A bug man for all seasons

Ackland's desk was covered with insects. The shelves and files overflowed with them - bugs in jars, bugs in theory, bugs in space. His office contained 20 years worth of specimens from the insect world. I went to visit him one day shortly after he learned he was being moved to another office, an administrative strategy used to locate tenured academics who can no longer be found amid their accumulated clutter.

I suggested he embrace the moment as an opportunity get rid of things he no longer needed, thereby making room for new unnecessary things. He summarily informed me he'd spent months as a Ph.D. student microslicing insect ovaries and mounting them on slides, and he'd be damned if he was going to get rid of those . . .

Ackland Jones was teaching Entomology 115 at the University of Nebraska when I started my career there as a nontraditional student. I worked as a gardener for the school because employees received tuition remission, and gardening was what I knew. I wanted a journalism degree, but my department frowned on degrees not applicable to gardening. I settled for general agriculture and signed up for Entomology 115. I fell in love. The bug world was endlessly varied and complex, and almost entirely overlooked in spite of it comprising nearly 80 percent of the species in the animal kingdom. To hear Ackland Jones tell it, God, whom he referred to as "she," created the world and insects maintained it.

The primary assignment in Entomology 115 involved collecting about 30 insects. Initially, it was no problem. I worked outside and it was fall - a time when insects died naturally. Collecting was a matter of picking them up off the ground. As the semester wore on, however, it became clear stalking and killing would be in order. This did not set well with my conscious, which managed to sleep just fine though much greater transgressions. I would have to somehow tell a man who shared a room the size of a large closet with a million or so dead insects that I harbored moral objections against killing bugs for a collection. I prepared for the rebuke.

It did not come. I apparently was not the first farm kid whose livelihood sometimes depended on insecticide to sit before Dr. Jones and whine about killing one bug. He even questioned the practice himself, he said, but not enough to change the requirement. Thus, my study partner and I found ourselves shaking aphids off poinsettia leaves in a grocery store just hours before the collection was due.

I so appreciated Dr. Jones's unobtrusive methods, I followed him into a graduate level course in sustainable agriculture. It was way out of my league, so I embellished my weekly essays with clever philosophical expositions and other unrelated baloney. Dr. Jones found them sufficiently amusing to pass me, and to suggest that I explore a writing major. I think he knew I loved bugs the way some people love the first person they sleep with after not having sex for 10 years. I'd spent 10 years in mind-numbing, blue collar jobs by the time I started school. I was so starved for learning I enjoyed algebra.

Dr. Jones knew as much about people as he did about bugs. He knew what I needed to hear and he said it. I transferred into journalism the following semester and left that first lover behind with a vial of dead aphids and a few flying insects stuck to pins, undoubtedly buried by now in the recesses of Dr. Jones's new office.

Monday, December 28, 1998

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.