The Difficult Work of Being Alive

I do not subscribe to killing things. Really, I don’t. And I’m not talking about phylum: Chordata, the charismatic ones – of course I don’t subscribe to killing them, not senselessly anyway. I’m talking about the arthropods.

There is no disputing their instrumental value, and I’m inclined to see in them some intrinsic value too. But it goes beyond simply that. I admit a certain fondness for them; a philia, not a phobia. E.g. It would never occur to me to kill a spider. No, I make cooing sounds at spiders. I manipulate my mouth into the smallest little ‘o’ I can manage and emit soft vocalizations (but high-pitched, because that’s what babies respond to) whilst simultaneously presenting my palm, upwards, in what I hope is received by all its eyes as a beckoning gesture of benevolence and friendship.

I realize it’s highly unscientific absurd. I must look so utterly stupid doing it – and people have, hand-on-heart, witnessed me doing it. I may as well wave a white flag, or offer an olive branch, or release a dove, whatever—my gestures, though well-intentioned, are far too culturally loaded, they’re far too anthro to be understood or requited by a spider. And anyway, it’s not how they’re received, it’s how they’re perceived that matters. When William Arthur Ward proposed that a warm smile is the universal language of kindness he must not have had arachnid amity and goodwill in mind.

I save ticks too — or rather I did once. I’d forgotten about it actually (which is shameful given the epic experience of the whole thing and the epiphany it precipitated) but my mother hasn’t let me live it down. It was a big blacklegged bastard and I practically had to perform surgery to unembed it from the furry flank of my little dog. After failing repeatedly to crush the armored lentil of its being, a testament to how indomitable a small thing it was, I elected to drop it down the sink and drown it. I opened the tap on full blast and it slid smoothly down, past the stopper, and away.

Knowing full well that ticks have outlived the dinosaurs and will probably outlast my best efforts too, I remained admirably composed—as did the tick!—when it ambled out past the drain plug and made directly for me.

I repeated the drowning process, adding hot water for good measure— thinking a little scalding? Will hurt, might help! It was down longer this time, but again it resurfaced, still relatively nonchalant — its eight legs laboring in a movement that suggested this was more trek than traipse. Provoked and perturbed I let the water run for so long (conscience-stricken though I was about the water wastage) that I was absolutely certain the tick traveled past the stopper, through the rubber gasket and the flat-washer, by way of the slipnut into the tailpiece and the adjacent trap-adapter, out one end of the swivel p-trap and, finally, across several lengths of coupling so as to be discharged into the waste line or collected, dead, in the cleanout plug. (Or something like that, I hoped.) And then, for the final coup de grâce, I clinched the stopper.

It reemerged yet again.

Frankly amazed I stooped to examine it, to scrutinize its locomotion. It was clearly struggling now, all eight legs bearing down in a display of Beowulfian bravery, discernibly aware and conscious of its own mortality. Suddenly I felt embarrassed by the question which presented itself vaguely of whether or not I was capable of such doggedness. Physiologically speaking, probably not. I contemplated the tick’s struggle for existence, its course and progress through the small catastrophe of my sink and, beyond it, in the tangles of what Darwin called an entangled bank. In its minuteness, it made absurdly visible the complexities of ecological life: the ways bodies borrow from, depend on, irritate, endanger, and sustain one another. Something like tenderness washed over me, though tenderness seemed an odd thing to feel for a creature I had just been trying to drown. In that brief encounter, the little tick and I were not exactly reconciled, but implicated—drawn, however unwillingly, into the same messy web of vulnerability, aversion, and obligation.

In wonderment, I yielded with deference and offered her the corner of a washcloth to ease her climb up the steep, slippery stone slope of my sink. Now that I was paying attention, it was obvious from size and sheer determination that “it” was, in fact, a “she”—the morphological differences between the sexes being quite pronounced, even among tiny ticks. I transported her to a far corner of the out-of-doors where, no doubt, her trembling strength was immediately challenged again; and there, entangled in the lifeways of plants and animals, she resumed the difficult work of being alive.