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Sidewalk Battles
The inch-worm (also known as the canker worm) plagued us again this spring. Each year for the past several years they have come just after the elm trees are fully leafed. The worms devour the leaves, stripping trees bare. Streets and sidewalks are littered by the trash. The worms themselves, sated, dangle from the bare limbs on long silken threads. They drop on pets, on people, and, most of them, onto lawns and sidewalks below.
Birds ignore the worms; they appear to have only one natural enemy, but are prey only when in a semi-stupor and are on the ground. The enemy is the tiny “grease” ant – or, rather, a task force of them. One day I watched, enthralled, a series of encounters between ants and worms, a half-dozen death struggles within a yard-long space on a secluded sidewalk.
A “scout” ant, locating a worm, runs off and collects a dozen of its kind. Tentatively, they attack the worm; a quick probe from one side, then the other. Several of the ants ringing the worm advance and clamber over it. The worm stirs and rolls, scattering the ants. They probe again… one, two, then others. They try to “ride” the worm like a steer, but now, aroused, the worm rears, coils, uncoils, throwing ants up to two inches every which way. Seemingly stunned, the ants meander aimlessly for a moment, then rejoin their fellows in the attack.
Slowly, slowly… fifteen, twenty minutes, a half-hour… the worm tires under the ants’ relentless sieges. Is it by design that they patiently work the worm toward the edge of the sidewalk, to the grass? Their attack concentrates on the near side; the worm rolls, coils, uncoils, stretches, and moves inexorably toward the “forest.”
The last inches go more quickly. The ants are in control now. The worm’s movements slow, become more sporadic. The ants are pushing, pulling, moving the near-corpse of a worm to the grass, and finally it tumbles over the edge. The grass and the rubble of the sod floor helps to further immobilize the worm. Now other ants come to the scene. They swarm over the worm.
And a new war party answers the summons of a scout and emerges to begin the assault on still another canker worm on a warming sidewalk.
What’s At Stake in Helping the Family Farmer Prosper
From an ad
In 1896 William Jennings Bryan said it best: “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic, but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
As long as the American farmer can supply our food at a price that allows us to spend the greatest part of our income for our cars and TVs and recreational items, our high standard of living can continue. But, when our farmers can no longer produce our low-cost food, or when they have no economic incentive, or ability to produce this food – truly, again, “the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
The Moon
by W. H. Brovald
II
Anna Dressler was very tired. She had been for several days; sleep, when it came, was too light to do any good. It was for that reason that tonight no gentleman called at her apartment and there was no light in the third-floor bay window jutting over the side street.
Anna had fixed herself a modest supper in her apartment pantry, had eaten there, and stacked the dishes in the cabinet below the sink. Then she turned out all the lights and went to her bedroom where she threw herself across the spread and lay, breathing heavily, for several minutes.
Sleep was far away. She was not trying for it. Night was not her time to sleep.
She sat up on the edge of the bed and muttered about the closeness of the air in the room, the man-smells that had accumulated, the smells of toilet water and powder, mixed and offending her now.
Anna got up and crossed into the parlor, to the tall windows on either side of the bay; she quickly unlocked them and swung them open. She stood there a moment, smelling the freshness of the air coming in, and smiled. It was the first smile she had smiled in a long time. Then she dropped to her knees on the day couch before the bay window, and looked up into the sky.
The moon stood alone in the darkness. The nearest stars were far away, as if deferent to the moon. There were clouds, too, but they were far to either side. Anna smiled again, got to her feet, and with a skip in her step and a tra-la-la on her lips, hurried into the dark bedroom where already, she thought, the fresh air had made its way.
She disrobed, and as she did so she wondered at herself. How long had it been since she had sung to herself or taken a skip or two?
Not since before she came to the city. Not since she’d left home… and Carl. She had promised she’d come back. That’s what she’d told Carl on the eve of her leaving, a night when, as they stood at the front door of her home, the moon had come out and shone down, as it was shining tonight.
She had come to find a career, had spent all she had, had fought for a chance until there was no more fight, and then had given up. Afraid to go back, sick for staying, she had chosen… to stay.
“Why?” she asked herself now, as she put on her finest dress, a soft blue jersey that captured the moonlight as she returned to the living room.
Still humming, still smiling, she suddenly resolved that tomorrow she would see about going back. It would be so good to get home again, to be with Carl.
She dropped onto the couch once more, her pulse pounding with delight. She looked out and up. The smile faded from her lips, the song died in her throat. She had returned just in time to see the clouds overtake the moon, just in time to realize that it had been six long years, and that Carl had long ago stopped writing, stopped caring. And she dropped her head onto her arms and cried.
The clouds patiently gathered force for the final siege…
In Praise of Unreasonable Men
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
Modern Samaritans
(From the Press Associations)
Alabama state trooper Kenyon Lassiter saved the life of Kenneth Roy Barton, 33, after Barton’s pickup truck crashed near Opp, Ala., and he was near death with a severed artery.
Lassiter stopped the bleeding, radioed for an ambulance, and sent him to a nearby hospital.
Fourteen months later, Trooper Lassiter stopped a speeding car only a few miles from the site of the accident over a year before. As he walked back to his car after issuing a ticket, a pickup truck careened across the road, hit and killed Lassiter. The driver did not stop.
But he was apprehended later. It was Kenneth Ray Barton.
* * * *
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kohls of rural Jim Falls, Wis. happened upon a neighbor, Tom Goettl, asleep in his truck along a county road. They roused him and got him on his way. But a few miles later they found Goettl, unhurt, contemplating his truck, ditched.
Kohls pulled the truck out and left Goettl nearly ready to go again. A short time later, the Kohlses stopped to help still another stalled motorist, when Goettl, in his truck, came along and struck Kohls, killing him.
Notes from a Journal
I realized, as I was setting the “Sidewalk Battles” (front page) that I usually sympathize with the underdog. When I watch one of those nature-in-the-raw TV shows, I close my eyes to those “kill” scenes; I want the apparently-vanquished to escape. So how come I was cheering the ants in their assault on the inch-worms?
Just think of the poor elm tree, being choked inside by beetles and denuded outside by inch-worms!
A postscript to last month’s report of the suspected thief who never came to trial: a robber, fleeing the scene with his loot after being surprised by police ignored warnings and was wounded by police gunfire. Now he has been awarded $45,000 under Minnesota’s crime reparations law.
The Gryphon
A hobby journal, hand-set and printed
by Walter H. Brovald
St. Paul, Minn. 55105