Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  As a humorist myself—which is to say, as a person for whom irreverence must be understood as my stock-in-trade—I do not have a problem with any of that. But here is what chaps my hide: Sedaris fails to realize that it is not he but instead the Reno woman who delivers the punch line, of which Sedaris himself is the butt. “I didn’t think anyone was going to notice,” she replies, without missing a beat. The irony in this exchange belongs not to the humorist for observing the idiosyncrasy of the woman’s informal attire but rather to the woman, who knows perfectly well what Sedaris is doing and bests him by turning the joke around with the kind of graceful, self-deprecating irony that is the hallmark of genuine wit. (And can there be any doubt that she is a person of good humor if she has chosen to wear her Chocula colors to a performing arts center?) Every desert rat knows that this brand of dry humor is a signature characteristic of those of us who dwell in this dry place.

  Sedaris is right that this is an amusing anecdote. He is simply wrong about why. So I hope one of you reading this will let him know that black socks go with black shoes and teach him how to pronounce Nevada. (You might also mention to Jon that Nevada is the driest state in the Union.) Most important, please tell David Sedaris—whom I consider the most gifted literary humorist working today—that it is we who consider him the unwitting provincial. You think The New Yorker has cornered the market on irony? Out here in the desert West, our irony is so damned dry that it’s scary. Bluh! Bluh! Bwaa haah haah!

  WHILE HANNAH IS THE family intellectual, Caroline is a tireless athlete, which is why Eryn and I were surprised when Caroline chose “Ancient Egypt” for her day-camp class. For five days she immersed herself in the culture of an ancient people who, like her, were intrepid desert dwellers. On the afternoon of her third day in camp, Caroline brought home her freshly made drawing of an Egyptian goddess.

  “What is that cornucopia-looking thing on top of this lady’s noggin?” I asked Caroline.

  “Come on, Dad. Can’t you tell? That’s a big ol’ scorpion!” she replied with genuine enthusiasm.

  “No kidding? Weird place for a scorpion. What’s her name?”

  “It gets spelled different sometimes, but basically it is S-E-R-K-E-T. Six or seven thousand years ago, she was supposably the goddess of stings and bites. A lot of the old Egyptian people thought she could protect them from scorpion stings. There was even a gold statue of her in there with King Tut!” she explained. “Pretty epic, huh?”

  I may have been in detention in the principal’s office during the ancient Egypt unit in my own educational past, but somehow the scorpion on the head thing struck me as improbable, and seven thousand sounded like too many years, even for so ancient a culture. But a little research convinced me that Caroline had her story straight and that Serqet (or Serket or Selket) was indeed a powerful goddess dating back to the predynastic period of Egyptian culture, which flourished between about 5500 and 3100 BCE.

  As a deification of the scorpion, Serqet represented genuine power in a culture for whom lethal scorpion stings would have been a very real threat. Her full name, “Serket hetyt,” contains an intriguing dual reference to the gruesome asphyxiation that can be caused by a bad sting. The name may mean “she who tightens the throat,” a clear allusion to the toxic power of the scorpion and its representative goddess, or “she who causes the throat to breathe,” which instead suggests her power to protect or restore those who might otherwise perish from a sting. The scorpion is common in ancient Egyptian art. Among the earliest hieroglyphic signs was the scorpion ideogram, which is found written in papyrus texts, carved into ivory and wood, and chiseled into stone monuments.

  The evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane once observed that the Creator must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” because beetle species are so impressively numerous. He might well have added that the Creator seems to like scorpions pretty well too. More than seventeen hundred species are known, and they exist on every continent except Antarctica. The fossil record is also rich in scorpions, and we know that this fascinating animal has existed in some form for around 450 million years, making it one of the oldest terrestrial invertebrates on the planet. There are scorpions in caves, in jungles, on prairies and savannahs, even high in the Andes and Himalayas. As the goddess Serqet reminds us, however, scorpions are most abundant in deserts. Of the ninety or so species in the United States, almost all are found west of the Mississippi River, and most live in the arid and semiarid regions of the West. Here in Nevada we have around twenty species, and while some of those exist only down in Mojave country, up here in the Great Basin we have scorpions aplenty. They range from tiny little guys all the way up to the Northern Desert Hairy Scorpion (Hadrurus spadix), which can be almost six inches long—large enough to eat mice, lizards, and other scorpions.

