Tuesday morning the church garden crew I work with gathered to pull the last of the zinnias from the narrow strip where they grow next to Little Rock's Sixth Street, between Cumberland and Scott. Late last summer and early fall, the zinnias were covered with butterflies; this year, though the butterfly weed is thriving, I have not seen more than two or three butterflies at a time.
Is this the result of a natural variation in butterfly population, or should I be concerned? Did they change their route? Duck hunters may have a better sense of this kind of thing than I have.
The last part of pulling up the zinnias is whacking their stalks against the curb to shake topsoil off their roots. Topsoil is a precious resource and must be conserved. After beating the last of the zinnias, I had started to weed and shape the beds when some projectile shot from the west into my field of vision.
It was a praying mantis.
I would have taken it for a big grasshopper were it not for "The Far Side," the single-panel cartoon originally called "Nature's Way," found in newspapers all over the country from 1979 to 1995. When it ended, this newspaper ran an editorial elegy called "No more talking cows."
My mother bought me collection after collection of "The Far Side" and I studied it the way good Baptists study their Bibles. In fact, I studied "The Far Side" during the years when any good Protestant a generation or more back would have pulled herself up to the first rung of biblical literacy.
"The Far Side" and the Bible are not equal, but they are both hilarious, perhaps because they contain the same fundamental idea, one we forget at our peril: We are created. Creatures.
Reverence does not exclude humor, and "God is not mocked" should be read as a warning against imitation, not against laughter. Imitation is permitted to artists, as long as they remember that they are imitators. Every sunset should be a pleasant humiliation.
The mantis sent me, as soon as I got home, to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. See it for a long article on Mantodea. The creature I got to look at for a few hours was, I think, stagmomantis carolina, the Carolina mantid. Glad to have him or her here.
Look up "entomology" in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, and the first entry you encounter dedicated to a human is for Douglas Arthur James, who organized the first meeting of the Ozark Society, which fought the damming of the Buffalo River.
James began teaching ornithology at the University of Arkansas in 1953 at the invitation of Samuel Dellinger. He taught until 2015. His predecessor, William J. Baerg, a spider specialist, taught ornithology from around 1920 till James' arrival, meaning that ornithology was taught at Fayetteville by one of two insect specialists for almost 90 years.
As a member of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, James also served in the Biological Warfare Unit at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. While there, he helped found the Arkansas Audubon Society.
Ernest James Harris was another entomologist from Arkansas. He came from a farm in north Pulaski County and studied at Arkansas AM&N (UAPB) but, according to his Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry, could only get work as a janitor after his graduation in 1951. He traveled the country by motorcycle and settled in Milwaukee, where he worked in a lab until he went to the University of Minnesota for a master's degree. After earning that, he came back for a few years to Pine Bluff.
Then the United States Department of Agriculture drew him to Hawaii, where he bred a species of wasps that "parasitize" the eggs of fruit flies. Apparently the entire country of Chile has been without fruit flies since 1975 thanks to Harris' work.
A look at "entymology" in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas also turns up Vance Randolph. Perhaps man is, after all, the measure of all things. From his early work in the 1920s until the 1970s, Randolph was resented by the Ozark people he wrote about and ignored by people who thought those Ozark people didn't matter.
Excepting a wonderful book of children's folklore published by Little Rock's August House and stuff I heard from old people, my early impression of "folklore" was, sadly, that it belonged to the aesthetic category of "down home" and "aw shucks."
Vance Randolph's compilations of Ozark bawdy works ("Roll Me in Your Arms" and "Blow the Candle Out," both available for purchase at the Old State House Museum, last I checked) led me out of that early impression. They are delightful and remain, I am happy to say, unprintable in a family newspaper.
And, like "The Far Side" and the best parts of the Bible, they remind us that we are, after all, human.