Caterpillars and Camping Out

There was a caterpillar clinging to a stick in a jar in my elementary school classrooms. I suspect it is a common experience for most kids.

Caterpillars would crawl about, munching the leaves we had stuffed in, and eventually turn into an organic jewel hanging from the stick. Within days or weeks we would see another creature emerge. The various elementary schools I went to in northern California seemed to always use the monarch butterfly.

Very dramatic. A greenish worm with rows of legs striped like a tiger... a green jewel hanging from the stick like some ancient Egyptian good luck piece. A fragile insect with moist wrinkled appendages becoming within minutes beautiful black and orange wings. A fragile flapping bit of orange and black flying haphazardly away.

I tried collecting caterpillars myself for years after that. I only succeeded a few times in providing the correct vegetation to power the process for my caterpillar captives.

Later in life "Caterpillar" took on another meaning. A Caterpillar was a powerful diesel powered machine belching black smoke, tearing down buildings, and repeatedly threatening my life. Caterpillar tractors lifted my brothers and I to rooftops supported by fragile teetering walls cracked by my father, ready to come crushing down with a single blow of the metal monster's jaw. "Riding the Roof" was a favorite game for my brothers and I, surfing a platform of sloping wooden shingles on roiling waves of crushing debris, surfing down the two or three stories over squirting glass, wood, counter tops, chimneys, whatever may have been left behind by previous inhabitants.

We watched in all directions for boards which might suddenly pierce through our bucking platform. We laughed and shouted in bravado hiding our silent fears.

It was a Caterpillar that lifted my brother and I into the air, carried us over the edge of the sixty foot cliff where we watched seagulls dance on waves between our dangling feet. The steel jaw tried to dump us but we clung on.

It was Caterpillars that my brother Mike learned to make into extensions of himself, deftly turning tons of steel growling in an idling sleep, into a living thing that gracefully swept through buildings and dirt, mud and rock, creating new spaces for new buildings. The best I could do was to awkwardly wrestle the behemoths through their tasks, crushing houses or mixing soil with water in a stiff mechanical dance which took all my concentration to pull off.

Maggie was a caterpillar motorgrader of ancient design (worm drive instead of hydraulics, a large gas engine as the pony engine for her diesel...) who almost got me killed. But that is another post (one I've already written out by hand).

Between the strange many legged worms, and the destructive monsters of metal and hydraulics, I learned lifetime lessons of change in caterpillars. Rebirth of living things, rebirth of plots of Southern California land (my father's company has torn down three buildings in the same locations in several places in So. Cal. Tear them down, build them up, tear them down again, put in something else, tear it down...). The changes wrought by the internal workings of those strange insects, and the changes wrought by the external workings of the yellow machines are apt metaphors for the changes of my own life.

I'm getting a divorce.

My wife is realizing I am serious, I see supressed fear in her eyes, an uncertain future. I suppose there is something similar in my own eyes.

We went on the annual church camp out this weekend. We set up camp in the rain. We got soaked. Our tent got soaked. We had wet bedding and wet boxes of food and dampened spirits, though that last part was only partly from the circumstances of being in an unexpected Oregon rain.

We mopped up the tents with towels that grew so heavy with water they could absorb no more. We wiped down all we could, and took the hospitality of campground neighbors/fellow church members and ate fried chicken, corn on the cob, salad, and clean bottled water. I got the boys showered, dressed into warm clothes.

I found strange and increased joy in worship Sunday morn. Perhaps it has something to do with hard times.


Somehow I feel closer to God when things hurt. Somehow I feel more able to concentrate on Him, find and count more of His blessings in my life when the road is rough.

We slept poorly, and that exahaustion was in all our eyes throughout the weekend. The exilaration of being outdoors in some of the most beautiful country in all the world offsetting only a little the restless sleep of damp bedding and the restless hearts of a missing wife and mother.

Jeremiah

Isaac

Rocky

Huckleberries

Canadian Geese

Trillium Lake