  We humans specialize in being afraid of things (and people, and ideas) we do not understand. While this spontaneous fear may retain some modest adaptive value, often it causes us to act like small-minded dummies and, even worse, to miss out on a lot of things that are remarkably cool. Many people would include scorpions, along with their cousins the spiders (both are arachnids and neither is an insect), in the category of “the only thing I know about this animal is that I am scared of it.” It is true that all scorpions sting and all are venomous. And, yes, they like to hide in places where they are difficult to detect and then ambush their prey—or your foot—in a vicious attack. And, sure, they brutally crush their victim in their pinchers while stinging it with a paralyzing blast of neurotoxins and enzyme inhibitors before subjecting it to a tissue-dissolving acid spray, after which they coolly slurp it up. But is this treatment any worse than what we rural Westerners are subjected to by our local county commissioners? Young children (other than county commissioners) are at greater risk. The Mayo Clinic reports that after receiving a sting, little kids may experience convulsions, drooling, sweating, and inconsolable crying. If this is an accurate description of symptoms, I hereby submit that all five-year-olds everywhere are being stung by scorpions all the time. I will allow that anyone who is allergic to scorpion venom is likely to have a rough time of it, but why malign these little arthropods when the same might be said of a damned peanut?

  Not many scorpions in the United States have a very potent sting. Southern Nevadans have to worry about the notoriously toxic bark scorpion, which likes to crawl up walls, hide behind framed pictures, and then creep out at night to drink your best whiskey before attacking and devouring you as you sleep. But I doubt even this fate could crack the top-ten list called “Risks of Visiting Vegas.” Here in the northern desert, our scorpions all have friendly little stings that are somewhere between a harvester ant’s bite and a honey bee’s sting. And since we have almost no gnats, chiggers, ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, horseflies, wasps, yellow jackets, or hornets, we need something that can sting just to keep us from getting too soft.

  One of the many amazing things about scorpions is that they glow in the dark. To be more specific, they glow under ultraviolet light. There has been considerable debate about why a scorpion should have this in common with the 1970s fuzzy poster of a ghost ship on the wall of your parents’ basement that ignites under what stoners used to call “black light.” Some have maintained that this glow trick is a random accident of evolution, which is a theory that strikes me as both unlikely and just plain lazy. Others have wondered if the fluorescence is used to help scorpions hunt, but there is no solid evidence to support this theory. Nor does it seem likely that the glow warns predators or allows communication between scorpions, though both explanations have intuitive appeal and do remain possible.

  The current and most likely explanation for scorpion luminescence is far more incredible. Start with the fact that although scorpions have one pair of eyes atop their cephalothorax (“headchest”) and another two to five pairs along the front sides of their cephalothorax, they have crummy eyesight. To be more precise, they have decent sight within the blue-green spectrum and truly lou
sy vision outside it. Now, add to this that the main hazard of being a scorpion is that it might be spotted by moonlight (they’re nocturnal, after all) and get picked off by a predatory lizard, snake, rodent, or bird. The best way to avoid this fate is, obviously, to take cover. But how can the poor scorpion know whether it is being illuminated if its (many) eyes are unable to detect the wavelength of light that emanates from the moon?

  It appears that their elegant solution has been to evolve a cuticle that is charged with beta-carboline and other luminescent chemicals. When the scorpion’s exoskeleton is struck by moonlight—which, as a reflection of sunlight, contains some of the same UV rays you use sunscreen to protect yourself from—it glows. In this sense, the scorpion’s entire body functions as an eye, one that is highly sensitive to very small amounts of UV light. If a scorpion sees itself luminescing—which it can only because the wavelength of that luminesce falls in the blue-green spectrum—it knows that it is exposed and must seek cover. Somewhere deep in its 450-million-year-old nogginchest, the scorpion says to itself, “Dang, my ass is glowing again. Better head for the sagebrush!”

