Loving the Land

His tongue explored the crevices of her sex, first circumnavigating her inner lips, then probing gently within. Marianne made soft low sounds of pleasure. Eventually, she pulled him insistently upwards, kissing him on the mouth. Her hair surrounded him; it smelled of the woods where she worked; it had the smell of a warm sun shining on old leaves, a primal smell of fertility and abundance. She pushed him onto his back and climbed above; retrieved the condom and pressed it down his length. She slowly lowered herself, and suddenly a sheathe of flesh surrounded the sheathe of latex.

They rolled through the bed of ferns, both wondering who led and who followed. Their hands explored every inch of their partner's body. The crickets and the katydids emitted a pulsing wall of sound, and the two young lovers moved in exquisite joy through an ocean of cold and mystic fire.

Later, they fell asleep in a tight embrace atop the fernbed. Late that night, an unexpected thunderstorm woke them, soaking them in warm rain. Laughing and shrieking, they ran for shelter beneath projecting rocks. In their warm dry cave, they saw the pouring rain bringing new life to the forest, and they heard the steady patting rush of rainwater on the stones around them. In the lightning and the thunder, they made love again.

The man blinked. The moon was sinking on the horizon, brilliant stars shone in the clear sky, and eldritch foxfire continued to surround him. He shook his head to clear it of memories.

He and Marianne had drifted apart. As the preliminary results of the ecosystem study became available, he came to see that the Appalachian land of his childhood, his beloved lumpen land of hills and dales, was dying. Hemlock was being destroyed by the adelgid, and the pine bark beetle was threatening most other conifers. Dogwood blight assaulted the beautiful flowering trees, and sudden oak death threatened not only oaks, but also all broad-leafed shrubs, including rhododendron. Magnolias were mysteriously dying, and no one could determine the cause. There was hardly one tree in ten that was not faced with imminent death. In some few decades, the area would be transformed into a moonscape. And there was more: drought and disappearing groundwater were destroying millennia-old streams. Strange viruses killed every male insect in a plethora of species. Frogs were born twisted and deformed, sporting five, sometimes seven limbs. He could think of no scientific advance, no political policy, that could possibly save his magnificent forest.

He kept a death-vigil for the woodlands. Every day, he left early and returned late, going on long walks in the mountains, desperately drinking in sights that no-one would ever see again. Eventually, Marianne had enough, and dumped him in favor of a virile mammalogist. "I love my little caddisfly," she said, smiling at him gently, "but he spends too much time in his shell. I think it's time I had an honest relationship with a bit of charismatic megafauna." He mutely nodded his assent, and watched as she turned to leave, walking briskly out of his life.

His work suffered from his long walks. He lost his research fellowship, and was thrown off the project. He hardly cared: he took his sleeping bag out of the bunkhouse and walked into the woods without looking back, resolving to sleep under the stars in the future. He fell deeper and deeper into love with the land around him. Years passed, and he found himself now in late middle age, sleeping alone by the side of a stream while the forest died around him.

While thinking about Marianne, he had made a mess. He cleaned it with water from his canteen, turned over, and went to sleep.

Love can be cruel. Seven species of fireflies surrounded the sleeping man, and the females of each species called their mates with their own unique pattern of blinks and swooping dives. One species, though, mimicked the patterns of all the others, and when ardent males approached, the predatory females ate them alive.

Love can be deceptive. Balloon bugs dipped and bobbed in the night air. Once long ago, among their distant ancestors, males had given females delicious gifts of food before mating. Some had wrapped their gifts in shiny gauze. As time wore on, the food items had grown smaller, while the gauze wrapping grew more and more elaborate. In the modern species, males presented their loves with empty balls of white anal secretions, which the females, having forgotten the original purpose of the exchange, accepted with glee.

Love can be downright malevolent. Inside his sleeping bag, bedbugs engaged in what has been described as "homosexual stabbing rape."

All this is true, but it hardly matters. The universe offers abundant evidence that true love does not go unrequited, although the mechanism by which it is resolved can be strange and wondrous beyond our imagining.

Dormancy is the dominant state of life. Unicellular organisms make up the overwhelming majority of living things, and at any given time the overwhelming majority of unicellular organisms are dormant. In the ground beneath him, millions and millions of prokaryotes and protists slept an ongoing slumber. Like Sleeping Beauty, they patiently awaited a new dawn, when a roaming plant root would reawaken them to life and love with a mucoid kiss of sugary secretions. If need be, they would wait a near eternity: scientists once revived a yeast cell that had lain in hibernation 1,400 years. When the man cleaned his sleeping bag, the ground absorbed two calories of nutrients, enough energy to bring 600 microorganisms back to life. The world is so fertile, so bountiful, that even masturbation produces life beyond counting.

The man awoke one last time before dawn. He felt as if he had lain dormant an unusually long time. Lights surrounded him, and again he had difficulty separating them into stars, lightningbugs, and foxfire. On this occasion, he didn't try particularly hard. From the stream at the center of rhododendron thicket, he heard the plashing splish of water applied to limbs. He was not at all sure that the limbs were human. He thought of his wood-nymph, his Naiad, his forest-spirit, the abstract personification of his love of the forest. Maybe, just maybe, something loved him back. He rose to his feet, and began running to the stream edge. Moments later, at the campsite, six hundred newly-awakened protists heard the joyful noise of two mammals engaged in water-play. The hills echoed back the sounds of sex.

The indescribably beautiful, wondrous, and mysterious planet rotated slowly on its axis as it drifted through oceans of darkness and light. Puppy-like, the moon followed close behind.

End.

*

p.s. You too can amaze your friends with knowledge of insect sex! A good starting point is H.C. Proctor: Indirect Sperm Transfer in Arthropods: Behavioral and Evolutionary Trends (Annual Review of Entomology, 43:153-174). These fascinating creatures can teach us far more than we can learn in the Kama Sutra, and if for no other reason than this they are at least as deserving of conservation as the more cuddly and charismatic mammalian megafauna. Save the world; pause before you use insecticides. Have a beautiful and fulfilling Earth Day.