On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, page 9
Kalman’s movements and behavior also highlighted, however inadvertently, the multiple claims to space in a city. Cities are filled with a variety of private and public spaces, spaces one can enter and spaces one must be invited into. In the latter case, an open door may be the only sign that the public is invited in (but owners reserve the right to take a look at you and boot you back out). At times the dividing line is non-obvious, but most urban residents instinctively mind these boundaries and do not cross into private space. City sidewalks present a great confusion of private and public: they are generally public space, which means they are owned by the city—which in turn means that anyone who wants to plant his stake on the sidewalk must pay the city and get a permit. With municipal permission, a restaurant, under private ownership, can take over a portion of the sidewalk for outdoor seating. The newspaper stands pay for the right to appear on the sidewalk, as do food carts and other vendors. Should you just want to walk and speak loudly, declaring your protest of this or that, or should you want to display art or be art on a public sidewalk, you need a permit. But sidewalks are also the responsibility of the abutting building’s owner. These owners must repair, clean, shovel, and generally maintain the sidewalks in front of their buildings—but they are not “theirs.”
Urban buildings, by contrast, are generally private spaces, often owned by one party (a landlord or corporation) and leased by another (a tenant). In buildings owned by cooperatives, the corporation owns all the space up to the rooms themselves, including the interior of the walls. In New York City, there are also “privately owned public spaces,” which developers create and maintain in exchange for the right to build taller buildings.
What struck me about Kalman was that she moved through all the spaces with ease. Had she opened a mailbox on the street (federal space) and lifted out a letter, I would not have been surprised. Sure, she didn’t climb any walls, but her ability to transcend the social and cultural knowledge of where one is allowed to go felt like a superpower.
• • •
Is there something about Kalman’s brain that leads her to see more possibilities on the street than I do? Simply put, yes. Neuroscientists are just beginning to put together a picture of what exactly it might be. The difference is not simple, nor is there a canonical “creative brain” that can be spotted from the outside, as if using a phrenologist’s chart to identify the bumps of a creative person’s skull. One research team, though, reported a correspondence between the brains of those who seem to be especially creative thinkers. Certain people, they found, have fewer of one kind of dopamine receptor in the thalamus of the brain. These people also performed well on tests of “divergent thinking,” in which people are asked to concoct more and more elaborate uses for ordinary objects, for instance. The reduction in receptors might actually increase information flow to various parts of the brain, essentially allowing them to think up new and interesting solutions. “Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” the researchers wrote.
Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them. With that in mind, Kalman and I approached a streetlight. I cannot say I had ever approached a streetlight before with such anticipation. I had walked by streetlights, run into streetlights (then cursed streetlights), watched my dog spend precious minutes smelling the urine on their bases. You have seen these lights in your city. Indeed, in New York there are two or three on each side along every city block . . . wait, have you really seen them? Yes, of course I have, you say to me impatiently. And so you have. So you know that the most common streetlight typically extends from a pole that is round or octagonal—not rectangular—or is hooked like an inverted J; that the legs of these poles are thirty feet tall, more than three times as long as the arm holding the cobra-headed lamp; that there are white and yellow sodium lightbulbs (and that we feel calmer under the yellow), which are typically one of two streetlighting wattages; that there are a variety of possible pole bases, none of which is entirely impervious to dog urine. But you are getting restless, I see, since you have seen streetlights, and you know about them already.
This streetlight pole was festooned. Someone had decorated it with a few half-hearted flyers, attached at eye height with serious packing tape. An advertisement for clarinet lessons stopped Kalman in her tracks. The bottom edge of the paper was cut into strips cut and bent hopefully for easy grabbing by clarinet-interested passersby. Kalman grabbed one. She had begun to learn the clarinet the previous year, she revealed, as part of a project for a class she teaches at the School of Visual Arts. For her curriculum, everyone was tasked with learning a new instrument, then taking a walk by themselves, writing down “what was going on in their minds,” Kalman mused, looking at the wee bit of paper in her hand. “Then one of the students took all of the texts that they wrote and made them lyrics for a song using all the musical instruments.” They were to perform the music on the street but kept being thwarted by the weather. She sighed. “So we never performed it out on the street where it was meant to be; it was meant to be walking music.”
