I rarely argue with copy editors, it’s a waste of time. Most do only minor damage, some a lot of good. In any event, my philosophy is usually to let them have their way, so long as I get my check. But this month at Horse Fly, my favorite sentence lost its punch, and I think the piece loses some essential darkness. Primarily for that reason (and in place of further whining), I hereby present the original column for your enjoyment. The local references may confuse, but what the hell.

The Great Fence of Llano (completed)

Grasshoppers of Llano Quemado

It was bad enough to pull out the rifle. A pump-action BB gun, actually, but to grasshoppers, a cannon!

By this point I only wanted the satisfaction of personal revenge. There was nothing I could do to save my crop because they’d gotten it already: lettuce, squash, basil, and mint gnawed down to the ground. There were still a few tomato plants, but the ‘hoppers were just teasing me. The flowers were almost gone, too, delphiniums and foxgloves eaten up like cotton candy, and now the bastards were after my morning glories! So be it, then, I thought, letting a BB roll into the chamber and giving the Crosman a quick six pumps as I slouched back into my chair in the shade of the big elm tree…

* * *

Things were getting twisted here in Paradise under the Picuris, though maybe no more than anywhere else. Down by the water towers, the Great Fence of Llano marched slowly across the mesa and threatened to cut the dirt road heading up the hill. (A road I’ll bet no one’s supposed to use, though how would anybody know?) The deep holes and giant fence posts posed no real barrier yet but made you think. The story is, when asked why he was fencing the land, the owner replied, “To keep people from going across it.” That he was probably the only person in recent memory who had was thought not stimulated by the line of mashed sagebrush left by his equipment. Ah, well. Higher up the slope, someone with a tractor or a nasty sense of humor had dug a V-shaped ditch across the road as well. It didn’t keep the ATVs out, but then neither would a sign. Could it be, however, that cutting in was much more relevant than keeping out?

The genius of it all was staggering and cold. Even higher in the piñons, in a nearly pristine canyon where no garbage disposals had ever run, more insect intelligence was hard at work, chewing roads and surveying lots. Soon there’d be bulldozers, wells, and pipes punched down through the aquifer. Then the lawyers and the realtors would come, with builders, burglar alarm salesmen, and satellite TV installers, followed by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Fed-Ex trucks. Finally, the tax man and the plumber! Chew, chew, chew, gnaw it to the ground, and all the ‘hoppers make a buck. Who knew there was a fortune to be made from eating all the seed corn?

* * *

There’ll be hell to pay for this, I thought or at least there ought to be, and the morning glories were the last straw. I’d squirted the mindless eating machines with water, thrown stones, and dusted plants with cayenne pepper. The happy-bait I’d bought at Blossoms was like voting for Kucinich, but I wanted blood! Lining up a big yellow grasshopper in my sights, I pushed the safety off and fired: a sharp plume of dust from the ricocheting BB in front of the animal was my only reward. Several shots later when I’d sighted in, he vanished instantly with a satisfying splat. I passed maybe 20 minutes in this fashion, ritually executing at least half a dozen, until I remembered what had happened just a couple of days before:

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 jerking, and then they shuddered and sighed! You wouldn’t have believed 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!

They had me. No matter how good it felt to try, I was never going to kill them all. To every thing, there is a season, however.

(Winter, while not on anybody’s mind, is absolutely on the way.)

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