at my kitchen window, watching the caterpillars, crawling, this way, that way, up and down, constantly crawling.  Not the two-inch creatures of my youth but these six-foot monsters our world has created.  My guts are churning and I wonder about those supposedly beneficial or at the least benevolent bacteria, are they now the size of wheat grains?  Is it only my hunger I feel or perhaps my paranoia at the thought of these things thrashing about in my intestines?  While I contemplate my own end, beyond the walls of my prison, the caterpillars crawl mindlessly to their destiny.  What irony, I think, that these may be the inheritors of the earth.