Summary

In this chapter, Dillard heads to Lucas’s Field to spend the night. Lucas’s Field is one of her favorite places which includes Tinker Creek and the only area that was clear cut long ago. From there she can see the pond, the creek, and the quarry and rock ledges. She is hedged in by woods while she sleeps in the open meadow. But she doesn’t sleep. She watches the night sky and thinks about how grasshoppers in moments of crazed destitution turn into locusts.

Genetically speaking, grasshoppers and locusts are the same. It is in times of drought when the grasshoppers can’t find food that they mutate. They frantically lay more eggs and then go dormant for a number of years in hopes that when they awake, there will be food. Dillard marvels at the extravagance of this change, of...