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September 3, 2007

The Blue Wasp

The Blue Wasp
Thaddeus Barsotti
September 3, 2007

It was the dead of the afternoon and over one hundred degrees out. I was walking along the road that separates the creek and riparian area from my field of fennel. In the middle of my stride the movement and sound made by a huge blue insect taking off from the ground in front of me stopped me in my tracks. Stepping back I realized the insect was in the middle of a project and I had disturbed it.

The insect had taken flight from the entrance of a fairly large tunnel that had been buried into the ground. At the entrance of the tunnel was a full-grown black cricket. I leaned forward to take a closer look and saw that the cricket was alive, its antennas were moving back and forth, but it lay motionless. The black cricket was either paralyzed or drugged as a result of losing a battle with the blue insect, which was buzzing in the background waiting for me to leave its prey be.

I took a few steps back and watched the blue insect enter a flight pattern back towards the cricket. I could not tell what kind of insect it was until it landed about eight inches away from the cricket, where I could finally get a good look at it. It was a wasp of some type; one that I had never seen before in my life and it was built like a fighter jet. The wasp was about the size of a pen cap and its pointed body was a shiny, metallic, aqua blue color. The wasp stood out like a precious gem in the dry, powdered dirt of the entrance to the tunnel. After landing, the wasp flickered its wings a few times, took a calculated look around and briefly surveyed the surroundings before returning to its mission - which still lay motionless.

The cricket, which was larger of the two, didn’t even flinch when the blue wasp mounted it. Without hesitation, the wasp grabbed onto its prey with its legs and used its wings to drag the cricket along the ground. I was amazed at how fast the wasp could move the dead weight of the cricket. The wasp quickly dragged the cricket across the road, into a patch of grass, where I could no longer see it. At this point I figured the wasp was going to stay there, hiding its catch from me. A second later the wasp emerged from the other end of the grass clump still dragging the cricket at the same speed it entered the grass clump with. It was obvious that the wasp had a destination in mind and I was nothing more than a brief distraction in the journey.

I stood motionless, catching glimpses of the bright blue wasp as it moved through the golden dry grass. An eerie feeling came over me as I contemplated a world where a predator smaller than me could fly into my home, paralyze me with a sting or bite and then proceed to drag my motionless body over the course of a football field at a steady speed, without resting, towards a destination at which I would undoubtedly become food for it, or worse the eggs it laid into me. I couldn’t help but to be extremely fascinated with the wasp while being glad that I wasn’t a cricket.

As I walked back to the house I thought of my grandfather, Martin McRae Barnes, who passed away earlier this year. He was a professor of entomology at UC Riverside and he would have really got a kick out of my experience or letting me tell him about it. After his funeral my dad told us a story about a beetle that was in his home. My dad took the beetle out of the house and it would fly right back into the house, like it didn’t want to leave. After a couple of times of taking the beetle outside and having it return into the house, my dad realized that this beetle was in some way his dad coming back to let him know he was still with him.

I think that when people we are close to leave our mortal world, they are not really gone - they have only changed the form in which they exist with us in this world. I can’t tell you if my fascination with that wasp was my grandfather in me; or if the fact that the wasp was even there for me to witness was my grandfather in my world. But, like my father when the beetle would not leave his home, I felt my grandfather’s presence.

Enjoy your boxes this week - Thaddeus

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