I'm so pleased I was able to find this picture to memorialize something that happened to me at a time when I wasn't carrying my camera. And I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to take a picture this clear, least of all with one hand.
I have been noticing dragonflies speeding and hovering over every patch of grass all this summer, here in Boston. Even at Fenway Park, when I looked through my binoculars to take a closer look at how David Ortiz manages his swing, there were huge dragonflies just a few feet from the bat. I was thinking, one of those beautiful insects is going to get it for sure.
A few days later as I was crossing a busy traffic island between Quincy Market and Christopher Columbus Park on the Harbor, my eye fell on a dragonfly lying on its back on the asphalt, about to get stepped on. I grabbed it up by the abdomen and carried it over into the park, then set it down right side up on my palm.
It was alive, it must have been stunned by a passing windshield. It was standing on its own legs on my hand, still stunned. I could see the tiny abdomen panting two breaths per second, fat-thin-fat-thin-fat-thin. I had no idea a dragonfly's breathing would be so visible.
And then came an extraordinary half hour in which I sat watching and it sat recovering. It was clearly happy just where it was, grateful to be in a still place. I examined it closely and could see no damage, either to wing or leg or body.
I had time to study the complex veining of the wings. This made me think of a house with additions over the years. There was the basic original wing, then something must have happened in evolution and the main structural veins suddenly had a bold new idea and went zigzagging off in a new design to support a lateral add-on with a different pattern. And the other more dutiful genes came along and filled the new wing spaces with regular useful square ribs like house framing. The clear material between the veins glistened whitely here and was invisible there.
The body color was intense and jewel-like, but the color was the more brilliant for grading out of a browner green which set off the emerald.
It appeared to have two big eyes, of course, but I knew that each was composed of thousands of individual eyes. I could just see a softness or roughness around the edge of the reflection of the sun in each orb which showed that the surface was not completely flat but made of unimaginably tiny knobs.
I looked and looked, and it didn't move. It didn't mind my breath on its neck. Its breathing was still fast, mine was slow and trancelike.
The sun was starting to go down and I knew I had to go home on the subway. I wanted to leave it in the grass, near its food supply. I gently shook my hand, then tried putting my palm down near the grass to let it walk off if it was not ready to fly.
And it didn't want to let go. Each of the tiny feet was gripping its savior's skin with what looked to the naked eye like a thumb and one finger. It was holding on for its life.
Minutes passed. I knew this extraordinary thing would likely never happen again in my earthly existence. I finally pried it up as gently as I could and set it in the grass.
It immediately sputtered and curled up, as if twisted in rage or grief at this second disruption. I watched a while longer, hoping to see it recover, but the dark was gathering and at last I could no longer make it out.
May it recover and live long, and capture many another mosquito. And may I have another opportunity in my tiny short life to intersect with another creature's different life, to see with my two eyes, a fraction of what that splendid being could see with its sixty thousand. In this universe, whose vastness of time and space we can speak of but not imagine, the difference between its lifespan and ours is unworthy to be measured.
