By katie
all flourishing is mutual
what a cluster of beetles taught me about decay, loops, and what comes next
on the kingfisher trail in early june, not far from my sit spot, i found a small cluster of american carrion beetles working on something dead in the center of the trail. i almost stepped right over them. they have black wing covers, and behind the head a strange yellow shield like they're wearing a tiny cape. from a distance they look like bumblebees, which i think is the whole point. apprently they can smell death from a long way off and they fly straight for it.
i crouched down and just watched for a while. it was mesmerizing. i've been getting more curious i think, i've been stopping for things i would have stepped past a year ago, i'm noticing more.
i started looking into these beetles: they don't show up right away. they wait a few days, until the smell is strong enough to travel, and by the time they arrive the flies are already there ahead of them, laying their own eggs. the beetles feed on the carcass, but they also feed on the fly larvae, and then they lay their own eggs in the soil right next to the body. their own larvae hatch into that same mess and finish the job. everything on top of everything. it's not one clean process, it's a whole crowded ecoysstem, all of them eating and being eaten and building the next generation out of the last thing's death.
i used to think of decay as an ending. now i think it's more of a handoff. the body stops being one thing and starts being soil, then bug, then bird, then, a long way down the line: me, walking a trail, stopping because something looks sooooo utterly strange.
there's a marxist idea, the "metabolic rift," this notion that capitalism snapped an old loop in half. the loop used to be something like: you take from the soil, you die, you go back into the soil, the soil feeds the next thing. capitalism broke that. we extract and extract and ship the nutrients off somewhere else and nothing local ever gets given back. the carrion beetle doesn't have that problem. it is, structurally, incapable of extraction without return. it eats the body and it deposits its eggs right there in the dirt beside it, so its own children are raised on the site of what it just consumed. no rift. the whole system stays put and stays fed.
i keep coming back to that line i wrote a few months ago, about loving the circular aspects of the natural world. i think this is what i meant; i just hadn't found the beetles yet. death on the kingfisher trail isn't separate from the ferns coming up along it or the ducks landing on the jones falls a few feet away. it's the same trail. it's the same circle. the beetles are just the part of it that we typically don't like to look at, which is maybe exactly why i made myself look. and i'm glad that i did.
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