We left the flyer otherwise intact, its strips fluttering in the breeze. I did briefly consider taking up the clarinet. I could hear someone practicing piano awfully through an open first-floor window. We walked down the street to this music. The street provided the accompaniment.
* * *
1 Though she does have more ladders than one would ordinarily expect of an apartment dweller, and is drawn to rubber bands . . .
2 And so I try it! horowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitz. . . and my last name becomes a pulsing, throbbing vowel-crushing machine.
3 It’s not you, alas: any egg shape with eye shapes within it that you show to an infant will elicit coos and smiles of delight.
ANIMATE CITY:
Everything That Won’t Stand Still
“’Tis very pregnant,
The jewel that we find, we stoop and take’t
Because we see it; but what we do not see
We tread upon, and never think of it.”
(Shakespeare)
Flipping Things Over
“A wooly caterpillar, his head crowned with four fearsome green horns, moved lazily on the first step, heading nowhere good for caterpillars.”
If you do not get excited about finding a blowfly paralyzed by a parasitic fungus on the bottom curl of a leaf tip, or upon spotting the globular, smooth-edged holes in a leaf that are the characteristic sign of a munching tortoise beetle, then perhaps a walk around your block with Charley Eiseman is not a good idea. But for anyone who as a child marveled at the metamorphosis of a homely caterpillar into an iridescent butterfly, or who has admired the tenacity of a slug or snail assiduously consuming their tomato plants, this sort of walk will open your eyes to the unnoticed population underfoot, overhead, and, alarmingly, onbody.
It is time to consider the bugs.
Even when you see no bugs before you, even when the ground looks still and the air looks clear, they are there. Millions upon millions of bugs. And there are even more signs of bugs past: on vegetation; in leaves and bark; in characteristic leavings; in egg sacs, cocoons, spent exoskeletons, and built structures; on brick, dirt, clay, and on your own skin. Their ubiquity does not make them inherently interesting, of course. In fact, as a culture we tend to value the rare over the common, in our sensibilities and in our policies. We mourn the passenger pigeon, hunted out of existence a century ago, but vilify the pigeon on every city street; we keep bunnies and mice as pets yet kill rabbits and mice not born in pet stores. Of course, there are hundreds of rare—federally named as endangered—insects: the “superb” grasshopper; eleven pomace fly species; assorted weevils, ants, beetles, and midges. But the prevalence of bugs (or, better, Arthropoda—true insects, arachnids, and otherwise) only highlights our obliviousness to them . . . most of the time: we certainly notice when a cockroach darts across our dinner table or when a male mosquito, covering for his bloodthirsty mate, buzzes in our ear.
The insects’ advocate is Charley Eiseman, a young man with a calm manner and a trim beard befitting the naturalist that he is. Though I had not met him before, he proved easy to spot: wearing a plainly genuine expression and a flannel shirt on a sixty-degree day, he stood out among city folk. Eiseman has the quiet footfalls and unassuming presence often found in native New Englanders. He smiled broadly in greeting, but he also looked at me a bit like he was trying to determine what kind of insect I was.
A field naturalist by training, Eiseman confessed to having an overweening sensitivity to all living things. While working out of doors teaching tracking classes and conducting salamander surveys, he began noticing “little mystery objects”—the spoor and leavings of insects and other invertebrates. Wanting to have a field guide to these tracks, and finding none, he and his friend Noah Charney set off on a fifteen-thousand-mile, forty-day journey to document evidence of invertebrates—what is called sign—in all the major ecotypes in North America. The result of their travels and research was Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. The book is a marvel: a rollicking, seemingly plumbless guide to the innumerable indicators that insects leave of their presence.
