Bug Drama
According to a quick google search, the record for the world’s loudest scream was set by Annalisa Wray in 1994 at the Citybus Challenge in Belfast, Northern Ireland, when she ironically yelled the word “quiet” to a level of 121.7 decibels. This is the official world record, which is broken several times a day when my wife encounters members of pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta or, as I like to call them, bugs. Bug drama is one of the salient events of life in North Idaho.
The most recent chapter of this drama arose from a stink bug infestation of Biblical proportions. Even I have found their overwhelming presence annoying as they pile up several inches deep on the bathroom counter. On the men’s side of the bathhouse, they can complete their cycle of life and death safe from my wife’s ministrations. This is not the case in the cabin, where they live their incredibly brief lives in perpetual fear of territorial wrath. With this latest hatch, I have discovered that my wife actually likes the pungent odor for which this species has received its name because its release means she has smashed her latest find to smithereens.
These odiferous insects were only the latest in a long series of bug drama episodes that occurred throughout our time in North Idaho. This year’s season began with a traditional scene where my beloved used every wile at her disposal to spur me into spraying the cabin for spiders. I reason that in the early spring, spiders are cold too. Why shouldn’t they come inside for a little while and warm up? They’re God’s creatures, and if I don’t bother them, they usually don’t bother me.
My wife’s reaction to a spider’s presence is somewhat more dramatic. I know that spiders aren’t actually insects, but they fit my highly specialized taxonomy as bugs because they are small, and my wife finds them creepy. In the case of spiders, creepy might be this century’s understatement. Even though she claims it’s an exaggeration, I insist that one time I had to buy an emergency airline ticket to come home from a business trip to kill a spider that had her cornered in the bedroom.
Well, once the cabin was sprayed, and the arachnid invasion abated, the spring rains brought the first clouds of mosquitoes. I’m convinced that God was having a bad day when he made mosquitoes. Who would think that the world needs an organism that lives by sucking out your blood and spreading disease? The bug drama for mosquitoes shifted to me because I’m usually outside working during this time, while my wife cleverly avoids the problem by staying inside the cabin doing jigsaw puzzles. I can slap and scratch with the best of them. Although there is less scratching in the latter part of my life because I’ve been bitten so many times that I’ve built up some immunity to their venom. But as the season progressed, they seemed to get bigger and more potent until they eventually got even me twitching and scratching. There is a North Idaho tall tale where a local claimed to have seen a mosquito carrying off a cow. This is ridiculous, of course, because everyone knows it takes at least two North Idaho mosquitoes to carry a cow.
Eventually, June ended, and the sun emerged over the mountains. This dried up the puddles, which ended the mosquito invasion. But just when you think it’s safe to come out into the open, an ominous buzzing sound is heard all across the land. It could be from a recently installed overhead power line, but it is likely the beginning of hornet season. Unlike mosquitoes who make their way through life by eating you, hornets prefer to simply eat your food. Our use of the open-air pavilion where we dine is put into extreme jeopardy by the arrival of flight upon flight of militant yellow jackets. It is reminiscent of the black-and-white images of allied bombers invading Germany during WWII. Certainly, the retribution that they administer if you dare to disturb their enjoyment of your food is explosive. Retreating indoors soon becomes the only option.
Bug drama is not just a daytime activity. At night the true denizens of the insectile universe emerge. Chief of these is the moths who come in nearly every shape and size imaginable. Since our cabin door is 90% glass, the light inside brings a myriad of beasties flopping and banging against it. This is normally not a problem unless you want to go in or out of the cabin. Opening the door has the potential to create an Egyptian plague. My wife has perfected the trick of sliding in and out of the door so that it hardly opens before slamming purposefully closed. A time or two, I followed too closely behind her and had important parts of my body trimmed away. It’s a tossup whether that is preferable to the deafening multi-hundred-decibel hiss to “close the door!” when I venture out alone.
However, our real pity should be saved for the few moths that manage to squeeze inside the cabin. When my wife takes up her flyswatter, which has the heft of a medieval morning star, and she begins to mercilessly hunt down any miscreants daring to enter her “no bug zone.” She doesn’t believe me when I tell her I can hear their tiny little cries of terror, begging for mercy, as she starts wielding that vicious weapon around the cabin. It wouldn’t make any difference—her Nordic heritage had already worked itself into a berserker rage by that point. Disemboweled bug guts, disembodied wings, and moth dust fill the air with a grisly mist. Her countenance closely resembles a fierce warrior’s face amid the movie violence she is too squeamish to watch. Go figure.
After long consideration, I have concluded that bug drama results from deeply set territorialism supported by the natural aversion we all feel to fearfully strange six (or eight) legged creatures. Hollywood has capitalized on this same phenomenon with many feature-length treatments of alien insect-like horror. I have finally given up a rational conversation about the relative harmlessness of insects. My arguments fall on deaf ears, so the drama of bug slaughter will continue into the foreseeable future unabated. I have come to the conclusion that the only way to save the few remaining North Idaho bugs is to return to Sioux Falls. So amid a whirlwind of murdered insect husks, we packed our bags to head east. I did send word of our return ahead to the powers that be. And it was a good thing since I received a notice back that a planned locust plague had been called off.