INDEX EAGLE & ALL ABOUT TOWN

September 6, 2008

Off The Beaten Path - The Index Eagle June 1997 by Bob Hubbard

Sometimes while walking alone, I imagine what it must be like to be as small as a bug, flying along high above the grasses, looking down on them as we humans might look down from an airplane to the forested land beneath it. How much huger a small lot becomes; how incredibly many insect-miles it is to go virtually anywhere. And yet, as the insects are small next to us, so are the mites small, next to insects. If a human mile is roughly 1000 body lengths, and an insect mile and a mite-mile were to be proportionally equivalent, an insect mile for an inch-long bug would be about 83 feet, but a typical mite-mile would only be a couple or three feet long. So when I get tired of imagining grass stalks the size of redwoods, I scale down to mite size and look at them as great green columns the diameter of office buildings whose tops might be a mile or more above their bases, and whose leaves are like ten-lane freeways climbing into the sky.

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