I unexpectedly took the week off from newslettering last Friday, but I should have seen it coming. We were hosting some friends from out of town, and, even though they were only here for three days, we packed those days incredibly tight. These friends come visit us every year, and squeezing every drop out of the time we have together is enjoyable but exhausting.
This year’s linchpin outing was a trip to the American Museum of Natural History, which was the first time some of our guests had seen it. While it’s exciting to view an iconic institution through someone else’s eyes, the AMNH always feels new to me too. The place is so massive as to be overwhelming, despite the fact that supposedly only 3% of the Museum’s 33 million holdings are on display at any given time. No matter how many times we visit, walking around inside makes me feel smaller than a bug.
While we hit some of the big-ticket items - the new Hall of Gems and Minerals, the blue whale, the elephant stampede - we ended up lingering longer than expected in a more modest gallery, the Felix M. Warburg Hall of New York State Environment. Unlike many areas of the Museum that have been diligently refurbished over time, this exhibit looks exactly as it did the day it launched in 1951. The displays take a kaleidoscopic look at the ecology of the Hudson Valley town of Pine Plains, just a few miles east from where Hope and I went to college. Though groundbreaking at the time, much of the science and culture it was intended to illuminate has become obsolete. While the dioramas of local habitat acknowledge the onslaught of European civilization (just look at the one with the forest being cleared out behind a cluster of wigwams), they make the encroachment of agriculture feel just as natural and inevitable as the geological strata that preceded it.
And yet I can soak in the bittersweet homeliness of this area for hours. As visitors speed through it on their way back and forth from the newer and splashier Hall of Biodiversity, I’m touched by its post-war optimism and sense of mission. The design, with its stick-on lettering - in both blocky sans serifs and jaunty script - its colorful topographic reliefs, and its modest little mammals and birds doing everyday things on the edges of forests and farms, makes me nostalgic for a world I never quite lived in. Duchess County is no longer as quaintly undeveloped as it once was, and even circumstances that once seemed eternal - like the clear, consistent progression of the seasons - have been undercut by weather events like the heat dome that was broiling the city outside during our visit.
There’s one case in the exhibit, though, that gestures to the catastrophes of the present. Dropping the sober realism of the Hall’s other displays, this one features a series of tiny creatures - a millipede, a daddy long-legs, a weevil larva - blown up to 1000x their normal size as they sift through a layer of leaf mulch. Though the taxidermied displays elsewhere in the museum, with their beautifully painted backgrounds, impel the mind into fantasy, this disproportion invites horror.
The scene is reminiscent of the giant ants in the 1954 B-movie Them. Whenever local TV channels would show this movie for a Saturday afternoon monster matinee, I’d spend the entire week ready to run from the room whenever they ran an ad for it. The concept of insects big enough to tear me apart was a catastophe my childish mind had no hope of handling. Nowadays I enjoy plenty of things that terrified me as a kid, but to this day I’ve still never seen Them.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence that last Saturday night - our guests gone, our minds and bodies fatigued from the heat and the company - we settled down to watch an entirely different dystopian ant film, Phase IV (1974). The sole feature directed by legendary graphic designer Saul Bass, it features colonies of ants that are monstrous not for their size but their intelligence. When a cosmic phenomenon renders ant colonies of all species into superorganisms of great cunning and dexterity, two scientists (who are in WAY over their head) are dispatched to the Arizona desert to investigate.
The script and storyline of the film are fairly boilerplate paranoid sci-fi, but Bass’ visual storytelling surpasses the source material to create something truly unsettling in its close-up naturalism. Working with wildlife photographer Ken Middleham, he presents a series of wordless, exquisitely staged scenes of ant behavior, granting these tiny aliens in our midst a sense of agency and character that would be inconceivable at any other dimension. The ants quickly become much easier to root for than the lame, cocky humans who have to hide within concentric edifices of technology in order to compete. For a couple of hours, at least, as they infested and tore up all of our carefully planned machinery, it felt impossible to overestimate the resourcefulness of these tiny creatures at our feet.
The weekend stayed hot, and we were still beat, so on Sunday afternoon we asked Dash to pick a movie we could all watch together. He kept the theme going by picking another film about nature’s vengeance against hapless humans - The Birds.
