A Broken Land

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. No, the Californian plutocrats sitting on their hoards was a recent development that makes the landscape, for all its chameleon grandeur (because it’s often used to film everywhere else in disguise), a little bleaker for it. It is an unnerving, out-of-body, and dehumanizing feeling to look out over the desert, the sea, the rolling golden hills, or the eternally twinkling hundred-mile city and be struck by how this seemingly infinite paradise is actually quite easily collapsed into a still-large but ultimately finite and very, very lifeless profit sheet.

Ventura, California has the usual coastal menagerie of flora (lots of succulents) and fauna with a couple exceptions: the driftwood was mostly bamboo when I got there and, probably because of the local agriculture, the most common pest is the crane fly (“mosquito hawk,” “daddy long-legs”).

It’s these I’d like to talk about. The two funnel-web spiders, at the time in either corner of my kitchen window prompted me to leave my screen door open a crack to let in crane flies as a way of feeding them. But there’s no reliable way to limit fly intake to a spider-subsistence level, so I end up having as many or more crane flies curled up dead by the baseboard as wrapped up in webbing. It is with a unique dignity that these crane flies die—I said “curled,” but it is less rounded than that, more that they form angular cages with their death-rigor’d legs and their wings lose their former lively clearness for a brittle, gossamer mummy skin. The reason they ended up dead at the baseboards is that they spend away their captive lives butting against the walls until they reach the ceiling and, perhaps in despair, land there and hang indefinitely.

Unemployed and depressed, I would watch these, and I noticed that they often lose legs in their butting, increasing the angle of their remaining legs in their resting. I eventually saw a fly with three legs in a “Y” pattern, then two in a “V,” and finally, today, a crane fly just below my bedroom ceiling hanging by a single leg, “I,” and I am reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, her main character considering her own gestation:

“I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion... and suddenly—My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me.” I have called “that slenderest word” when seriffed a column, of a temple maybe, but that all crumbled as narcissism as I considered or reconsidered the “I” of that crane fly and realized I was not the single column left of an antique ruin, but the literal last leg of an insect that wastes its gift of flight in an unangelic, unsoaring battle with a wall bigger than its understanding until I fall to the carpet, the single useless bar of a cage holding nothing.

But in smiles and sadness we are at least that much more than meat. The body resists the perpetual gold prospecting like a disease, but it never quite becomes immune. After living here my whole life I’m still given fevers and shiver from the exorbitant mansions and cars, the caves and wings of modern dragons.

I hope for a hero, or a wizard to equip me with armor, horse, and sword, not to rescue a maiden, but to rescue myself and my home. But I fear the dragons have forever darkened the sky with their smoke, and that the fires are here to stay, forever.