JUNE 8, 2024 – Here I sit, halfway in the sun, halfway in the shade, watching the big parade of cumulus clouds drift slowly but purposefully overhead. Like a vast armada with sails hoisted to the heavens, their crews look down on us earthbound admirers and occasionally wave. You can tell the ships of the line by their flat, dark gray undersides. They carry lots of cannon and ammunition to unleash should the order be given, but for now their mission is peaceful. What must be the flagship rises above the rest, and with powder ready, is more forbidding. Peace through Strength is written along its jutting bow.
I watch this procession for five or 10 minutes, mesmerized by the Navy of Skyward Water Vapor as it sails across the deep blue ozone. An oar’s length away sits my wife, once immersed in her book, now exploring the Land of Nod. I see a non-biting bug circling erratically over her wide-open mouth and dropping closer with each eccentric round. I imagine the bug wondering if the fun of surprising a slumbering human is worth the risk. It wisely decides to forego the fun.
All is quiet on the lake, which condition I find strange given the fine weekend weather. From our dock I have a clear view of at least two-thirds of the clear cool water of the 3100-acre lake, and even with the aid of binoculars, I see only three boats—two of them stationary. The one in motion, revealed by its small white tail, is motoring along a far-off shore—what I and I alone call, the “Barbary Coast,” for no particular reason other than it’s an exotic sounding name, in keeping with my dreamlike state whenever I’m lucky enough to find myself in this paradise.
The breeze is out of the west-northwest, and since our portion of the shoreline runs along the northwest section of the lake, the wind today manifests in microbursts. I imagine that once it organizes itself a half-mile out, it’s a steady blow, and given the three-mile fetch beyond, the waves on the other side of the lake are busy pounding the stony shore. Here where I sit, the air is perfectly calm one moment, then in the next, rises to a shout. If what you’ve brought out on the dock—extra cushions, a pen, a journal, a plate full of crackers—are not secure, they’ll take flight, then . . . take an ignoble dive into the lake. (By fast thinking the fountain pen holder was retrieved; the (soggy) crackers were better left to drift off as fish food.)
Beth stirs, awakes, looks surprised to be holding a book, then flips through it to find her place when her nap began. But where was that place, exactly? I can tell the lines were blurred. “Huh! I couldn’t stay awake,” she announces, as if her trip to dreamland was known only to herself, and then, only upon her wakening.
I chuckle to myself and wonder how the book’s author would feel seeing that his ever so riveting work had cured Beth’s chronic insomnia. As a writer-wanna-be, I empathized. With a burst of renewed inspiration after a week in the doldrums, the novelist finds the plot again along a smooth straight path. In perfect cadence, melliferous phrasing fills the laptop screen. If only the fingers could move as fast as the mind! “My readers will love it, but first—my agent, editor and publisher will think it’s genius!”
But the reality is that the writer’s burst of inspiration might be the same as a “crazy and vivid dream” that loses all color, definition and meaning in the telling; a flash of brilliance inside the writer’s mind that does little more than put the reader’s mind to sleep; a reader sitting at the end of a dock on a Saturday in early June, while a fleet of clouds float quietly by overhead.
While Beth resumes reading, I turn my sights back to the parade of ships. If there are things to think about, I consciously choose not to think about them. After all, I’m sitting at the end of a dock on a Saturday in early June . . .
Just then I notice a tiny worm as it drops down from the oak branches that stretch out rather high above over a good half of the dock, shading it nicely from the over-zealous sun. I’m fascinated by the worm’s method of ambulation. Like a spider’s invisible line of locomotion, the worm’s silky thread is a veritable climbing rope, one of such proportional strength it’s the equivalent of a two-inch thick braided nylon rope in human hands. I watch with amazement as the worm works its magic thread in the breeze. The creature is so small I must keep my eyes laser-trained on its silhouette or I will lose track of the agile elongated speck.
It’s an extraordinary show, a side-show or really, a side-side-show in nature’s un-ending and open-ended outdoor theater. Yet had I not been sitting on the dock, looking, seeing, and watching but thinking very little about anything except what appeared on nature’s stage, I would have missed this act of the tiny worm.
Now I am thinking about something. I’m thinking about the mighty talent of this creature close to the bottom of the local food chain.
At that very moment in thought, from stage right a dragonfly intrudes. In the nano-second it took me to notice the sight-seeing entomonial biplane, it changed into a WW I killer fighter plane and . . . snatched that tiny worm right out of existence. W-h-a-a-a-t! Yes, right there at the end of the dock, nature had lured me into its side-side-show theater, captured my attention, then hypnotized me with the wonder of a worm. Suddenly, without a warning or a hint of danger, nature exhibited its murderous side.
And emblazoned on that merciless side—in this case on the shiny wings of a killer dragonfly—I see the words, Food through Stealth Attack.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
