Field Guides are Lenses

Field guides are lenses. By directing and broadening vision, they increase appreciation and provoke thought. They can even determine the course of a life. Had Caterpillars of Eastern North America dropped from a Christmas tree during my first instar, I suspect I would have molted into a creature different from the bookworm and literary gadfly I became. I spent childhood summers on my grandfather's farm in Virginia. During nights I read the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. During days I roamed pasture and wood catching and studying creepers and crawlers. The only guide in Grandfather's study described the diseases of cattle. As a result my scrutiny of insects never progressed beyond astonishment. In any case summer's lease was always short, and in August I migrated back to Nashville and an apartment on West End Avenue. In Nashville books were easy to come by; bugs were difficult, even though I explored alleys, peering into backyard gardens, hoping to discover spiders, particularly my great love, the black-and-yellow Argiope.

For adults whom the racket of television and the internet has reduced to melancholy, field guides can be therapeutic. Opening a guide is comparable to stepping through the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. Beyond the title page lie fabulous unimagined and unimaginable worlds. For ramblers, especially that genus known as nature writer, guides are essential. Not only do guides blaze trials for writers to follow, but, like markers beside paths, they determine what and how writers see, thus becoming unacknowledged foundations supporting signatures of verbs and nouns. Two nights ago Vicki made fish chowder. Dinner was late, so I wandered the side meadow below the kitchen porch. That afternoon I'd finished reading Caterpillars of Eastern North America. I should have stayed inside and started this review, but David Wagner's book has a magical levitating power, and almost without thinking, I was outside, my fingers wrapping a lens.

On a red maple I discovered two Saddled Prominents, caterpillars I had not seen previously, a sight almost as rich as Vicki's chowder, thick with haddock, lobster, and scallops. The insects were minute, one green, the other reddish, white spilling down their backs like melted marshmallows, the edges of the saddles brown, seared like the sides of marshmallows held low over a fire. Before sitting down to dinner, I saw a feast of caterpillars: White Spring Moth on mountain ash; Fall Web Worms on alder; and White-Marked Tussocks on almost every shrub. I could not identify the caterpillar of a dagger moth I found on both bay and wild raisin. Perhaps it was an early instar of the Impressive Dagger. The caterpillar's body was black and velvety, and yellowish hair (setae) burst from it in tufts. Its spiracles were white—these being openings along the insect's abdomen that allow it to breathe. Below the holes the caterpillar's body puffed out into a rack of red warts looking like purses.

Field guides curb appetites and transform the harassed husband into that sane creature, the dawdler. Alas, the first words Vicki said on my appearing in the kitchen were more pointed than the soft nothings of a blessing. When she first called me, I was looking at a clutch of eggs on a willow leaf, sixteen tiny eggs deposited in a U. The eggs resembled amphora. Circling the brim of each egg was a silvery wheel, fourteen spikes jutting out from each hub. I don't know what insect laid the eggs, but I am going to watch them closely in hopes of finding out. The prospect excites me. How odd that things so small, so ostensibly removed from life as depicted on screens, can fill a day, making interest sizzle.

Guides have an ancient history, some of their pages fabulous and fictional, decorated with sketches of the cockatrice and griffon, for example. Other pages have been utilitarian, for instance, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century herbals, which incidentally make fine evening reading, seeding dreams with words...