I can’t say I’ve ever seen a real, live example of the spotted tussock moth, Lophocampa maculata.
From its pictures, it looks kind of like an aerial photograph of Sir Elton John taking the stage for a concert — long flowing sandy-brown cape and train, feathery white collar and headdress — if Elton John was about four and a half centimetres across.
Oh, and a moth.
But the caterpillar that becomes that moth? I know that one well. We used to call it a woolly bear, and honestly, if there was ever a thing that couldn’t care less about camouflage, this was the creature.
It’s ridiculously fuzzy, black on both ends and bright yellow in the middle, with a row of black spots running down the middle of its back. A handful of stray, longer white hairs poke out at both ends, making their presence known the way that, pretty regularly, straggly white hairs poke through an older man’s eyebrows.
More than anything, though, the caterpillar just looks like it doesn’t belong.
There was light rain misting down, the smell of early fall rot rich and full and rising up from the ground in waves.
Being so obvious, and so painfully slow, meant that it was a favourite for catching and putting into an old mayonnaise jar with a handful of leaves, in the usually vain hope that it would cocoon up and reappear as a moth. Months later, leaves shrivelled, cocoon forgotten, the jar would join the legion of things-someone-else-later-has-to-throw-out.
But back to the now.
Last weekend, working outdoors, I went to the shed to get a shovel. There was light rain misting down, the smell of early fall rot rich and full and rising up from the ground in waves. The fireweed had gone to tufting seed, and the dogberries to scarlet orange. The grass had reached the point where it’s tired of growing for the year, and the mower’s resting until spring.
And there, just below the doorknob, was a woolly bear. It wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t even making that head-back-and-forth questing movement that caterpillars sometimes do. It was looking like fuzzy neon against the white-painted shed door.
Take the lid off the big propane cylinder to check if you need a fill-up, and a terror of earwigs will explode out in all directions, travelling with their soft brown curling, jittering, disgusting gait. But the caterpillar? It doesn’t give a damn.
Jar up a big loose rock while you’re trying to make sure you’ve gotten every single one of this year’s potatoes? A repulsion of sowbeetles/woodlice/carpenters/builderboats (all the same thing, actually, those grey-backed paddle-legged gill-breathing modern trilobites) will shiver off in all directions looking for some dark wet.
Not the caterpillar.
I came back an hour later, swapped shovel for saw so I could start breaking down old spruce fenceposts for firewood.
Caterpillar was still there, not a care in the world. No closer to the doorknob, no further away.
It’s funny how, as you grow older and older, you can lose that supreme confidence that you once had in yourself. As the illness roulette starts to pick off or mark up those around you, as the field of options narrows, as parents and older friends pass away, it’s harder and harder to keep your face forward into the wind.
Turned down for an opportunity, you used to say “another one will come along,” not “why even bother?”
Put the saw away, sweat prickling along my arms and neck, latched the door for the night and saw that the caterpillar was gone. Completely.
Was I worried about what had happened?
No.
It had just gone somewhere else to continue being exactly 100 per cent itself.
Amazing.
Fifty-plus years in, and I’m aspiring to be a caterpillar.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
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