Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Small Mercies

103 Small Mercies Between the Space Needle and Puget Sound, among tree ferns and bromeliads, we watched scads of neotropical longwings, massive blue morphos and banana-sucking owls, little scarlet-and-black swallowtails, aqua-neon preponas, and key-lime-and-opal malachites. My wife, Thea, was about to have surgery, and these were the images she wanted to carry with her into the fog of anesthesia. The butterfly house at the Pacific Science Center is a typical butterfly conservatory,where tropical conditions prevail under glass as in aVictorian hothouse, allowing one to walk among exotic species during the northern winter.Immensely popular,butterfly houses have sprung up in many cities. Children on school break thronged this one.All visitors had been cautioned on the way in not to pick up the butterflies, and especially not to step on any that may have alighted on the paths.But one little lad who hadn’t quite gotten the message spotted a zebra longwing at his feet, and drew up his sneaker-clad foot to stomp it good. Happily, his mom stopped him just in time, and gently informed him that you don’t tromp on the butterflies in a butterfly house. Where did that child get the impulse to crush? There is always plenty of entomophobia going around, but most kids have a native fascination with bugs.To just up and smush it like that, you’d think he must have had a pretty direct example. Some parents off every interloping insect, setting a destructive pattern, though obviously not that watchful mom. Maybe the misguided tyke had an evil babysitter with a particular vendetta against insects? Later I picked up a Seattle Times.When I’m in the city I try to see it, if only to follow the weird doings of that subtle, rasty cat named Bucky in the comic strip “Get Fuzzy.”To get to Bucky, you must pass the topbilling space on the funnies page, where resides that other cantankerous feline of venerable standing in the comics community ... and there was yet TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 104 another instance of Garfield gleefully smashing a spider with a rolled-up newspaper.The spider says, “You can swat me, but there will be another spider to take my place.” “Very well then,” replies the cat. SMACK! “I’ll renew my newspaper subscription.”As if that wasn’t enough,the next day’s installment showed a spider hanging back, saying, “I’m not coming any closer.” SMACK! “My latest invention,” smirks Garfield. “Magazine on a stick.” Butterflies and spiders are scarcely interchangeable. But a longwing is leggy, and with its wings folded, it might well elicit an aggressive response of the sort usually reserved for unwelcome insects and spiders. I wonder whether that child,or any other readers,may have been inspired to commit random acts of violence toward inoffensive creatures by the misarachnistic behavior of Jim Davis’s famous cartoon kitty.After all,Garfield gets around; from Garfield boxer shorts to suction-cup Garfields in car windows, this puss commands a tremendous sphere of influence. Which takes me back to a recent autumn, traversing the Midwest with a group of writers. Outside Muncie, Indiana, we were cordially received at Jim Davis’s farm and compound.The cartoonist was not actually present, but his staff showed us various progressive,conservation-minded features of the place: a state-of-the-art biosewage treatment system, where wastewater was processed by wetland plants to remove impurities and bacteria and return clean water and valuable nutrients to the ecosystem; and a prairie restoration program, remodeling farmed-out weedy fields into a more natural state. The autumn fields bore rich raiment of purple asters and yellow goldenrod, nectaring thirteen species of butterflies—a lot for so late in the year. No morphos or malachites, but meadow fritillaries, orange sulphurs, and eastern tailed blues flashed over the meadow. No wonder we left the region regarding Garfield’s dad as a sensitive environmental innovator. Hence my confusion whenever the spidey-smashing panels appear—which is at least as often as the snake-smashing sequences in “B.C.” (Johnny Hart, this goes for you, too!) Now some may say that this is just cartoon violence,likeWile E.Coyote getting bonked,blown up,or flattened.Maybe;and maybe kids and parents 105 Small Mercies are smart enough to realize this, and to recognize irony. But there is no...