Wildlife and Technology

I’m going to put the Being & Nothingness Cam Team members on their old rotations, since it looks like if I don’t they’ll just hang around here and turn the office into a coffee shop. Before I left, at around 1:30 AM, I decided I really would have them tackle the food moth invasion. It’s not exactly in their job descriptions, but, hell, they were coffee-crazed and seemed game. I had some old dish cloths in the store room and they got them damp and played wack-a-moth. Today all four rooms appear moth-free. I found out this morning that Phaye had a camera in her backpack, and I imagined Moth Team action shots: 3 adults in dark clothing and raspberry-colored berets, jumping up and down, swinging dish cloths against the walls. That could have been some serious modern art.

I caught Phaye this morning on the back step of the office squatting down taking a picture of something. When she heard me coming she hid the camera like a guilty child and moved away. There was a medium-sized garter snake curled in a heap in the sun on the wooden step. Phaye had gotten one picture before I came out, a little blurry, but I posted it anyway.

Phaye’s behavior is because, among other hiring conditions, no one may bring to work anything like a Blackberry, laptop, even a cell phone—nothing with chips, memory, rechargeable batteries, nothing. I’d love to work myself into a middle-aged frenzy expounding on evils of them-there modern gee-gaws, but I can’t. Among the multiple stipulations and prohibitions I agreed to when I accepted the Being & Nothingness Cam Project grant was that nothing along those lines could be the office. And, no, I don’t know why. I was alarmed when I saw Phaye’s camera and felt like a bad girl myself. She was outside, so I simply told her that she couldn't use it again.

We looked at the snake for a while and I wondered why it lay so still. It had to have been in the sun long enough to move and get away from us. I picked it up to get it to a safer place and it was stone cold.

Dead, I guessed. But while I held it in my hand it began to move and became alert. This made no sense: a cold snake in the sun? I walked across the yard and put it into some overgrown grass and after a few seconds it came to and got away under the nearby fence in a hurry. On the way back to the office I paused to pick up a coffee cup that had been left on the black table in the yard and the cup was cold. I felt the table and the black metal chairs around it—all of them in the full morning sun for a good hour—and they were all very cold.