  Last night, my buddy Steve—who, along with his wife, Cheryll, has the distinction of having been stung by a scorpion—rolled up to Ranting Hill to lead me on a land lobster expedition. It is essential that one have the proper high-tech equipment before undertaking this challenging and dangerous adventure. Please listen to me carefully, dear reader, because your life could depend upon being properly outfitted. You must have all of the following gear: a UV flashlight (ten bucks at the hardware store) and whiskey. To go afield lacking either could be risky.

  Steve and I set out just after dusk, knowing we had only ninety minutes before the rising of the full moon, which would flood the desert with light and send scorpions into hiding. (Remember the glowing butt epiphany?) It was also a breezy night, which is not ideal for a scorpion search. Because the animal stalks insects by detecting vibrations through sensory organs in the tips of its legs and specialized hairs on its pincers, wind can disturb its hunting strategy. Despite all this, it took only a minute or two for scorpions to pop out in the purple beams of our flashlights. Steve found one at the base of a native shrub I had planted just a few days before, while another was down by my woodpile, and a third near the girls’ tree house. As we headed into the open desert, we discovered others near juniper snags, around sage and bitterbrush, in the rice grass, and even on sandy flats between patches of balsamroot, whose dry leaves rattled gently in the breeze. Some of the scorpions held motionless, like tiny lobsters. Others crawled along slowly. Yet others scurried with surprising speed to avoid us and tuck into their burrows, which are marked by small, arched holes in the desert floor. The scorpions glowed beautifully beneath otherworldly splashes of bright purple as our UV beams tunneled through the darkness.

  When I looked up from one of our finds to survey the moonless sky, I noticed reddish Mars and bright, blue-white Spica unusually close to each other in the West. Hanging low in the south was Scorpio, the giant, gracefully curved constellation known since the time of the Babylonians as a scorpion. The unmistakable reddish gem of Antares (which means “rival of Mars”) shone brightly from the center of its celestial cephalothorax.

  I am only slightly ashamed to admit that the high point of the evening was ogling scorpion sex. Steve called me over to witness two scorpions doing what arachnophiles call the promenade à deux, which is a classy, Frenchified, nonpornographic term for the unique mating “dance” of the scorpion—an elaborate process that can take many hours and is highly ritualized. First, the male grasps the female’s pedipalps (little mouth claws, like those seen in spiders) in his. Then, he dances her around looking for a good place to deposit his spermatophore, the sperm packet that she will hopefully take into her genital operculum, thus triggering release of the sperm. This courtship dance can also involve “juddering,” in which the scorpions shudder and convulse, and the “cheliceral kiss,” during which the male uses his pincers to hold the female’s pincers in a gesture that looks, to my human eyes, like holding hands. When this ritual dance is complete, the male retreats quickly, probably to avoid being gobbled up by his partner. Scorpions are ovoviviparous, which means that the young are hatched within the female and only afterward born into the world. Once outside the female, the tiny scorplings will crawl onto her back and hang on there, until they have molted once and are ready to light out on their own.

  I have neighbors who say that in their many years of living out here in Silver Hills, they have never seen a scorpion. In ninety minutes of night hiking, Steve and I discovered eighty scorpions, two of which were dancing for the future, and each of which is an amazing, glowing little packet of 450 million years of evolutionary brilliance. I find it fascinating that in all this wide, wild, windy desert, nothing glows under UV light save the scorpion. What if we had a flashlight that emitted a beam that illuminated only spiders and another that ignited only snakes and another that revealed only rodents—or, better yet, separate wavelengths for antelope ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, and bushy-tailed packrats? What if we were capable of matching the astounding diversity and richness of life in this sagebrush steppe biome with a mode of perception that was equally revelatory?

