That’s what I thought when we first moved here. Not true at all, but I still think that way.
Right after we showed up, there was a stunning drought. The soil around our beautiful ’70s-vintage hippie adobe cottage in the hills was like cast iron. We had an irrigated “garden” area for flowers, but the gophers weren’t born yesterday and knew just where to wait. Once we were having a drink on the flagstone patio and watched a delphinium zip right into the dirt like in a cartoon. The point is, I guess, there weren’t any mosquitoes. (You know, “bugs.”) Of the state bird of Delaware, not a one.
In the evenings there’d be “down-valley winds.” I called them “zephyrs,” but I can be cruel. We both like to eat outside in the summer. When the sun got low and the air chilled high up on the peaks, the cold air rolled down the mountains and blew our dinners into our laps. (There may have been bugs, but you tend to ignore the little things in the midst of a disaster.) On calmer days, I did notice that there were a lot of flies. An astonishing variety of them, in fact. I saw blue flies, green flies, black & gold flies, house flies, horse flies, GIANT flies, itty-bitty flies, and a couple of red ones. The amazing thing was that every one of them would bite.
Night was the fun part. We had to open the back door for ventilation. I used to sit waving the moths away from my computer monitor so I could read my email. It was even worse outdoors. We lived next to the national forest. There were moths the size and heft of small penguins that would bump into the window by my wife’s side of the bed and scare her to death. Yet with all this, plus the black widow spiders, wasps, ANTS, mice under the floorboards, hummingbirds in the kitchen, and a rat in the attic, there still weren’t any “bugs.” Not in my New Mexico.
We live on the other side of town these days, and it’s pretty much the same. The zephyrs and dust devils come through when they please, and a steady 30-knot wind can come roaring out of a clear blue sky. I’ve found tiny baby scorpions in the kitchen and a black widow in my slipper. The flies are less colorful but still bite, and there are mosquitoes. Lately, scattered herds of ants have taken to migrating across the old oriental rug in the living room. They’re invisible against the pattern, but I see them when they take a short cut across my legs. The other morning my wife yelled, “Something’s BITING me!” and shook a good-sized centipede out of her shoe. Then there are the great pooping hordes of box elder bugs, and I haven’t even mentioned the Grasshopper Army (!).
Today was the worst, by the way. As I sat outside in my chair beside the hummingbird feeder, having a drink and looking at the mountains, a furiously copulating pair of grasshoppers fell noisily out of the elm tree overhead and landed at my feet. It was the most pornographic arthropod activity I’d ever seen. So help me, they were bumping and grinding, heaving and flapping, and then they shuddered and sighed! If I’d shot a video, you wouldn’t believe it — I swear the male even wiped himself off afterwards. The much bigger female was staggering around on a flagstone, already oozing enough eggs to ruin another growing season, and I got up to send her to heaven with my shoe. Suddenly she was all business and shot out from under my foot, covering a good 15 feet in a single bound and vanishing in the chamisa. A strange and wretched business, but so it goes.
And yet, I still feel like “there are no bugs” compared to other places I have lived. That’s crazy, I know, so it must be the low humidity: I never have that feeling where your skin is covered with hot soup. I don’t have to wipe the sweat out of my eyes unless I’m exercising. I may have ants in my pants, but nothing sticks. No fleas running a river of sweat, no beetles caught in the mud. They bite, I swat. That’s all.
We sat outside this evening. It was 65 degrees at six o’clock with a good stiff breeze. That’s too cold for most flies, and I only saw one. He landed on my knee but shouldn’t have been out on his own: I bopped him so easily, it wasn’t even sport.
No bugs in New Mexico, man. (Sometimes everything is easy.)
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
BoxElder bugs are cool. As a kid in Colorado, I loved them. Didn’t even put them into the “insect” category.
As for the grasshoppers, too bad you didn’t shoot a film. You’d not have much competition for grasshopper porn. But maybe not so many voyeurs, either. Astounding. And the bastard got away!
John
I know the land of mosquitoes as well as you. The Eastern Shore. Biting flies, and other things that go “skritch” in the night.
JudyinBoston
We happen to have a Boxelder “problem.” Swarms so large you need a shop vac to deal with them. They swarm here because we have tree with the bark they favor for breeding.
A real estate agent once told me about a client of hers that wanted to sell her house. This was a much older lady who was a bit sedentary. She also had a boxelder problem. The agent came to show the house, and the owner had quite of few boxelders on her when she answered the door. After that, the agent came by before each sales visit for bug patrol.
The bugs will eventually prevail, and perhaps sooner than we suspect, we humans being in a bit of a swarm ourselves lately.
Ed