Eiseman met me on an early-September afternoon in a parking lot in Springfield, Massachusetts, an industrial city that never had an urban reincarnation and is very unpromising for walking, as far as I was concerned. But it was near Eiseman’s hometown, which is not urban at all, so this was where we converged. I asked that we meet in a parking lot on the strength of a mention in his book. In the introduction, Eiseman writes that he and Noah stopped on their invertebrate tour to visit Noah’s mother in Tennessee. Five hours after they said their good-byes, Noah’s mother left her house to find the fellows still in the driveway. Turning over sugar maple leaves and flipping logs, they had found enough insect sign to postpone, for the time being, their trip to the “wilderness” where real nature was to be found.
I was secretly hoping that we would not make it out of the parking lot ourselves. If a driveway holds an ecosystem, what of a parking lot? Perchance a universe. Sure enough, we were barely ten seconds into our walk before he spotted a few beautiful orb weaver webs, followed by a handful of funnel webs along a hedgerow at the lot’s edge. He did not know the name of the orb weaver (“An arachnologist might be able to tell you,” he said unhelpfully for those of us having no arachnologist readily available), but here, as throughout our walk, it was clear that the specific naming was not the point. Instead, the fun is the discovery of the thing at all.
The funnel webs turned out to be a repeating motif of our walk. Once we saw one, it was as though they were imprinted on us, and we were unable not to notice another. The characteristic dense white web shows up again and again—at the top of a row of hedges in front yards, along intersecting brick walls. If you look more closely, you will see the titular funnel: a smoothly rendered spout in which, if you are lucky, the spider is hiding, waiting for some walking insect to happen upon her lair and submit to her jaws.
To look at insects up close is to see the hasty cycle of birth, violent killing, and death. Few insects are humanitarians, and even herbivorous insects work great damage to the leaves, buds, grasses, and stems they eat. But Eiseman and I were looking less for insects, and more for the traces of insects past. In following their tiny footsteps, we were forensic insect hunters, looking at the evidence of their criminality they have left in their wake. Insects are messy eaters, like to storm a place and live it up, and rarely clean up after themselves (except those polite larvae that eat their own egg cases). They shed their skin, excrete willy-nilly, plunder and pillage, and move on: the insect equivalent of a mad party with only hastily removed clothing, broken bottles, and other detritus left behind. Positively uncivilized.
I could have loitered over the funnel webs for a while, but Eiseman had darted off. An urban walk with Eiseman is decidedly nonlinear: one minute he is beside you, the next he has veered over to a tree pit, or to a piece of street furniture—a fireplug or lamppost—and is scrutinizing its surface for bugs. We did leave the parking lot, but over the next two and a half hours, we managed to cover but two-thirds of a mile. At that rocketing pace—about a quarter-mile in an hour—we could have been overtaken by nearly all the species we saw on our walk, including some of the larvae. This was a typical pace for Eiseman, who, as a healthy young man, takes about ten hours to complete a five-mile hike, waylaid by logs whose undersides need examining and snakes demanding pursuit. He has spent uncountable hours in a quarter-acre vacant lot in Burlington, Vermont, where he once lived: a few dozen photos for his insect guide came from that single plot.
Over those hours, on the most ordinary of city blocks, we saw nearly all the categories of insect sign mentioned in his book: egg cases (the egg sac of a common house spider along a brick wall); exuviae—a fancy word for the discarded exoskeleton of a fly (a mayfly, attracted to and molting on a streetlight); parasitism (gruesome blowflies overtaken by a paralyzing fungus); droppings (earthworm droppings, a large constituent of what we call “dirt”; jumping spider droppings, black speckles in white dots); webs (“everything has a spiderweb on it,” Eiseman advised); cases (spider “retreats”—structures for temporary spider-hanging-about); leaf mines (the work of the oak-shothole leafminer, whose larvae fashion rounded holes as they eat their way into adulthood); galls (small deformities on a grape plant leaf, inside of which we found uncountable secreted orange aphidlike things); mounds (small hills with burrows in their middle erupting out little brown “sidewalk crack” ants); and even sign on vertebrate (a mosquito bite on my own calf that swelled excessively).
