Gnats Ain't Bad
The Source
I’ve just finished a book about a man who has spent the last 30 years of his life traveling and photographing route 40, the old “National Road” that once ran 3,157 miles across the belly of the nation from Atlantic City to San Francisco. He’s spent three decades trying to locate, uncover, dig up, and otherwise discover the 3,157 concrete mile markers that once lined the most famous of American roads. When an interviewer asked him his favorite part of his journeys he thought a minute then said, “Kansas. Open panoramas. Authentic-looking.” When asked what parts of the country he disliked, he answered quickly. “Some of the West. Rattlesnakes. I hate rattlesnakes and they’re everywhere. They seem to hide right in the spot where you want to stand to take your photograph.” I share the man’s aversion to anything that slithers, be it reptilian or political. I once took a group of students on a tour of the Australian “bush,” the wilder and hairier region of the down-under continent that never appears in shots of the Sydney Opera House. Every Aussie we met wore these strange Stetson-type hats with tiny beads and ball bearings dangling from strings around the rim. They called them “fly botherers.” The flies get so thick in the outback that a trekker simply runs out of the energy to swat them so the Aussies tie little weights to their hats. That way it only takes a shake of the head to give yourself a few moments respite from the biting and swarming. Wildebeest in the Yukon have actually been driven mad by the northern black fly. Adventurers to the northern wilderness have stumbled upon entire herds of the dead animals that’ve been driven over cliffs or into deep water just to escape the biting of the little buggers. In some of the hilly areas of Florida they actually put up warnings: “Do not enter! Fire Ants active!” I’ve never seen a fire ant in person but I’m not a fan of either part of the little bug’s name and that alone is a good enough reason to keep me from going to Florida to climb the hills. There are more poisonous fish in the world than snakes. The Cadiru fish in the Amazon have been known to swim right up person’s… You know, I’m not going to finish this description. And right here in the land of the brave is the home of the poisonous dart frog that can kill you if you so much as touch its skin. Of course, you first get to sample the delights of paralysis, asphyxiation, cardiac arrest, then it really gets bad. Any fan of crossword puzzles knows the name of the tsetse fly. Aside from being fun to pronounce, the tsetse kills about 300,000 people a year, a large price just to be a consonant-rich word for puzzle solvers. The tsetse, or “tik tik” to the natives, has been around for 34 million years so the chances of them disappearing with the next big snow are remote. They produce over 30 breeds in a lifetime so their built-in life insurance policy pretty much assures that tsetse will remain a six letter word defined by “sleeping sickness insect” in the New York Times crossword. Perhaps the most feared and headline-grabbing insect is the Africanized honeybee known as “the killer bee.” In one of the worst scientific miscalculations since Dr. Frankenstein created his big buddy, the killer bee escaped a 1956 Brazilian experiment in bee breeding and has now worked its deadly way up to several southwestern states. So far their human victims number around a thousand. Actually, the little demons aren’t more venomous than any other honeybee. It’s just that they’re more easily agitated and stay angry longer. Sort of a little tea party with some extra sting. I only recite this painful litany of crawling, flying and slithering things that might kill you to say that the next time you talk an evening’s stroll into the sunset and you’re beset by a few gnats and lady bugs, life could be worse. Like that irritating uncle who shows up at family reunions without a hot dish, bores you with made-up stories of his war exploits, and laughs loud enough that you want to check his DNA and see if he really does belong to you clan. Like the gnat and the ladybug, he’s a part of your landscape. Smile and deal with it.