ALEXANDRIA SEARLS

BALDING AND THE WINDSHIELD

I remember the windshield of the Buick wet and sticky from bugs as we drove, the wipers shoving bodies and wings with each left, right motion. Yellow ooze spread across the glass; we crashed into another swarm as we sped along the highway. Black limbs were smeared and removed to the side.

I was a child, a girl, who stared from the passenger seat; my grandfather drove, steady and sure. Usually I sat in the back, but my grandmother had stayed at home, and so we were heading somewhere without her, somewhere I’ve forgotten, and I could see the insects up-close, their lost antennae in the pulp. I looked and I didn’t look.

It was the early 1970’s in Sarasota. We travelled the flat road, and a bug hit that I didn’t recognize, one with a cocoon for a torso and the thinnest of legs. Impact. Slide. Gone.

Gone, but the fear of its form still moved over me, along my stomach, within a grimace.

*

Another day, and I had returned to the backseat. My grandmother muttered when a truck passed, afraid of the metal wall.

I could still see the blurring veil of insects, spread in a fan by the wipers, cleared with a spray of windshield wiper fluid. I didn’t know that the shiny blue fluid was poison in disguise, containing methanol and antifreeze. Back then, no one called it poison. It was what you used, how you could see. It was good.

Why was I afraid of so many insects? There was the idea that you couldn’t communicate with them, not like you could with mammals. Insects were beyond influence, except through poison and wipers and smacks from your hand. Your own blood oozed from the mosquito.

They could be angry but they couldn’t love, that’s how they seemed then.

Now I see butterflies flitter around each other, I hear crickets sing, and I am not sure of the ideas of the past, those unarticulated ideas, resembling unconscious impressions more than examined sentences. I didn’t understand, and I still don’t.

*

Gradually, so gradually that I didn’t notice, the number of insects in Florida, and along the East Coast, decreased. Sometime in my 50’s, I recalled that insects used to splatter on the windshield. Now the windshield remained clean.

Life had decreased in other places, too. In my 20’s I had gone snorkeling and scuba diving in the Caribbean, peering at the beauty of the fish among the corals. In my 50’s, I returned, and the coral was diminished, and the great schools of colorful fish had dwindled down to a few of each species.

In my sixties, not so long after the other observations, I also noticed that my hair had thinned. I found a photo from ten years prior; there was a balding spot at my hairline. My full mane had disappeared even before that photo, but I hadn’t seen or felt the difference. Now I bought tonics. I ate collagen. Eventually I came to accept the thinning, for the time being anyway. I had other things on my mind. But I didn’t want the world to thin along with me. And it had.

My heart felt like cracking; the windshield had not cracked.

I pictured myself in bed, dying. I longed to die in a world gaining more life—animal life, plant life.

The enlarged part over my skull, the spaces that white hair leaves empty, they were the signs of life winding down.

‘Please world, don’t thin along with me,’ I murmured.

Alexandria Searls is the director of the Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center in Virginia, where she leads nature observation classes and films and photographs insects. The crane fly is one of her favorites. She has recently been published in Progenitor Magazine and Cagibi.