Free The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjoberg

roadside ditches and, in the woods, the abruptly clear-cut galleries for power lines. That’s where you find flies! Untouched nature has its merits, certainly, but it rarely measures up to lands that people have disturbed.
    Almost any disturbance at all can create a whole new environment, which may sometimes meet the rather intricate demands that some insignificant fly makes on life. It can be quite simple. Let’s say that a young landscape architect falls in love with a girl who says she adores the heavy fragrance of balsam poplar, whereupon he, of course, has an entire forest of balsam poplar planted, perhaps at a university that hires him to design its landscaping just at the time he’s falling in love, and at night these woods come to be used as a meeting place by, say, the semisecret Students for the Liberation of White Russia, who put up completely unreadable posters about their hopeless struggle on the smooth trunks of the fast-growing poplars, using the only tool their organization has a plentiful supply of—namely, White Russian thumbtacks, which contain indeterminable metallic impurities that give rise to a rare form of rot in the tree’s inner bark that some even rarer hoverfly’s sap-eating larvae require in order to survive to adulthood.

    Even more wondrous is how these flies find the trees to begin with. I suspect that they have spies out circulating everywhere.
    I particularly want to emphasize the importance of love in this context. All too often, love is the unappreciated factor in the development of the culturally determined ecosystems that today harbour the richest menageries of hoverflies. Historically, it was probably the privations of poverty that led people to shape the landscape in ways favourable to flies, but today that landscape is shaped more by wealth and desire. Gardens are the best example. Now that there are no more farmers on the island, it is in gardens we find the greatest wealth of fauna.

    …
    I don’t know if the Russians brought any new plants or animals when they laid waste to the island and burned the houses in 1719, but suspicion of strangers from the east has never completely lost its grip on the residents. The fact that a one-year-old great cormorant caught in a fisherman’s net had been banded in Murmansk did nothing to improve the cormorant’s already dubious reputation, and if more people knew what the narcissus fly’s offspring were so diligently up to in the guts of the flower bulbs, I can imagine that it too would incur the wrath of gardeners and provoke clumsy attempts at eradication.

    On the other hand, no one has touched the oddity at Silver Lake. Even though it comes from the New World.
    It was one of my first years out here, at a time when, like the man who loved islands, I was devoting my summers to compiling a catalogue of all the island’s plants. One day I walked out to Silver Lake to have another look at it and to smell the smells I’d smelled before. The lake itself is a bottomless pool, as black as the lakes in John Bauer’s wash drawings, and it lies in the midst of a quagmire in the middle of the island in the deepest woods, where people have never lived. There are eight other lakes on my island, all of them larger, their shores lined with cottages, flagpoles and peeling rowing boats asleep among the alder saplings, reeds and loosestrife. Only Silver Lake lies off the beaten track. And nothing is more stable than a quagmire.
    How hard it is to find the place, and then find your way home again, is something even Strindberg had to learn. He borrowed the name of the lake for a bitter short story about his loneliness and distress after his divorce from Siri von Essen. She and the children were with him on the island that first summer, then never again. His protagonist, a museum curator, sets out for the lake to fish but gets lost, and although he is an enlightened man who carries the natural sciences like a cast-iron defence against the dark powers, he