Though this listing belies it, our walk did not start out auspiciously. After the initial web excitement, we headed down a block that looked terrifically dull. Desultory, underwatered sycamore and London plane trees lined the edge of a tired concrete path. Nothing moved; the afternoon was hushed. We were alone on the street, with not even a bored, idle squirrel for company. But Eiseman beelined to the trees and flipped over a leaf.
“This jumped out at me,” he said as I followed him, vexed. What this was was not obvious. He twisted a leaf between his fingers just overhead. I looked up at it: it looked vaguely unhealthy. Then my eyes adjusted, as if coming into a cool, dark room after a summer’s afternoon outside. Suddenly I looked through the leaf—and that was when I began to see what he meant. The green tissue was peppered with black and yellow spots, “the characteristic feeding signs of the sycamore lace bugs,” Eiseman explained. “They don’t make holes; they just suck the green juice out and make it turn yellow.” These lace bugs lived on the underside of the leaf, which, on close examination, was splattered with their excrement—those black spots. Nearly indistinguishable from the excrement was a bevy of nymphs. “They are very beautiful bugs,” he said, pulling down the leaf for my examination, and in the process, raining little nymphs and young adult lace bugs all over his hair and shirt. If I squinted, and suspended disbelief, the adults were indeed almost pretty, their transparent wings crisscrossed with raised and darkened veins.
I considered these little guys while Eiseman regaled me with lace-bug trivia. The bugs are specialists, often preferring just one tree: there are sycamore lace bugs, birch tree lace bugs, and oak lace bugs. They are what is called, sweetly, true bugs: of the large order Hemiptera, which includes all sorts of bugs that do not have chewing mouthparts. Instead, the lace bugs have beaks, and invent creative ways of getting out of eggs. The oak-tree varietal grows up in tiny flip-top egg lids that pop open when they are ready to hatch.
As we moved on, I pointed out the young adult bugs now speckling him. He did a perfunctory brush at his hair and smiled: “It doesn’t matter.” For the rest of the walk a few lace bugs cruised happily on Eiseman’s chest.
As we headed down the sidewalk, every new species of plant we came across became an opportunity: an opportunity for new evidence of an insect. In an ordinary tree pit encircling its featured tree, a few plants at its base, and tree detritus (fallen leaves, twigs, seeds or nuts or seedpod), there might be thousands of bugs and spiders and other things to munch on the bugs or spiders. Soon I was a co-participant in what seemed to be the major investigative strategy of the Searcher for Invertebrate Sign: flipping things over. Flipping-Over behavior marked Eiseman’s approach to most things, “if things aren’t jumping out at you,” he said (and hopefully they’re not). Eiseman was continually turning over leaves, which were often his first approach to a tree. “If you’re looking for an insect specific to a tree,” he suggested, “the leaves are the place to look.” Sure enough, nearly every single tree we passed bore the sign of some bug. Holes were rife. Just as the beginning arborist begins to use a leaf to identify a tree, it is soon clear that the holes of a leaf can be used to identify the hole-maker. In the motley array of trees, tree-pit plants, and wild weeds growing roadside and between sidewalk squares on our walk, we saw a dozen different kinds of leaf holes. Apart from the tortoise beetle and shothole leafminer holes, we saw large ragged holes like those a katydid or grasshopper might leave; punctuative holes that mimicked commas and semicolons; and birch leaves with neat, hole-punch circles, the sign of the aptly named leaf-cutter bee. The bee builds its nest elsewhere, but mines the leaves to make cylindrical cells for her eggs.
