These days, when a soft west or southwest wind blows and it is truly warm, and an outside coat is oppressive, — these bring out the butterflies and the frogs, and the marsh hawks, which prey upon the last. Just so simple is every year.” Thoreau, Journal, 4/5/54
Back from today’s run, I set to the dull-but-necessary stretching, and, while bent variously, I see motion where there’s usually none. It is tiny motion, to be sure, but on vision’s periphery, where the laces of my shoe cross, binding me in, something’s stirring. “Ah,” says my hoppy mind, glad for any distraction from the stasis of stretch-and-hold.
The motion bunches, then reaches and a new season begins – I have spring’s first green rider, who must have hitched this ride somewhere back in the woods. And, given that my rider’s on my shoe and lime-colored, not long ago it must have been grazing on a blade of trailside grass. But now, on this charcoal-colored expanse, it is obvious, a magnet for whatever eye is aloft.
Shoe with rider
Later in the season, this little guy’s relatives will be well over an inch long, but this one’s well under the measure of what may be his name. Inchworm? I click into the wires of research.
More names: “measuring worms, spanworms, loopers,” that’s reason enough for research. Then there’s motion’s method: “An inchworm moves by drawing its hind end forward while holding on with the front legs, then advancing its front section while holding on with the prolegs.” Prolegs? Do I have any of those? Sounds like a trademark. I look at my one-after-the-other feet. My green rider appears to be waving as he searches for a way down off the raised lace of mid-shoe.
Reaching, waving…there must be food out there somewhere; got to keep at it. By now – you probably agree – I have overstretched.
So it’s time for the green-rider-ritual: I stand and walk carefully over to the nearest weed, a dandelion this time, and I pluck a leaf, which I then place in the path of my rider. He reaches out, touches the leaf’s edge, but I am vibrating a bit, and, suspicious of the shaky world, he pulls back, heads off 90-degrees away. I shift the leaf to his path again. What an odd world where a leaf recurs in each direction? Well, he must think, nothing to do but get on board, and he loops up and on.
Now, following reason’s path, I go to the grass at lawn’s border and settle the rider’s leaf in it. A couple of loops take him off-ship, into a new world. I go back to stretching, back the linear track of today.
But now, as I coax flex into my muscles, I’m thinking about metamorphosis: if all goes as it should for the little green rider, some days in the future, he’ll give up looping, inching along and fly away. He is a moth-in-the-making.
And, if all goes well for me, I, a runner-in-the-making, will return to the trails tomorrow for the closest motion to flight I know.