I woke up Sunday morning, raised my window shade and looked out to find snow falling from the sky. I have a pretty view, out away from campus, into the woods and up around the hills, now cloaked in white. I noticed, looking out, a small black housefly sandwiched between my windowpane and the screening, clutching to the screen like a supplicating prisoner. Tenacious, I thought. And then I remembered that I am a prospective ecological biology major, and there was something distinctly wrong with this picture of a fly in the middle of a New Hampshire winter -- either I had just found the first endothermic fly with a metabolism nearly defying physical law, or there was more here than meets the eye.
There was more there than met the eye. The fly's six little legs were frozen quite solidly to the metal mesh, its millions of iridescent eyes staring out into nothing on those bulbous processes jutting from its tiny head. I have to admit I'm not much of an entomologist. I avoid killing spiders (not insects) and the like if I can, but I destroy with abandon every last mosquito (insect), tick (not) and horsefly (not when I'm done with them) that I possibly can.
But looking out at the little bug stuck to my screen, apparently desperate to escape the cold against the backdrop of acre upon acre of frosted trees, touched a bit of a nerve. It had all the quiet power that inspires poetry, the sort of emotional totality that makes men become philosophers and with a dream-like winter vista casting an ominous beauty on his stiff body; I think one well could have written a song. So I decided I'd write about him today.
I betook myself to thinking how the fly could have come to be there. An important note which I forgot to mention: the fly wasn't on my window when I went to bed the previous evening, his location is conspicuous and his abdomen portly and black; against the white it's unmistakable. Which means that sometime between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. a housefly, Musca domestica, three-eighths of an inch long, infiltrated my room, snuck through the narrow opening of my window and became confused, buzzing around and bumping his antennae into glass and screen in a frantic attempt to escape. Then, realizing the futility of his efforts and the inevitability before him, he chose a spot with a pretty view, clutched the screen with his hooked hairy feet and died.
I imagine the little guy was passing the winter days in a state of suspended animation, his body mostly shut down, wedged in a narrow crevice somewhere in my room. Perhaps when I cracked my window Saturday evening, the unseasonable balminess of the night (it must have been near 40 degrees), coupled perhaps with the smell of a heaping trash bin or a pile of a dog's recent work, proved too much for him as it wafted slowly to his hypersensitive chemoreceptors, (the location of which I'm embarrassed to say I know not, though he's beautifully preserved if you care to look).
Following the trail, he must have buzzed back and forth over my sleeping form, watchful (if he can see in the dark) for movement on my part. I had a fan going to blot out any noise, so I didn't hear him. He found the crack and slipped through, his puny mind filled with simple thoughts of victory and of a feast on something fetid. Then he hit the screen, reached his legs through it but couldn't find a way around. I imagine there was a time when he was quite frightened, if Musca domestica can feel fear. I hope, at the end, the drop in temperature brought him some peace before death.
Perhaps I anthropomorphize. Likely the fly's nervous system can't support self-awareness or do anything more than report on homeostatic conditions. In all likelihood, the fly's death proceeded like the shutdown of a computer, with information reported and machinery slowing until the final blackness. But no one really knows, so I'll stick with my image, for the poetry of it if nothing else. Sometimes a writer and sometimes a biologist, it's a tricky lifestyle, but it makes for interesting outlooks.
What's the point, you may ask, as I do now. Who cares? And I guess I don't know. It brings together the Boy Scout's motto and Murphy's Law and my father's plea that I always be careful
There are probably a mole (Avogadro's number) of flies in Hanover in the summer, but this one came out in winter and died on my window and caught my attention. Something in that drama has to be important. If not, I don't really care. There's a dead fly on my window screen in winter. The trees beyond it are lovely and white.
