SAGEBRUSH APE Desert moth Thyridopteryx meadi.

Thursday, February 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Sagebrush Ape: Her indoors

By Heidi Walters

I threw a book away once. Not away into a bag destined for the thrift store, but away into the garbage along with the other unpalatables and empty nothings. I know, it was wrong and ignorant to do such a thing, and maybe you're thinking next I'll be re-enacting Fahrenheit 451 and burning piles of books just because they offend me in some way or threaten my safe little world.

Don't worry, I won't do it again. Books--ideas--are sacred and all that. But still, it felt good. And it was payback for having been utterly betrayed by an icon of wilderness lore. I'm talking about Euell Gibbons, respected naturalist and "father of wild foods" who later in life became famous for his hickory-and-pine trees Post Grape Nuts TV commercial. My sisters and I used to jeer at him when his spot came on and, sometimes, flick pudding from our spoons at the TV screen. But, secretly, I liked Euell.

So then I grew up. And awhile ago I was in Albion Books when that familiar name leaped out at me. Euell Gibbons! I bought it. It was the Beachcombers Handbook, in which he told all about how to live off what you find at the beach, how to cook what you scavenge and catch and trap, how to explore and relax. Then I got to the part "on women" in this wilderness adventure. He didn't recommend it. He said women were a distraction, that they would detract from the man's experience of living in the wild, that they would befuddle the man's mind with their darned sexuality and that they would demand the man forego sleeping in the sand to build a real house with a full-service kitchen and frilly curtains on the windows. Or something like that.

So, as soon as it was made starkly clear that Euell was not talking to me about this cool life of living off the land, but in fact was telling me to Stay Out--like the proverbial stupid boys in their treehouse--I tossed him in with the banana peels and wet coffee grounds. Because, back when he was writing that book, my sisters and I were spending lots of time in the wild outdoors eating berries and pinenuts and trout and clams and enjoying it plenty. And there was Euell, sitting in his comfy study, telling us we didn't belong out there. You could argue that he was of another generation (he was born in 1911), when men were the outdoor adventurers. But that doesn't hold water: John Muir himself wrote generously about how he loved those "mountain women" he'd run into occasionally in the Sierra.

But, sad to say--and not big news to anyone, obviously--this boys-only mentality has undeniable precedent. In England there's a common nickname for the wife: "her indoors." My British brother-in-law, perhaps more in jest, says it--as in, "We'll have to check with 'er indoors."

And in nature, in the Mojave, happening right now under our noses as we tatter on about equality, there's a creature called the creosote bagworm whose females spend their entire lives inside a conical, long structure dangling from a creosote branch. I discovered this creature one day when I was walking up a dirt road out of Blue Diamond. Next to a large boulder, I paused and stared idly into a big creosote. And then I saw this thing, this tapered tan cocoon-like thing hanging from a branch. It was camouflaged with plastered-on tiny creosote leaves and a bristling array of short, tan, skinny sticks that had been stuck on perfectly symmetrically all around it. There appeared to be a potential opening at the bottom tip of it. It was beautiful.

After that, I walked frequently up that road to check on it. And for two years, that dry pendant clung to the branch. Then, last fall as the drought burned on and plants dropped most of their leaves and turned crunch-rusty, the cocoon disappeared.

Meanwhile, a friend researched it and found that my conical-bag architect was a type of desert moth called a creosote bagworm. Apparently, in the spring, baby bagworm larvae exit their home bag and start building their own silk-and-leaves cocoons, then stick their head and legs out and crawl around eating more leaves. In the summer, the mature larvae snag their bags to branches, seal them and over the next month transform into adult moths. Male moths ditch the bag. Female moths, who don't grow wings, stay inside. Male moths flit around seeking female moths in their bags, impregnate them and flit off. Female moths lay eggs and eventually die inside the bag.

Well, let fly with those "ain't it just like a man" diatribes. Hard to resist. But who am I to affix human emotion to another species? Nature, at best, provides a confusing metaphor for how to live a life. We run into danger enough when we try to tell other humans how to live and how to treat their women--though I think we can feel justified in intervening on behalf of basic human rights. But it would be odd to tell the bagworm how to live.

Right about now, with spring at hand, the creosote bushes are glistening. Soon, the male bagworm will plaster himself into a funnel of sticky leaves and decorate it with a pretty array of sticks. The female, likewise, will shut herself in, leaf by sticky leaf, knowing full well that once she's in, she will never come out.

And, walking by, I will stop, admire her pretty house, shudder at the thought of missing all this blue sky, then walk on.