Tracks of a Wasp
I left North Hero, Vermont, on a red-sky morning and crossed the border into Canada at a rural checkpoint cut out of corn fields along a road barely two lanes wide. It was raining by then, filling the air with the smell of wet hay and the heavier scent of cow manure. An appropriate odor since that’s what I felt this trip had turned into.
I planned to camp in Canada, photograph and write a spec piece on a wildlife preserve for a birdwatchers’ magazine. But a week before I left home, I was told I had to have a hysterectomy. My working vacation turned heavy and reflective. As long as I was able to have children, I didn’t want any, always putting it off for another thing I needed to do or a place I had to see. Now, at age 33, if I was lucky and it wasn’t cancer, I would end my reproductive years by delivering a large fibroid cyst.
By the time I skirted Montreal, the sun was out. I headed for Mont Tremblant, the national park where I planned to camp the first night. It was a Sunday, so I figured, even if it was popular with the Canadians, people would be leaving after the weekend. I expected to have it more or less to myself.
I told the woman behind the counter at park headquarters that I didn’t want to camp where it was crowded. I wanted peace and quiet, not to end up someplace full of RVs with generators running and children chasing each other on bicycles. She suggested Cypres Oust, an isolated spot fourteen miles inside the park.
The road was graded for the first three or four miles, then got washboardy. If I drove fast, it felt smoother, but I’d go into slides on the curves. I drove at a medium speed until my ’86 Chevy Cavalier and I were so jangled we trembled and bucked to a stop then started over. The turnoff to my assigned camp ground was a narrow, hilly, potholed dirt track. I mentally fist-bumped the lady at Park headquarters. Nobody else in his/her right mind would come this far to camp. Wrong. Cypres Oust was packed with people, and a car had broken down in my assigned spot next to the outhouse. Well, it’s early yet, I thought. They’ll leave soon. I mentally chose a nicer site where I would move when they were all gone. It was on a high bluff with a trail down to the water’s edge. The day was windless and the mountain-rimmed lake was slick. Far out, near a little treed island, I spotted a pair of loons.
I found an empty picnic table, dug out a book, my Walkman, and some wine—which I’d inadvertently smuggled in. This cheered me immensely, as if I’d done something a little dangerous.
I waited and read.
Back then, I was nearsighted and needed glasses to see the loons on the lake but not to read. When I noticed a movement on the ground over the top of my book, I had to put on glasses to see what it was. A wasp—with a green bean? I put my book down and went for a closer look. The wasp had itself a plump, green worm. I remembered reading in one of my wildlife magazines, that the female of some species of wasp injects her victim with a toxin that puts it in a coma-like, suspended animation. She’ll seal it in the nest with her eggs so when they hatch there’s a fresh, juicy meal to sustain them until they’re ready for the world.
This wasp straddled the worm, three legs on either side of its body, but the worm was a longer than she was and so broad that her back two legs didn’t reach the ground. She was winged, but the worm weighed too much for her to fly.
When I first saw her, she was crossing the remains of a camp fire. Now, she crawled up and over a charred log. I moved another out of her way. She skirted the rim of a blackened beer can, and went up the side of the hole the campers had scraped for their fire. In her path was a patch of ground where the people sat, pushing up sand with the heels of their shoes. I smoothed it for her, then went back to my perch on the picnic table. But I kept looking up, misplacing her, then finding her again.
The people in my assigned spot got their car running. The wasp was headed right for them. They loaded the last of their stuff and closed the trunk. The wasp cleared the sandy lip of the road. The driver got behind the wheel and slammed his door. I stood. He gunned the engine. The wasp was crossing a tennis shoe print in the road. If they went out to the right, they would miss her. If they went left, they wouldn’t. I snatched a large glass shard from the ashes and darted into the road beside the wasp. I bent, as if plucking something from the dirt, and got a carload of dirty looks as they steered left around me. I held up the broken glass. Embarrassed by their rudeness, they waved thanks.
After that near-miss, I fell in with wasp, whose unalterable path was now fully on the road. Other campers were leaving. Teenagers, who had been swimming in the lake, came shouting and shivering toward the outhouse to change clothes. As nonchalantly as possible, I became the wasp’s escort. I smiled and nodded at the kids who glanced at me, moving a foot or two at a time, hands clasped behind my back, feigning interest in this tree, that bird. When the wasp rested, I waited beside her, tracking the loons on the lake or watching the gathering clouds shift and change shape.
