Lizard Kid

Reflection from Assistant Producer L.M.

I am a child raised by the wild Arizona desert. This certainly wasn’t by choice. In a town with little to do beyond walking around Walmart, we had to get creative. Some kids would hunt scorpions with a blacklight, others would tempt javelinas with a banana, others still would go looking for arrowheads on the mesas. But I was a lizard kid. Armed with an adventure stick and an identification sheet from the library, I tore up any exposed ground I could find. Under broken plates and cobblestones, reptiles and bugs squirmed and skittered. I learned which could reasonably be poked with the aforementioned adventure stick and which, through painful experimentation, were better left alone.

However, experimentation and discovery were not the point of my trips. Quite the opposite. I loved these creatures for their constancy. I knew that a wander to the reservoir could produce an Ornate Tree Lizard, or that a peek in the bushes might present a Skink. They were just as much my neighbors as any human next door.

I’ve sadly let my lizard love lapse over the years (though I could maybe point out a Sonoran Spotted Whiptail or Zebra-Tailed Lizard if I was lucky).

When I heard this week’s episode of Constant Wonder, I felt a sort of kinship with Steven Peck. Not over his terrifying brush with hallucinations, but over a simple moment with a creature I’ve been forgetting for a long time.

Between the boiling summers, frontier mythos, and diverse and dangerous fauna, our childhoods may have looked something similar. Unlike me, Steven did not stop looking for lizards in adulthood. Or, rather, the lizards did not stop looking for him.

Here’s his description of one interaction with a lizard in his hometown of Moab, UT:

It didn’t run away. It stayed with me. Maybe I was warm. There may be some scientific explanation for why it didn’t move, but it just sat there. I don’t know how to describe this very well, but I started to feel a connection with that lizard. I began to feel like this was something really important that was happening and it wasn’t so much that I articulated that thought, but I remember the feeling, a feeling that this lizard was somehow important and I was connecting with it, and pretty soon I felt like I knew it.

I was struck by his newfound friendship.

How many lizards have we missed, simply because we stopped searching for them?

How many ladybugs and rolly-pollies and pigeons?

This week, I’m taking in Creation more slowly, more intentionally. I’m letting her lead me back to the hidden world that my busy life made me forget. Because out there, in the sidewalk cracks and weeds, is something holy.