His choice shouldn’t have been a surprise. Just last month we showed him his first Hitchcock film, Rear Window. Dash loves studying architecture and urban life, so despite the slow burn of the setup, he relished the idea of a diorama-styled murder mystery played out among Manhattan’s fire escapes and courtyards. Watching it only made him more curious about The Birds, which he had received echoes of through references in old Mad magazines and various other cultural detritus. He’s particularly fond of the fact that Hitchcock, with his weird sense of humor, insisted on using the publicity tagline “The Birds is coming!” with its technically correct grammar masquerading as an appalling error.
As it turned out, The Birds was Dash’s first legitimate horror film, with the exception of some of the 1930s Universal features that today feel much more creepy than scary. A few of the bloodier moments didn’t sit that well with him - but he was more than up to the task of navigating the film’s conceptual ambiguity. While Phase IV relied on a stellar macguffin to instigate its evolutionary crisis, The Birds keeps it much more mysterious. There are plenty of parallels between the moral flightiness of Tippi Hedren’s lead character and the arbitrary cruelty of the bird invasion, but in the end, no reason is given. This makes the film, despite its many dated elements, feel eerily relevant today. “It’s weird that they made this before people knew about climate change,” Dash said, “Because it’s definitely about climate change.” As a kid being raised in the hot shadow of that threat, Dash will always side with the birds, even if he’s a little freaked out by their tactics.
Dash is no stranger to nature’s caprices in this uncertain age. Five years ago, we attended an after-hours party at AMNH, where we got to run around with a bunch of other families enjoying the exhibits and participating in various live demonstrations, including one scientist with a tabletop crowded with insects in small cases. When we put Dash to bed that night, we saw a weird little spot sticking out of his neck - it turned out to be a tick, which we tweezed out and disposed of. We spent a few anxious days worried that he might get Lyme disease, but even more perplexed by the question of how the tick had come to him in the first place. Had it escaped from one of the scientist’s cases? Had it simply jumped on him from a tree or bush as we walked home from the subway? It turned into its own little Rear Window NYC mystery, which remains unsolved to this day.
Working at my desk this week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about all of these unexpected incursions of animal life - particularly because another one is unfolding right before my eyes.
Looking out the window behind my monitor, I can see our terrace swarming with spotted lanternfly nymphs. If you don’t live in the northeast, you might not yet be familiar with this invasive pest - but I suspect you will be soon. Native to southeast Asia, they first appeared in Pennsylvania a decade ago and have been inexorably widening their habitat ever since. The nymphs, with their speckled backs and eerily upright stance, hatch in June, and as I sit here I can watch them leaping across the yard and climbing up the glass in front of me. In a month or so they’ll be full grown, with their distinctive red, pink, and gray wings.
We saw our first lanternfly three years ago, in the company of the same out-of-town friends who joined us at the Museum. While waiting at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a ferry into Manhattan, we watched a peculiar but attractive insect waddle across our path. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we were delightfully intrigued. Later that same day, we encountered a poster on a wall identifying it as a spotted lanternfly and declaring it a menace that must be destroyed. It was the first iteration of the ongoing campaign waged by NYC and other municipalities urging citizens to stomp on them wherever possible. It’s way too late for that now, of course.
We’ve all grown to hate these creatures, which take advantage of having no natural predators in North America, where they accidentally arrived through the world-shrinking magic of international shipping. They infest every nook and cranny of the city, leaping right into our apartment whenever they have the chance. The thing is, they really are quite beautiful, if you can get past everything else.
Some scientists have expressed hope that local birds, who have so far eschewed lanternflies as food, will develop a taste for them over time. Though this is unlikely, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario where it succeeds only too well. Glutted with a nearly endless diet of insect protein, Hitchock’s fantasy could come horribly true. The birds, angered by our filthy stewardship of the planet, would descend upon us next.
But in that case, shouldn’t they be thanking us instead? Our folly filled their bellies, after all. Alas, this type of thinking is akin to those grand interventionist strategies, like blocking the sun to prevent global warming - the cure will always be worse than the disease.
I feel so powerless against the ills that plague our planet. Like the giant insects of Pine Plains, all of our species need to live together in the same glass box, and the temperature’s always rising. But unlike those models of wax and clay, we’re constantly growing and reproducing and jockeying for the upper hand. Nature has never been harmonious, but we used to be cocky enough to believe we weren’t a part of it. Those days of relative innocence are numbered. May the best beast win.
Any good lanternfly or other invasive species stories? I hope not! Anyway, I’m probably going to take next week off too because I’ll be traveling for the July 4 holiday - but I anticipate some exciting posts coming after that, maybe a bit less bleak than this one. Rejoice!