Standing guard over this wasp reminded me of a lizard in the J. C. Penney’s parking lot years ago, and my mother hunched over chasing it to safety with her purse. I was fourteen and mortified. Now here I was, just a little younger than she’d been, escorting an insect. I imagined my mother smirking.
When the wasp rested, she lay on her worm. Before she moved again, she flexed her legs and rubbed her tired feet together.
Not once did she deviate from her course. She went up and over obstacles, but her direction was a straight line. Ahead, the road dog-legged left and exited the camp ground. I cleared her path with my foot, sweeping twigs and leaves away and flattening, tire tracks. I scouted ahead looking for a wasp nest in a tree or under one of the picnic tables. If I knew her destination, where she wanted to go with her burden, I could have carried her part of the way.
When the road curved, she hauled the worm up the lip of sand and through a mine field of anthills. By now she was stopping every yard or so. When she rested, ants scurried up, bumping and nudging the worm, rousing the wasp to move on. Ahead lay a ten-foot-wide little forest of white birch saplings, the floor of which was leaf-littered. I tried to stay in front of her, brushing aside debris. Still, it took nearly fifteen minutes for her to cross. Many times, I lost sight of her when she rested, but spotted her again when she began moving.
Beyond the trees, she stopped again and lay on her worm as she had so often in the hour I’d been with her. She slid off the side, leaving three legs draped across its body.
“Don’t give up now,” I whispered. “It can’t be much farther.”
An ant neared. The wasp stirred, slid off completely, and lay still.
I thought my heart would break.
A moment later, she rubbed her right front leg over her face, then her left, then the back four flexed and massaged each other. She lifted herself off her stomach and sort of sniffed the worm. To the right of its head, was a tiny flat stone, not much bigger than a large grain of sand. She slid it aside with a front foot. Beneath it was a hole, down which she disappeared like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.
“All right!” I rocketed my fist skyward, and glanced sheepishly around to see if my odd behavior had been observed. I was still young enough to care about things like that.
I hunkered down in the shade of a sapling and guarded her worm while she went to check her eggs, to see, I suppose, if something had gotten what she’d risked her life for.
She appeared moments later, positioned the worm at the entrance, backed down into the tunnel, and pulled its body in after her. When she came out again, she went to work covering the opening.
She selected tiny stones, carefully picking through what looked to me like a zillion choices, all the same. She found just the right sizes and placed them at the entrance so they overlapped without actually sealing it. Next, with her back legs, she dusted it lightly, flicking sand. One at a time, she collected minute chips of wood and leaves and arranged them over the cap of stone she’d created. She dusted this with sand again. Without taking a moment to survey or succumb to pride, she flew away.
On the way back to my car, I paced the distance she’d dragged her worm over the better part of an hour. One hundred and twenty yards.
A group of teenagers now occupied the spot I’d wanted by the lake. I camped where I’d first seen the wasp. An hour later, a small camper pulled into the spot across the road from me. It was an Indian family, three adults and seven children. Within an hour, the smell of curry obliterated every other scent, and rock music drowned every sound. I took my camera and went for a walk along the shoreline, hoping to see the loons.
After dark, I barbecued chicken and corn on the cob over my camp fire and tuned out my neighbors by listening to my Walkman with the volume dial to ten.
About two in the morning, a tremendous storm came up. Thunder exploded time and again until most of the Indian children were awake and crying. A lightning bolt split the top off a tree in the woods fifty yards behind my tent. I lay on my air mattress with my arms and legs rigid so no part of my body touched the ground. I imagined being found at dawn with a steaming black-rimmed hole through my stomach.
I looked for the wasp’s nest in the morning and found no trace. Maybe the rain had seeped down the hole and flooded it. Or maybe mud had sealed the tunnel so that her babies would hatch, consume their worm, but be unable to get out. Was that the wasp’s one and only reproductive chance? Perhaps, when she flew off, it was to die. I sat cross-legged in the sand and stared at the spot where I remembered the nest being and silently wept for her eggs. When I finished my grief for her loss, I wept for mine.