  After thinking deeply about our ability—and, more often, our inability—to perceive nature, Henry Thoreau observed, “The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see.” To say that the Great Basin is barren is to admit an inattentiveness that is the perceptual equivalent of blindness. Those who dismiss this landscape as empty may be looking at it, but they are not seeing it. This desert is emitting its spectacular beauty in a wavelength that their eyes are not yet evolved to detect.

  FOR SOME TIME NOW, Hannah and Caroline have been hard at work trying to convince me that grieving for Darcy was over, and we needed to get a new puppy on Ranting Hill. At last I have ceased resistance. In the past I have always owned mongrel bitches that I fetched from the pound for a few bucks and a pledge to spay. But this time Eryn suggested that I should not impose my own lack of good breeding on the new family pet, and so she instead proposed that we complete an online survey to determine which breed of dog would be right for us. It is now clear I should never have agreed to this human-canine compatibility quiz, but at the time it seemed harmless enough to tap a few keys and build a profile of the perfect dog. Did I want a pooch that would be tireless in the field, better behaved than my children, not lap up toilet water like our worthless cat, and stay mellow even when I wail on the blues harp? You bet! So we clicked a bunch of boxes and out popped the result: English setter.

  I had never heard of an English setter, and, frankly, I didn’t like how…well, how English it sounded. Since my agency in the family has long been reduced to weed-whacking and drinking whiskey (not always in that order), it was soon decided that we would fork over a mountain of cash to score this dog from a breeder on the California side of the Sierra. I am too embarrassed to confess how much this puppy cost, but it was exactly the same amount I would have paid for a Stihl MS 291 chainsaw with a twenty-inch bar, which is something I have long wanted. The upside was that after securing puppy-naming rights, I insisted on “Beauregard,” which I taught the girls to pronounce with a ponderous, jowly Southern drawl. Caroline was quick to perfect her “Southern accident,” as she innocently called it, and soon was a dead ringer for the rebel rooster Foghorn Leghorn after a few too many mint juleps.

  The day the eleven-week-old puppy arrived on Ranting Hill, I experienced a Nevada-size case of buyer’s remorse. “He’s sooo cute!” the girls squealed as Eryn rehearsed his pedigree in a futile attempt to reassure me.

  “His father, Uncle Raleigh, was a great bird dog, and Kaycee, his mother, was an award-winning show dog,” she said. The fact that Beau’s father was his uncle seemed not only confusing but also potentially incestuous, while the dad’s name, Uncle Raleigh, just sounded painfully English.

  Even more troubling was Mom’s name. “Un
cle Raleigh and Kaycee?” I confirmed. “So Beauregard is the product of one of those royal scandals where the rich aristocrat fathers a bastard child with a prostitute?”

  Try as I might, I did not see in Beau the kind of good-looking dog that a sensible guy would swap a decent chainsaw for. He had a skinny little body, but with an oversize head that looked like the wrinkle-faced head of a very old man, which gave him a creepy look. His legs were thin as willow sticks, but at their ends were lynx-like paws about the size of catcher’s mitts, suggesting that if he grew into those feet he would weigh as much as a ten-point muley buck. His tail was the classic, bird-dog pointer tail, only it had a sharply angled crink where it looked like someone had slammed it in their tailgate. His skin was absurdly loose and baggy, which—along with his droopy, red eyes—made him look like a wino wearing a speckled, thrift-store suit three sizes too large. His ears were so long that they dragged along in the dirt whenever he walked, and each time he lowered his muzzle to the water bowl those dangling ears would go submarine, surprise him, and he’d come up with a startled headshake that strafed water all the way up the surrounding walls.

  Worst of all, this puppy had lips so preposterously long and flappy that he looked like an animal evolved to evade predators by rolling itself up in its own baggy face. Never have I seen such a bizarre sight as little Beau, with those crazy lips the size of a pelican’s pouch, sitting patiently while the hot desert wind, catching between his cheeks and gums, flapped his giant lips up and down in a fluttering rhythm that sounded like a baseball card slapping in the spokes of a revolving bicycle wheel—though, to make this analogy accurate, the bike would also have to be covered in dangling strings of viscous slobber. It could not have been an accident that Beauregard was actually born on April Fool’s Day.