The Last Word On Nothing

I can’t remember who noticed them first. From far away they looked like a crack in the pavement, or maybe a stick. But then someone crouched down, and then the rest of us did, and the crack or stick or trick of the light turned into a line of caterpillars.

They came one after the other like a rolling train of boxcars. We imagined them talking to each other: “Where are we going?” “Hey, dude, your butt is in my face!” “Your face is in my butt!” We put small leaves in their path and they went around them, one after the other, six legs at a time.

These pine processionary caterpillars were making their way from the trees where they were born to a place with soil soft enough that they can dig themselves in. They would make their cocoon underground, and stay there at least until the end of summer, where they would emerge as greyish moths.

We processed on, too, stepping carefully over the caterpillars, walking up through the stone walls of the town of Gubbio. We were not going to cocoon—this first trip out of the country seemed like the opposite. First we tried to peel off our anxieties, then our itineraries, then our face masks. We tried to remember what it was like to not be home.

The processionary caterpillar finds its trail with pheromones it secretes from its abdomen. They are constant, forward-moving. In a lab, caterpillars processed around a circular trail of pheromones for 12 hours.

In the Colosseum, a few days earlier, we were processionary. We followed people who were following other people, who were following a guidebook, who were listening to an audio tour from Rick Steves, who were following a woman with a pink umbrella. We had followed people elsewhere, too. We followed a woman who carried a piece of whole wheat bread in her purse through the gardens at Tivoli. We followed a couple who looked like they knew where they were going into a restaurant. We followed a 14-year-old who thought he knew where he was going. We followed Google maps and paper maps and bus lines. We followed signs to the Temple of Tiramisu.

I have always felt a little itchy—and sometimes a lot itchy—in crowds. I like to know where I’m going, and go there, and feel like I’m doing it on my own. But this time, it felt different. Maybe because it was good to finally be among people. Maybe I also saw the 14-year-old doing the exact same things I once did, when I was somewhere unfamiliar—striding ahead, not stopping to look around, certain they knew where they were going, certain that they did not need help, or a map.

That way has started to feel exhausting to me, even though it once felt necessary. Maybe I realized it was okay to not know where you were going. Maybe I realized that I really hadn’t ever known where I was going, and had never gotten there on my own.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons