Thunder Smitten: The Idea of This Garden-Life

Black-and-yellow Argiope aurantia

"Tell me," said the spider, "why do you garden? Why do you toil in the heat and bake yourself brown under the summer sun while countless others of your kind are cooling themselves in pools of water or at the beach or sit all day inside their offices and houses made artificially cold by large, noisy boxes? I have to be outside to catch small things that fly so that I can feed myself and my babies. They're coming soon, you know. And then I will die. As I sit here day after day, I notice that you don't have many mouths to feed. How will your species survive with so few young ones to work and gather food to feed you and take care of you when you're very old? I've heard (on the Web) that your kind lives for many moons, more than I care to imagine. So, why do you garden?"

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The author needs great faith in his[her] reader's sympathy; else he[she] must hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It was the Eden of a thunder smitten Adam[Eve], who had fled for refuge thither out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original Adam was expelled. 

(from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables).

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Life cycle of Argiope aurantia: The female fills a spherical egg sac, up to 1" (25 mm) wide, with a tough, brown, papery cover. She attaches it to one side of the web close to her resting position and then dies. The eggs hatch in autumn; the young overwinter in the sac and then disperse in spring. The male builds a web in the outlying part of the female's web, making a white, zigzag band vertically across the middle.

This spider seems to prefer sunny sites with little or no wind. It drops to the ground and hides if disturbed.

(from The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders)

Subsidies? 'Fur' Sure!

Once in a while it's nice to get off this speeding bullet train called life. From the back porch of our temporary home, the lakeside tree house, we witness progress of a different sort. What we think might be a northern river otter, Lutra canadensis, pops its head up from the muck and chomps noisily on some crunchy morsel. A fish made sluggish by the cold winter water or perhaps a frog venturing forth from the cold mud becomes supper for this member of the weasel family. As I try unsuccessfully to capture it in focus on the camera, I think about the trappers and fur traders who once made a substantial income from its ancestors' hides. 

Beavers, otters, muskrats, and minks were at one time so popular as winter outerwear for wealthy Europeans that our own Congress under President George Washington agreed to subsidize the fabulously profitable fur industry. Something unthinkable today, this subsidy encouraged the slaughter of thousands of animals for the sake of a fashion statement. Thank goodness that was short-lived, the fashion I mean. Subsidies continue in perpetuity even though entrepreneurs like John Jacob Astor proved without a doubt that private industry prevails over the lumbering giant known as Government. Just about anything you can think of in this country is subsidized in part or in its entirety by tax dollars: Education, healthcare, ethanol production, farming, ranching, solar power, wind power, oil and gas production, churches.... Help me out here. I know there are more things to add to the list.

Aristocracy never really disappeared from this country. It just morphed into elitism that preys on sluggish minds: We know what's good for you. We must continue those subsidies, or else!

There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing, in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in ante-revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased....

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 1851