Perfection

I think I’ve used this pic before for a story, but I’m so danged proud of it, I don’t mind using it again.

This, in my estimation, is one of the few times I’ve gotten as close to perfection as a human can, in a composition shot.

And this is a dragonfly. Precision killers, aerial and acrobatic. Not known for sitting still. I once saw a dragonfly pluck a house fly out of the air like it was lazily reaching for a sandwich, and return to its perch literally five inches from my nose. And there, like that sandwich, it ate its lunch in six neat bites, chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp. Then, like finicky eaters everywhere, it tossed the “crusts,” the wings, to the ground, in contemptuous disdain. And while my jaw dropped, it went zooming off to find dessert.

So why is this dragonfly holding still long enough for a picture, let alone one of such a fascinating juxtaposition of light, texture, media, elements, position? And, for the record, I rearranged nothing. My husband and I came across this just as it’s seen, along the bank of the river I grew up on.

The answer lies in two elements that cannot be viewed in a picture: the wind, and metamorphosis.

I don’t know what it is about the drop in barometric pressure that prefaces a storm, but when so many January and February babies arrive – erm, precipitously – as a blizzard approaches, it can’t be coincidence.

The wind was so strong on the day that I took this picture, that we were stumbling a bit as the wind gusts caught us from odd directions. There was buffeting going on, and I don’t mean the type that means you’re about to overeat at the sight of some massive groaning boards.

I had to hold the camera straight above the creature as I took my pics, and you’d better believe I gripped it tightly so I didn’t drop the phone and crush the poor thing! And my husband still held on to my belt, because did I mention the wind?

Once I got my shots, I handed off the phone to my husband, so I could pick up the dragonfly and move it to a place of safety. That’s when I realized it must have just emerged from its nymph stage, because the body was still soft.

In case you’re wondering, I’m a critter magnet. I raise butterflies in the summer and release them, and have seen some amazing and rare species. I’ve been handling insects safely for as long as I can remember – Luna moths, Cecropia moths, all sorts of cicada species, rare butterflies big and small. Giant grasshoppers, katydids, families of crickets. They all seem to find sanctuary in our home, or in our back yard, or on my person.

I’m not kidding about that last one. I had a cicada single me out in a crowd of over ten thousand people to save it from the sparrow that was hunting it. And the time we were visiting the NASA center at Wallops Island, Virginia, where the biggest and most beautiful tiger swallowtail I have ever seen smacked into me, blown by one of the strongest winds I have ever leaned into, I mean we were leaning at like a 35-degree angle into it I’m so not kidding about that, when suddenly WOMPH you’re bowled over by the force of a… butterfly?

When I could stand again, I picked it out of the grass, and held it while it struggled to get flying again. Repeatedly, it was bounced into the grass. So when I picked it up for the fourth of fifth time, instead of trying to get it aloft, I turned my back to the wind and let it hide in the lee of… well, me. And it started to crawl for high ground. Let me tell you, cats and their gravity paws have nothing on this huge swallowtail! I felt. Every. Single. Foot. As that flutter (with a wingspread bigger than my spread palm!) climbed my prodigious tummy, it suddenly decided that my spine was better. Over my arm and around my ribs it went.

Have you ever had a giant butterfly or moth climb your spine? Even through three layers of clothing, that was a strange sensation! I ended up walking to the nearest tree, and leaning over so that the top of my head was up against the bark, in the lee of the tree, so the flutter could walk up my neck, onto my head, and onto the bark, stomp stomp stomp. I felt every footfall, and they have six. Of course, hubby was laughing at the absurdity, but the swallowtail decided that the tree was safer than flight, at least till the winds died down. It was still there, though higher in the tree, when we left.

I was reminded of that situation when trying to move the dragonfly. It climbed obligingly onto my hand, but when I turned around, the wind wasn’t so kind. I kept turning, trying to find a safer place for it to fully dry and harden, and there was no place safe from the wind at all. It came from all sides, gusts from least unexpected corners, and its poor wings were rotoring in eight or ten directions at once trying to compensate, and I’m pretty sure that’s physically impossible. Having leaned from my swallowtail experience, and even the trees weren’t safe this time, I ended up cradling it very close to my body to prevent a mischief to it.

Eventually, I (we?) reached a distasteful conclusion: it had been safer where I found it. Right above the water, the wind was at its gentlest, almost still. So back it went, with my apologies, and it carefully climbed off my hand and onto the twig it had left.

Insects have such ephemeral lives. Except for the biting insects, I appreciate their fragile adult life span, and watching them just trying to live their lives to the best of their limited ability in this big world. Even now, I still have a butterfly with a crumpled wing that couldn’t make the journey south. This one wasn’t eligible for a wing transplant; trust me, even flutter health insurance is horrible in this country. So he’s got a heated rock, and a synthetic flower, in his habitat, and he’s watching the snow come down outside with what I can only describe as existential horror. Yes, I do feel like some sort of Cthulhu-like elder god, keeping a delicate crumpled flutter alive, but he’s not ready to give it up just yet. Even butterflies have personalities, I’ve learned, you can see it while raising them. Caterpillars and adults recognize us, and we’ve gotten deliberate butterfly kisses as we’ve let the flutters fly when their wings are fully dry. He’s slowed down a bit, since he’s not in full diapause like his peeps vacationing in the Mexican Oyamel fir forests, but don’t let the lack of mai tais fool you. It is easy for flutters to die; all he needs to do is stop eating. But the way he attacks his flower, proboscis uncoiling before I can even scoop him up to get him on his preferred feeding spot, tells me all I need to know about his desire to live.

Just like a dragonfly, drying as best it could, while the winds went howling past its known world.

I look forward to seeing that dragonfly’s children and grandchildren buzzing over the water, come summer. Maybe I’ll get some more pictures, one never knows. But I doubt I’ll ever reach the perfection of composition that I have in this shot, a split second of time captured in the colors of a healthy river.