Slow & Barefoot

Natural History, July, 2001 by Robb White

How to walk on the wild side

My mother was the slowest kind of person. When my two sisters got divorced (both at about the same time), they got into the habit of walking for miles around our old home place in Georgia for exercise. Momma went too, for company and commiseration, but it didn't work out. Every afternoon, those fast-walking women would do two or three laps to Momma's one. My sisters told me that one time, when they passed her after their first lap, Momma was bending over in the middle of the little dirt road with her head down, and they were worried she'd had some kind of heatstroke, but she was just watching the doings in an ant bed. Miles later, when they passed her the second time, she was still in the same place doing the same thing. She showed them the winged bodies of all the male ants of the colony scattered around the little mound where their wingless sisters had dragged them. "They killed them, and now they're hauling off the bodies," said Momma. "Good idea," growled my oldest sister.

When I was a little boy, I was like my mother in one way. I was so fascinated by ants, wasps, and doodlebugs that I would have squatted in the road all day too, but unfortunately I did not inherit the slow gene. I was so twitchy that when I found something interesting, I would stomp all the grass around it to death during my observations. When Momma went walking, she would always come back with stories about how she had watched a whole nest of newly hatched baby lizards dig themselves out of the ground, or seen a snake swallow another snake, or caught the mating of a pair of pileated woodpeckers. I would squirm with envy and head straight out to see what I could find too, but all I came home with were scratches on my legs and tater-rows of dirt on my neck. My mother was not one to volunteer advice, even to her children, but I finally slowed down enough to ask her why she saw so much and I saw so little. "You walk too fast" was all she had to say about it.

She was right. I guess if those days had been these days, the school would have diagnosed some kind of ailment and doped me down with some pills. My mother dealt with my wigglesomeness in another way. She wouldn't let me in the house except when I was so hungry I had to sit still to eat or so sleepy I couldn't wiggle another wag. I'm still like that. When my good young doctor (also an animal watcher) tried to regulate my calorie intake to modify my blood chemistry a bit, I lost so much weight the first week that he was astonished. "You must have a metabolic rate about like an insectivore," he said. What I'm saying is that my own nature made it very hard for me to get close to nature when I was a little boy. That is, until I started going barefoot.

There is another errant gene in the family--this one causes serious inflammation of the Achilles tendon in some of us when we wear shoes. It first happens when we are about half grown, and the only thing to do is to leave those shoes off for the rest of our lives.

Having to go shoeless was the best thing that ever happened to me. It is impossible to walk too fast through brier woods when you don't have any shoes on. I started seeing box turtles copulating; baby birds hatching out; gopher tortoises laying eggs; grasshoppers, millipedes, and all kinds of other arthropods mating; baby quail and turkeys hiding; and hawks standing on the ground and eating doves, squirrels, and cotton rats. Deer were everywhere.

So what happened to the slow gene? I have a very slow four-year-old grandson, and just the other day I saw him squatting in the yard looking at something.

"What you see there, Will?"

"Look at what these ants are doing, Pop-Pop. The little ones that don't have any wings are killing the big ones that do have wings and dragging them off."

Robb White builds wooden boats in Thomasville, Georgia.