Page 106 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

My very personal dragonfly encounter

took place summer of 1995, and lasted

over an hour. Kris and I were playing golf

with our friend Ruth, on the Willow Park

course in Castro Valley. Ruth’s ball had

gone into the creek that runs the length

of the course and keeps it both

challenging and life-­‐filled. From TV

images, golf courses seem like human-­‐

only territory, but the municipal courses

my friends and I play in the Bay Area are

full of wild creatures. A blue heron lives

along Willow Creek, as do hawks and

snakes, rabbits and foxes, turkeys and

coyotes; once, we saw a mountain lion on

a nearby hill. So when I went over to help Ruth look for her ball I wasn’t surprised to see something

moving in the thick scum of algae growth covering the water at this particular spot. An insect about

three inches long was persistently, if weakly, moving. I called Ruth to come with her long aluminum

ball retriever, and she got the cup of it under what we now recognized as a dragonfly. The rescue

immediately looked like a cruel exercise in futility as we saw that the body of the creature was

completely enmeshed in webs of slime, a mossy growth of algae in long thin intersecting lines that

made a netlike cocoon around the struggling body. The largest dragonfly I had ever seen now lay

helpless in the palm of my hand. Gingerly, I began to strip off the binding strands of slime. There were

dozens of them. Would the dragonfly let me help? My fingers looked huge compared to the

vulnerable, exhausted body in my hand.

We still had a golf game to play, and golf etiquette requires keeping up the pace, so we treated the

creature as we walked along, at first taking turns holding it while we hit our shots. The creek area

where we had found the dragonfly was the fourth hole, less than half way through our game, which is

about a mile and a half in length. By the fifth hole she—I call her she because she was so large, and

often among flying creatures the larger ones are female—was riding on Kris’ shoulder, clinging with