Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Elemental Forces

When the rain is not gentle, everything suffers
August 29, 2006

I am thankful all the rain in August did not bring a hailstorm. Hailstorms are a destructive force of overwhelming proportion – a gut-wrenching fearful experience. When thunder exceeds 100 decibels fear wrenches to the fore – and anxiety threatens my equilibrium. One hailstorm is indelibly seared in my memory.

A number of years ago, at 2 a.m., hailstones clattered for the “hours” that can reside within 15 minutes. In the wake of the storm hail was 3 inches deep on the ground. On the north side of the house a “haildrift” took 36 hours to melt. Every nesting bird in the neighborhood died, as did every jackrabbit and cottontail in the pasture.

Plants were stripped of leaves, beaten to the ground, and left with bark splintered. A frothy brown meringue in rainwater pools mixed with floating hailstones finally melted just before noon. Tendrils of fog drifted through the leafless mesquite from the supercooled water for an hour after daybreak. The ground looked like the surface of a golf ball, pinged with regular craters uniform in density and pattern. The spicy odors of crushed leaves in the morning soon gave way to the stench of death. During the day heat, magnified by humidity, radiated from the earth, a horrible thick cloying exhalation.

By nine in the morning the ground shimmered like hot pavement. I shook my head – were my eyes watering? Even after rubbing my eyes the ground pulsed. I finally focused on billions of termites with bright, glistening, sky-reflecting wings. In never-ending trains they emerged from newly opened tunnels to mill, hesitate, cluster, and to test their new wings with ever-quickening shivering tension. Within minutes the termites swarmed, a blizzard blindly launching up from the ground, up my nose, in my ears and under my eyelashes. The termites were soon out of sight. No nighthawks, no swallows, no kingbirds, nor any scissortail flycatchers came to feast. These aerialists always come to the bounty of the post-rainstorm termite swarm, but death had trampled a “considerable” expanse of the landscape.

By afternoon flies gathered on rabbit carcasses. How had they survived, or were they the vanguard of other scavengers – vultures, coyotes, sexton beetles, skunks, and possums? Vultures normally swirl high, omniscient, awaiting the very second of death. One’s descent to the ground brings several neighbor vultures, and their descents brings more – but where were they?

At the base of a scarred prickly pear cactus six millipedes clustered around a mating pair wound together in a double helix. When I touched one, it did not immediately coil as usual – it marched away, under the netting of a long dead cactus pad on the ground. Under other decaying pads I spotted others. I lifted a pad to examine one that had its head circled back to its other end. I could see it regurgitating “glop.” After a minute it moved a few inches, and then circled to regurgitate more glop. In each wad of glop she left an egg – and the glop’s surface soon hardened. Other millipedes clustered around splintered Ephedra twigs scattered on the ground. The silica in the twigs aids their digestion, and with the ensuing time of plentiful rotting vegetation the millipedes would feast until they returned home to the subterranean midden rooms of Aphanogaster ants.

I visited rainwater filled playa that evening after darkness descended. The grass-covered playa bottom would soon provide a base for algae, a tadpole’s choice for its round rasping mouth. A two-foot tall dead mesquite’s top projected six inche3s above the frothy brownish red water. Thousands of toads sung as loud as the hail had rattled on the previous night. Within the cacophony and revealed slowly by flashlight, order was presented. The Great Plains toads floated in the deepest water. As they mated, their strings of eggs would sink to the bottom. Tadpoles of these toads take longer to grow than of other toads.

Nearer the edge of the water female Plains spadefoot toads clasped grass leaves that they draped with egg strings. Their eggs would hatch in less than 24 hours, and the young would leave in two weeks. The Great Plains toads bleated like frightened sheep. The spadefoot toads sung with great oscillating rhythms, swelling to glorious chorus, then softening and fading away to return again and again.
On one side of the playa a builder had dumped dumptruck loads of broken concrete. The pseudo-rocks formed an archipelago and within the shallows a quiet bee buzzing could be heard. Narrow mouthed toads! The species is more common further east.

On the shore two tarantulas paced along the edge of the water, their burrows under the concrete now under water. Another tarantula perched on a dry hunk of concrete. The narrow mouthed toads live in tarantula burrows. The toads use the tarantulas themselves as protection. These toads run (not hop) to cower under a tarantula at the approach of hognosed and garter snakes. The slime of the toads coats the tarantula burrow, preventing parasitic soil mites from infesting the tarantulas.

The cycle of life and death is never-ending. Catastrophic events bring immediate change, but today only an astute observer will notice hail-scars on older branches of the mesquite. The only lasting residue of the storm is my own alarm when storms reach violent levels. I get very quiet and offer silent prayers of “Let the center of the storm miss us, please.”