“Contracted” is the word that springs to mind as I look closely at the log I’ve pulled from the pile in my garden. It’s cold with frost-shimmer, and as I study its micro-landscape of moss-forest and bark-gully, I find where the rind has flaked away … something on the bare wood beneath.
I pick at the bark, like a scab. Beneath is a strange tattoo. At macro scale it resembles a labyrinth; all corners and spurs, tight-wound and interlocking, tortuous and confined. Zoom out and in form it’s like a weird fossil, outstretched wings or limbs or leaves, radiating out from a central spine or arm or trunk.
Held at arm’s length it’s a texture, or the trademark fingerprint of some mysterious maker. At all distances, evidently, a Rorschach of sorts. My interpretation would be, as I say, contracted.
I look at the bark and see a clue I do recognise: little holes, as if made with a needle. I’ve seen this sign before, inside the house: it’s cost me money, and worry. But I never saw the culprit that was invisibly and insidiously infecting my surroundings, back when such a concept seemed strange.
Little woodworms and their little worlds. They’re beetles, actually – the larvae of a clutch of wood-boring species with names from the humdrum (common furniture) to the charismatic (house longhorn) to the activity-descriptive (powder post) to the chilling (death watch).
They do their damage out of sight. The eggs are laid on wood-pores; pale, concertina-like grubs hatch and burrow their way beneath. The little pinpricks are the “flight holes” – the point where, having done their pretty and destructive work, the developed beetle chews its way out and takes its leave.
The route left behind is sort of charming: wriggly and impulsive, an organic map of whimsy – made by a creature with no more complex agenda than to survive.
Thankfully, this time it isn’t a stair or a beam: this wood is for my stove. It seems a shame to burn something that records such oddly artistic effort. So I sling it aside, leaving this little world – with all its contracted corners and cul-de-sacs – to go back to mine.
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