things nature engineers

I was on the Caltrain coming home from work, rocking out to Pavement and reading Microserfs, the amazing 1995 Douglas Coupland novel I am currently obsessed with, so I was pretty into what I was doing and it's astounding that i even noticed something moving in my hair, on which my eyes suddenly focused -
3/4 of an inch long, black and red and yellow with white tufts of spiky fur -

a caterpillar!
(in my hair!)

I didn't scream, just jumped up and yelped quietly...nobody even noticed.
It was especially strange because I hadn't even walked close to any trees or leaned back on anything. All I did after the office was go to the pharmacy.
My first impulse was to assume it might be poisonous, since the last accessed mention of a caterpillar in my recent memory file was Vincent talking about the poisonous caterpillars in his apartment in Japan. Even though, logically, this caterpillar was from Palo Alto, and city council would never let a thing like that exist within town limits.
I was fumbling for a tissue or something and realized I really didn't want to kill that big goop-filled furry guy in my hair, and plus - I'm a vegetarian!
I found an e-mail printout from my dentist in my bag and tried to maneuver it but it was too close to eye-level to focus on, so I turned to the poor guy behind me on the train and talked to him until he took his headphones off.
"Uh, excuse me, this is going to sound a little weird but there's a caterpillar in my hair, could you help me out?"
I tried to hand him the paper but he just fished it out with his fingers and plopped it down on my laser paper.
Several headphoneless people were laughing like crazy.
A guy in the back of the train said I should just throw it down on the luggage rack, but I said I didn't want to kill it.
He made some jokes about keeping it till it became a butterfly and other things, but I said I didn't want to kill it if it had come this far. I watched it crawl, curl, sit still, arch and slither for a couple of minutes. When we started to slow down before Hillsdale, I went downstairs and asked a stranger who was detraining to put it down in a safe place for me. He got a big kick out of it too, but not as much as the guy in the back of the train.
When I sat back down he started to joke about how it was a Stanford butterfly, and wouldn't be used to the Hillsdale environment, but I said at least I gave it a shot. We made a few more jokes about hitchiking caterpillars, shopping caterpillars, documentary-star butterflies and otherwise intelligent caterpillars, but in the end exhausted all material. Connecting with a stranger is only possible to a certain point without additional excuses or lowered inhibitions.
As for the caterpillar - I trust the kindness of strangers at least allowed him another honest shot at this crazy life.