Poems by Rachel McKimmy
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Stone Fly
“Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief. The water closes, seamless, around me… Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do.”
— Linda Hogan, Dwellings
by Rachel McKimmy
Rachel grew up in the northwest, in the mountains within sight of the great Pacific Ocean, and now lives on a mitten-shaped peninsula surrounded by the largest lakes on the planet, in the Lake Erie watershed alongside the Huron River.
On the first day of February, a group of four strangers slide into a vehicle and drive to the outskirts of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The first site they visit is a creek that’s an offshoot of the Huron River. The Huron River is a river that eventually flows into Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes of North America, and the most notoriously polluted. This creek is just a little vein in the Erie watershed.
There is a small stream with an old bridge over it, a bridge which is rotting through. On the ground are several inches of snow. Breath puffs out from between cold-chapped lips, chilled air burns lungs. One of the team wades into the icy water up to his waist, wearing brown plastic waders, filling a sample cup beneath the flow of the water and screwing the cap closed. Then, with what looks like a butterfly net, he begins dragging muck up from the depths. Finally, into trays that one of the other team members holds out to him from the bank, he plops the scoops of sticks and mud.
The three others not in the water sit down on buckets or squat in front of the trays, starting to pick through them with metal forceps, looking for something tiny, about the length of a fingernail, with a segmented body, six jointed legs, two antennae, and two tails. This order of insects, officially called Plecoptera, have been around since before the dinosaurs, and are an indicator of water quality because of their sensitivity to pollution. They’re called stoneflies.
The more stonefly nymphs, or larvae, the group finds in a timed period, the healthier the water. The fewer stonefly nymphs the group finds, the sicker. I joined the volunteer group without knowing this involved murder.
By the end of this several-hour excursion to two other sites, our hands are bright red and numb, stiff with cold, with crescents of mud beneath our fingernails. When a nymph is found, it squirms in the grasp of the metal forceps, before being dropped into a small bottle of alcohol. The number of stoneflies from each site is kept as a record of water quality. I can imagine shelves of boxes of dead stoneflies, each box labeled with a different year, going back almost 30 years. Time capsules.
On the Internet, you can find fossils of stoneflies enclosed in amber for sale, calling to mind the mosquito trapped in amber on John Hammond’s cane, in the first Jurassic Park movie. A different type of time capsule.
Despite their short lives, Plecoptera has collectively lived through three mass extinctions in Earth’s history: the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, the Triassic extinction 210 million years ago, and the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago. Hiding in debris caught against the flow of the current, the nymphs live. During the last winter of their lives, adults emerge with two pairs of veined wings. Their nymphal stage lasts from one to four years, but in their adult form, they live only a few short weeks.
And yet, Homo sapiens have been upon this planet for less time than this ugly little insect.
The stonefly in amber is frozen in honey-colored stone, polished smooth by a human hand. The membranes in its wings are still clearly defined, and the pattern on its abdomen still clearly visible. Its legs are bent, its wings poised half-open to fly.
“All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.”
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
In ancient Greek mythology, a nymph is a nature spirit, typically imagined as a beautiful young woman lounging in a forested glen beside a river. If you were to seek such a spirit today, where on Earth would you look?
Like the stonefly nymph, I imagine the mythical nymphs of ancient Greece cannot bear pollution. I imagine there are few places today that a nature spirit would like to live. Even the place I grew up in California, an 80-acre forested property, would not be pristine enough.
When I was a child, it was so easy to come across a porcupine, a bobcat, a fox, their eyes reflecting the gleam of a flashlight at night. These days, the woods are overpopulated with woodrat nests, tangles of branches and plant matter built up in trees or right on the forest floor. Their natural predators have been killed off by the rat poison meant for the woodrats, my father says. That forest hasn’t been wild in a long time. My dad has to manage the forest now, thinning the newer alder growth to allow the slower-growing evergreen trees a chance to recover from clear-cutting.
Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9% are gone. This current, sixth extinction may cause 90% of species to go extinct, some scientists say. I sometimes imagine that when humans drive ourselves to extinction (and I have no doubt that someday we will go extinct, our greatest fear fulfilled), that the world will be much better off. But that is the future.
This is now, and the forest nymphs are gone, like the foxes.
“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Perhaps she'll die.”
-- Rose Bonne, “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”
One of my favorite poets, Robert Frost, lived in Ann Arbor. I went to his house once, a white house with Grecian-esque pillars framing the front. It is now transplanted from its original location to the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.
Walking through those empty houses, an uninhabited village, it becomes easier to imagine the world if people were suddenly to disappear. You can walk through but not touch, almost as if you are a ghost lingering after all those who once lived there were gone.
I imagine: the water of the stream runs across the rocks of the streambed. This is the stonefly nymph’s whole world: from the rounded pebbles at the bottom, to the the clots of mud and leaves and sticks caught up against the current that provide refuge from predators, and the bright, rippled surface of the water that is the nymph’s only knowledge of the sky.
The nymph scuttles slowly across the bottom of the stream, its antennae feeling the stones in front of it. Crawling atop a larger stone which it will cling to and camouflage itself, its balance is disrupted by a strong current and it flips upside down, legs waving frantically in an attempt to right itself, as the current plucks it up and bears it away downstream. The nymph is not a good swimmer.
A brook trout, with its dark green scales, orange fins and speckled sides like a piece of abstract art, spots the nymph that is cast adrift, helpless, in the current. Swooping down through the water with a thrust of its streamlined body, the trout opens its mouth wide to gobble the nymph.
A river otter is sunning herself on the bank, water slicking off her oily fur from her afternoon swim. She’s taking a break from building her nest beneath the abandoned vacation cabin farther up the eroding bank. The cabin once belonged to a rich family, but now the wood is rotting and a tree branch has broken through one of the windows. Vines crawl up the sides of the cabin. Like Chernobyl, after the nuclear disaster, the cabin belongs to the forest now.
The otter prances to the water’s edge and slips gracefully into the water, her head held above the surface and long tail trailing behind her. She pops her head below the surface.
Light flashes off of a mosaic of emerald and yellow and blue, catching the otter’s gaze. Coiling her body, she dives after the flash, her webbed paws scooping the water.
The trout sees her movement -- too slow. Grasping the trout in her claws and teeth, she wrestles it into submission before dragging it to the bank where she can eat.
A child skips stones across the slow-moving water, legs dangling off of the dock. One, two, three skips, the stone flies.
The Earth is a flying stone. Upon it, humans wage their wars against each other and against time. The other creatures on the Earth are collateral. Even the stonefly, which has survived three mass extinctions despite its fragility to pollution, may not survive this one.
In the end, Earth’s resources and its life are finite. The Earth is just a stone that flies.
This essay was the winner of the Hopwood Undergraduate Award for Nonfiction in 2021 at The University of Michigan.
© Rachel McKimmy